Last week, I began the process of reworking the outline for Storming. Essentially, I’m throwing out the steaming pile of crap lovingly crafted story adapted from the screenplay I wrote last year. The trouble was that, when I expanded this from the original novel, it also suffered from POV bloat. The solution?
This story began with five meddling kids. Well, seven, but two got incinerated by Gelt heat ray in The Children of Amargosa. So each of these five get their own chapters in the first two acts. The retroacts on one character who, by the time you finish The Exile, is clearly driving events, remain. Leitman and another character introduced to show the political machinations back on Earth, are peppered into the various chapters to breakup the action. Davra needs a break dealing with returning to the Founders’ Mine? What is Leitman up to? Or what shenanigans are happening in the halls of human power? Then back to the action.
It not only makes this more coherent, but it forces me amp up the conflict. Between interludes, interruptions, and the chapters themselves, this is becoming structured like streaming series on Netflix or HBO.
The last act will be a challenge. Space battles, multiple plot threads from not only the book, but the whole trilogy and even the series, will all have to be resolved, all without giving a novice reader whiplash. The nice thing about this being an outline: Just write, “And then JT reveals to Tishla that pudding is considered an aphrodisiac” and move on.