Wow, I had a interesting experience writing today. I only got about 650 words in, but I spent almost half an hour just walking around and thinking about it.
The basic premise of Bringing Estella Home (I should probably think of a better title…) is that the young protagonist was forcibly and unexpectedly separated from his older brother and sister when a barbarian war fleet invaded their solar system, and he’s trying to find and rescue them. The barbarians capture and enslave both the brother and the sister–they send the brother into a very brutal brainwashing program to turn him into one of their empath soldiers, and they turn the sister into a concubine to the head of the fleet.
Well, in the scene I wrote today, the Hameji put Ben (the captured brother) through a mock execution, after putting him through weeks of physical and psychological torture. The idea is to break him down completely so that they can remake him from the bottom up. The execution involves putting him in an airlock and “spacing” him.
For some reason, this scene had a really huge impact on me. It was…very brutal. Very moving, though I’m not sure if it’s moving in the way that I want it. It wasn’t senseless–it happens for a reason, to set things up for when he meets back up with his brother–but man, it was very brutal and disturbing.
Now…I swear I’m not a morbid person! No, really! My first novel was a happy, adventuresome, optimistic space opera, and I’m sure it won’t be the last one! And really, I don’t have any pent up anger or goth tendencies or anything–it’s just, this is what I thought should happen in the story right now. And…wow. It was a lot more powerful than I’d thought.
This has made me realize that I’m going to need to bring in a humorous character to periodically give relief to all this tension. I’ve got the novel figured out in my head in a rough three act format. If all goes well, I should be finishing with act 1 before the end of next week. At the beginning of act 2, James is going to meet up with a very interesting and quirky band of mercenaries, and that will (inshallah) be a good opportunity to bring in some comic relief. Not too much, of course–just enough to help the reader get through the really serious, really disturbing parts.
And I know where I want this novel to end. I don’t know how, but I know the main character’s root motivations and how that inner conflict needs to be resolved. I actually have it all coming down to a single line of dialogue given from the head mercenary, Danica, to James at the very end of the story. The denouement shouldn’t take up more than a chapter and an epilogue, which of course I haven’t figured out yet, but the key to everything, the thing compelling me at this point to write this story, is to get the main character (James) to get to that one line of dialogue and come to this realization about himself.
Of course, I won’t tell you what that is, since that would be giving away spoilers. 🙂 But if you want to be an alpha reader, let me know. The goal is to have this sucker finished before the end of April. Tough goal, especially now that so many storylines are exploding all over the place, but I think I can do it.
