Well, as was the deal with my last post, I am conveniently very tired for this post also, so sorry in advance. It's only ten thirty, but...well, how do I put this? I'm lame. Very, very lame. I'm basically an old man. Therefore ten thirty is kind of late for me. So there.
Anyway, I just wanted to post because I could tell I was going to have trouble sleeping again if I didn't get some of these thoughts out of my head. Luckily you all know what I'm talking about, fellow writers. I keep going to bed with scenes of my characters' futures flashing through my head, and I can't stop thinking about them because they are mostly some of the more epic moments that I have planned. To be honest, I don't really have everything all planned out yet, but I don't care. I'm taking it chapter by chapter, and I like it this way.
So Death List. That's what I'm talking about right now, by the way, in case you didn't know which one of my books I was obsessing about after my last post where I for some reason talked about several of them. No, Death List is still my child right now, and I am being a freakish helicopter parent. I just really like where it's going right now, you know? It's hard to not think about a book that you would be in love with even if you hadn't written it. That's how you know you have a good story...at least if everyone on Earth had the same taste as you. But you don't think about that, because that is discouraging.
Anyway, what I'm in the middle of right now is finally getting all of my characters to start their journeys. These journeys are both literal and spiritual, but the literal part is what is so far causing me the most problems. I sometimes write too much in detail, which can make getting things rolling kind of difficult at times. I am on page 180 right now I believe, and I still have one character who has not really begun to get where she is going yet. It might just be me, but I think that nearly two hundred pages in is pretty deep to still have characters who haven't even begun their plots yet. I might have to go back and do a lot of editing once I finish with this monstrosity-to-be, but I'll leave that to the future Rachel. JEEZ I'm so sorry, I keep getting sidetracked. I was going to start talking about where each of my characters are right now and what they're up to, so before I can digress anymore I'm just going to jump right into it.
In case you don't remember, which I would not expect you to, my MAIN characters in this book are:
Ezekiel Cato "ZeCat" Everton
Freedom Williams
Wolfe Livingston
Leala Cash
Vine Fairfax
Ziv Martell
Roth Opensaw (which weirdly is a last name I didn't make up)
Alva Everton
Price Herrick
If I forgot someone I'll bring it up later, but I do believe that these are all of the people who the story is told through. I have other characters, but they don't get chapters (I switch point of views every chapter) so right now I am ignoring them. Alva is the only one out of these people who hasn't really gotten started yet, but that's okay for the time being because she's just ZeCat's mom, and her soul purpose is basically to find him. He hasn't been gone that long yet, though, so I still have a little bit of time. None of this will make any sense to any of you probably, but let me fill you in on what's going on so far. Like I said, I just need to get some of this out of my head so I don't keep myself up all night! It would have been nicer of me if I had decided to use a diary or something, but oh, well. Sorry, everyone.
Well, to make this easier I'm just going to blab it out in a paragraph. Not very easy to follow, but so be it. ZeCat is currently hiding out in an abandoned building on the outskirts of Paradise City near the city wall with a bunch of criminals who are trying to break a hole in the wall so they can get out of the city. They're being lead by this guy named Tyson Moore, who is a complete and total psychopath (I did NOT originally plan for that, but he took on a life of his own IMMEDIATELY) and he has taken a real disliking to ZeCat for no particular reason. I'll have to post an excerpt later to show what I mean by that. Oh, and Bryony-Rose and Wolfe are also here. Bryony-Rose is a main character, but she's not a MAIN character, so she doesn't get any chapters. Just so you know. Anyway, Freedom is currently in a hospital just outside of Paradise City that is designed to take people like him apart. He's my character that is make a robot-man, remember? So he's been thrown in there to die, basically (short version of events) but he has no intention of staying there. Vine and Ziv are undercover as low-level workers there and have come across him, so Freedom is already planning an escape based on having them as allies. He's already starting to lose it at this point, but he kind of started losing it from the moment he was introduced as a character, so sorry, Freedom. Ha. Anyway, like I said, Vine and Ziv are there, too. I won't even get started on why they're there--I don't want to stay up posting all night--but they happened upon Freedom by chance and both of them already knew him, so it was kind of a bizarre reunion. Ziv was assigned to deliver some illegal tech-head stuff to Freedom way at the beginning of the book, and Vine knows him because Freedom kidnapped him (Vine's the son of some very important city officials). It's kind of funny, but Vine and Freedom actually kind of hit it off during that incident, and Ziv, who is Vine's best friend, turned out to be much more sore about the event that Vine ever was. Which kind of comes up once Ziv, Vine, and Freedom are reunited. Ziv is not Freedom's biggest fan, which is another thing that I didn't intend to happen but just did anyway. So that's them. Leala is finally getting her own thing going, which is essentially being assisted in escaping Paradise City Orphanage by a minor character, Galatea Reed, who pops up here and there throughout the book. Leala is escaping with Zylo and Price Herrick (Zylo's Price's older brother), who Galatea also chose, mostly by random, to leave the orphanage. They're headed for an apartment in the settlement just outside of Paradise City where they will be safe for as long as they choose to stay there...which ends up not being that long. Their deal isn't as fantabulous as everyone else's right now, but it's very useful in terms of information about government corruption and stuff, so it still has a purpose. Or more than one purpose, I guess. And now for my adult characters: Roth and Alva, who incidentally also know each other. In fact, Roth has something of a history with the Everton family, but that's a story for another time. At any rate he is a policeman (had to have someone on the inside, haha) and he recently made a visit to the Everton household to tell Alva that they had no leads on where ZeCat ran away to. Or at least that's what he wanted to say, but instead he told her just enough of the truth to get her inflamed, namely that the police had barely even looked for him. There's a lot of crime that goes on in Paradise City, and the police tend to focus on people who could present a real problem to the community. ZeCat had no criminal record, so Roth and the other policemen focus on the dangerous people that do. To him it seems logical, but to Alva it seems heartless, which eventually leads her to take matters into her own hands and try to hunt down ZeCat herself with the help of her younger son, Edwin. Why is his name Edwin? I have no idea. I do not get a lot of my characters' names. Anyway, Alva hasn't started her epic mom journey yet, but she will soon. And Roth is about to be up for a promotion that will entail he tracks down basically all of my characters that have gone missing, thus putting him in the position of the main antagonist. This will be quite interesting, because Roth isn't a bad guy. He just respects the Death List and does his job, and does it well. In fact, he does it so well that he eventually tracks down all of my characters, one way or another. Almost all of them end up getting away again, of course, but he still does it. Actually, there's this one particular scene I want to share and then I'm going to bed.
So Roth has finally figured out where everyone is hiding. At this point nearly all of my characters are together and know each other. Roth gets a squad together and they travel far beyond Paradise City to where everyone is and they attempt to ambush them. The characters in hiding, however, figure out the police are coming and have time to take cover and hide...all of them but Ziv and Vine, who aren't with the others at the time and don't know about the approaching squadron. Roth and his forces arrive on the scene and are instantly drawn to where Ziv and Vine are hanging out because it's so obvious. Roth's forces fire upon them before Roth has the opportunity to tell them not to, and Ziv is injured and Vine is killed in a very artful and awful way that I won't describe right now. Roth calls the police off and they go into hiding with a reformed plan; let injured Ziv lead them to where the others are hiding once he believes the police to be gone. It works out exactly as Roth plans and all of the runaways are captured and he is promoted. Basically everything goes exactly as he wanted it to...except for one little thing: Vine's death. No matter how many days separate him from that event, he can't get it out of his mind. The image of Vine's last seconds isn't one that Roth is able to delete from his memory. He can't get over the fact that he was responsible for the death of a teenager, of a child, of one of the citizens that it was supposed to be his job to rule over and protect. He isn't even the person who pulled the trigger on the gun that ended Vine's life, but to him he might as well have been. Basically he obsesses over the needless and unintentional murder of Vine until he can't take it anymore and puts a gun to his own head. Kind of dark, I know, but I can't see Roth's story ending any other way. So, yeah. I just wanted to get that off my chest.
Good night, everyone.
-Iridian
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