Plotting Jealousy.jpg December 5
So I’ve got the majority of the structure figured out and now I am working on the catalysts that drive the action.
Since no one reads this blog I think it’s safe to think out loud a little. In each book I try to dig into the characters a little deeper and I have neglected Tara in the past three books, mostly because she is not a navel gazer kind of person. She narrates the rest of the word and neglects what is inside her own personal space. That’s about to change and the catalyst of that change is her mother finally visiting to stage an intervention.
I know what you are thinking, and you are wrong.
In book four, contrary to the way most Urban Paranormal fiction progresses, Tara dials back the other worldly noise. I genuinely despise series where the character morphs into some kind of paranormal super hero, finding out they are the chosen one and gaining more and more super powers until the story is all about freaks, pointless torture scenes and child abuse twists. These characters are intriguing enough to carry the plot all on their own. I don’t think I need shock elements to carry them through the day. The Keys are bazar enough to carry any story if I pick the right realities.
Tara has dialed it back on all the ghosts but one, Dead Dennis. For some reason she cannot get that genie back in the bottle and he is so consumed by jealousy of Derrick and Sherry that he haunts them, turning violent. Sherry turns to paranormal investigators to get rid of him and the last time someone tried to get rid of Dead Dennis it went very badly. It goes even worse in this book. Some of the scenes in Hate.Dat with Dennis may have seemed a little unfinished, like his hate for Tara and his verbal beat downs on her were like an endless clash between an old married couple. The same pain points, never forgotten, rehashed relentlessly whenever the emotions run negatively high. There was a reason for those scenes and in Jealously.jpg it gets the crescendo it has been building two.
Tara’s genuinely concerned mother comes to visit for a few weeks and unless you live in the Keys year round, or unless you are a tourist here only for a short time and insulated from the locals, what passes for normal here requires a complete reset of the human brain. I have watched this transformation of people moving here time and time again. It never gets old. And everything I’ve seen over the years is getting squeezed into Tara’s Mom and her initiation into the Conch Republic. Fun stuff. What she does to Tara as she’s going through it, however … every time I start writing those scenes out I have to stop and delete it. I decided last night that I need to use Howard as a contrast. Some people come to the Keys, rework their brains and blend with the sickness. Some, like Howard, float through the madness for a time because they come here damaged as hell, and then they wake up and decide the Keys need to be fixed. They genuinely believe that with a sound business plan and enough money, the Keys are a gold mine of opportunity and they can make the Keys just like Disney.
Except there are generations of Conchs that see things very different.
On another tract: Darius.
I am digging into his character and the “mom” theme simultaneously because he was not born in Haiti, he was born in Belle Glade, Florida. And fleshing out his history is as warped a process as the history of Haiti and Belle Glade and I want to do it justice. So that’s going to take awhile or it won’t work inside the off the chain weirdness of Tara’s world because she has to narrate it and she is not the charitable type, politically correct or all that concerned with enabling someone else’s personal baggage unless there is some entertainment value or some evil product she can exploit. But it is her incessant drive to find products and markets for revenge that inadvertently flush money into empty bank accounts, provide work for people who probably would never be employed and the ripple effect of her single minded quest is profound. I’ve only touched the surface of that so far. I want to get more “cause and effect” detailed but I don’t want to slow down the story.
There was a scene in Envy.exe where she talks to the lace lady in Puerto Rico and lies, or debates lying vs the truth about the market for her wares and I deliberately made her seem like the queen bitch of the universe, because the reality is that we do not control anyone but ourselves and what we create in our hands and heads, once released into the market of goods and ideas, will be warped in ways both good and evil and there is no stopping that chain reaction. Control is an illusion. Good and Evil, with only a few rare exceptions, are a matter of perspective.
And that’s where I am at on the plotting.
As you were ;-)
