Writing Family
Ghosts has been slow going. There have certainly been distractions, but on
it's own it just hasn't tended to flow, even though I know where the story is
going.
I was
surprised by this, but I shouldn't have been. Writing the novel of Family
Blood was easy, because I was simply adapting the screenplay. What I had
forgotten, because it had been a while, was that writing the screenplay had
been really hard.
It started
with a really pressing dream, and the ideas were pretty full-fledged while I
was writing. The project I'd been working on before that had flown, but
suddenly the new one didn't.
Different
projects have different energies to them. It's not that you can say they are
better or worse, or that it would feel right to say that, but each writing
project is its own experience.
Now, one
thing that had been a little hard with the Family Blood novel was that
it soon became clear that the way it needed to be written was that each chapter
would be from the point of view of one of the characters. I had never done that
before, but for this it felt right, and I like that it kept all of the
characters well-represented, instead of two leads and a supporting cast.
I am also
using that method for Family Ghosts. It has its own challenges. For
example, yesterday I mentioned several false starts on Chapter 3, and part of
it was that I just kept starting with the wrong character. I thought it was
going to be Mark, and then Gus, but really, all along it needed to be Nate.
Chapter 17 had been going great, I was almost done with the scene, then nothing
went right. It was time to switch from Allison's perspective to Kit's.
It is a
more complicated story in many ways. Blood takes place over four days,
starting on a Halloween Wednesday and concluding that Saturday, November 3rd. (I
guess that makes it 2012.) Ghosts starts the night of the 3rd and goes
through to the day after Thanksgiving, November 23rd.
It is less
of an action book. There are no vampire attacks. There is only one scene of real
physical danger. It's more emotional though, because everyone is recovering
from the trauma of what happened in the first book, and maybe things that
happened before the first book play a role. So there are conversations that
happen, and stages in healing, that need to come in the correct order for the
appropriate impact. I've had to start writing out of sequence, and I'm going to
need to spend more time editing than usual to get all of that right.
I'm going
to want some preview readers. I want some musicians to read it and tell me if
the band parts feel right. That is about being in a band too, not just being a
musician. So I'm thinking about the various bands I've reviewed, and the
musicians I've interacted with more, and whom I can ask. The tricky part there
is that a lot of the ones I can ask are not currently in bands, so I'm afraid
that particular favor may be similar to giving them a nice paper cut and
pouring lemon juice on it. I'll worry about that next week.
The other area
where pre-viewers will be handy is in the balance of delivering information
from the old book in the new book so anyone can follow. I get annoyed with book
series reading over and over again about the twins' matching gold lavalliere
pendants, Claudia's junk food habits, and how George and Bess are cousins. I
want to strike that delicate balance between, "Yeah, yeah, we get it;
there were vampires" and "Wait, there were vampires?"
Initially,
when I was thinking in terms of movies, I could see Family Blood and Family
Reunion (book 3, sometimes this summer) as movies, but Family Ghosts
was too quiet. It's the things that happen in between. As I write Ghosts,
I don't know that I see it as a movie, but I am still very fond of it. There is
friendship, and healing on multiple levels, and the ending is pretty happy,
which was not true of Blood.
(The ending
to Reunion will be much more similar to Blood,
and then there's going to be a bit of a gap before I start the next three. I
feel guilty about it, but I can add an epilogue that will be kind of a "Whoa",
and that will have to be enough.)
Anyway,
that's where I'm at. Family Ghosts will be available March 31st. Watch
this space:
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