Adam Christopher | Steampunk and dark fantasy author. Now with added superheroes!
Adam Christopher is a New Zealand-born SF writer living in the sunny north of England.Archive for Seven Wonders
And so it begins again!
Hot dog. New Gods is plotted, although the chapter breakdown has yet to be done. But I’ve faffed for a week and I’ve nailed the story, so it’s time to start writing.
It’s been surprisingly difficult to dive in. Dark Heart was swimming around in my mind for a couple of years, and I’d had a full chapter breakdown for it ready for almost as long. New Gods is completely and utterly new. Sure, the idea has been there for probably more than a year, but that was it. And it was a great concept, but could I hang a story off it?
Luckily the grey matter pulled through, and there’s a rip-roaring tale of superheroics to be told. And tonight I’ve made a sizeable dent to chapter one – 810 words down, 99,190 to go!
Actually starting from scratch so totally has been a good excuse to get myself organised. Dark Heart was written half in MS Word, half in Scrivener. And while I did various spreadsheets and trackers for the last 50% of the novel, because the front half took so long to write, I could never get an idea of an average daily wordcount, or plot out a completion date.
But New Gods is different – my Scrivener project is all set up. My tracker sheet is counting words from day one! And all going to plan, I’ll have the first draft of this done in 63 days from now, 19th June 2009. New Gods is another 100k novel, and while I’ve only written 0.81% of it, I can already see that this is going to be a very easy target to meet.
And heck, I’ve done it once, I can do it again. Hell, this might become a regular gig 
New Gods
Plotting a novel and hammering out a synopsis is tough. Too much time is spent in keyboard hand-wringing, in worrying about whether plot A slots into plot B, and whether what character #1 does in chapter 15 is logical and meaningful.
But it’s an essential process (and I know some authors don’t do full chapter breakdowns or outlines, but I think you can tell in the finished product), so it’s just a case of madly typing everything out that you can think of, then editing it and crafting it into a proper story.
I’m about halfway through the plotting of New Gods, and having got the basic beginning-middle-end down, I wrote a fake back cover blurb for the bestselling superhero novel you might pick up at your local bookstore. It’s only a draft, and it’s too long really, and no doubt the story will work out slightly differently, but here you go:
San Ventura, California. A bustling seaside metropolis, a jewel of the Western Seaboard. A city gripped by a reign of terror instigated by the superhuman hooded criminal, the Cowl, and his accomplice, Blackbird.
But to the New Gods, the Pacific Coast’s self-appointed guardians of justice, it’s all just a game. Having eliminated every other threat in their territory, they’re reluctant to take down the last remaining supervillain and put themselves out of a job. Caught in the middle, the San Ventura police department fight hard to protect the city while cleaning up the trail of death and destruction left by the Cowl, and more often than not, the New Gods themselves.
When store clerk Tony Farrell wakes up one day to find himself suddenly the most powerful superhero on Earth, he wonders if he can stop the Cowl and bring peace back to his home town. His new girlfriend, Jeannie, certainly thinks so. But with power comes both responsibility and temptation, and Tony isn’t sure he can handle both alone.
But a new menace is coming, something hidden deep the annual Caprotinae meteor shower. And when the night above the city is lit with the celestial fireworks, it is not just the people of San Ventura who are looking to the sky. For Tony and the New Gods, defeating the Cowl may soon be the least of their problems…
Dark Heart 1st draft: complete!
I apologise for not jumping straight in an announcing it, but I’ve been enjoying a few well-earned days off. But I am very pleased to say that on Thursday 9th April, 2009, at something like 7.50am, I completed the first draft of Dark Heart. The target wordcount was 100,000 words. I made it to 118,637, which is fine and dandy as I can already see sections that need reworking and editing, so cutting 18,637 should be fine. A huge, rollercoaster of a novel in 19 sizzling chapters; a searing indictment of domestic servitude in the eighteenth century, with some hot gypsies thrown in… erm, hang on, that’s not it! Ancient voodoo gods, steam-powered cyborgs, and a final battle in the flooded London Underground (although it’s the Vacuum Tube Transport System really).
One unexpected side-effect was that as soon as I saved the project, created a back-up and an archive, and updated my wordcount spreadsheet, I felt quite sad. For a project of this difficulty – first-person Victoriana told from the point of view of about five different characters, each requiring their own voice and personality – I was really, really looking forward to finishing it and moving onto something more straight forward. Third-person, modern day, easy!
But then it hit me that these characters – Dr Clarke, Alexander Bellamy, Zoe, Canadian Airman Scott Faulkner, and others – had been living in my mind for the better part of three years. The writing itself took around a year, although about 80,000 words were written in the last couple of months as I finally cracked the procrastination bug.
And now they’re gone, frozen in amber as the final page of the book is turned over. The immediate reaction to this would be to start the sequel – I have the second book plotted and it’s ready to roll – but this would really be a bad idea.
Firstly, Dark Heart isn’t done. It needs an edit, and a second draft. But I can’t do that now, because I’m too close to it. It needs to ‘cellar’ for a few months until I forget how I wrote it, and then I can read it fresh and will be able to edit, cut and change as required with a much clearer view of what works and what doesn’t, rather than what I want to work.
Secondly, if something significant changes in Dark Heart, it will affect the sequel. So if I start the sequel before Dark Heart is at second draft, that might be a lot of work to undo further down the track.
Those are the two practical reasons why the as-yet untitled sequel needs to wait. In the meantime, I need to learn more about the craft of writing, so I need to write something completely different as a new challenge.
This challenge is a modern-day superhero novel that I used to call Power, but now I’m calling New Gods. Yes, okay, it’s just a working title, and comics legend Jack Kirby got there a LONG time before me, and I would be a foolish writer who would speak of their meagre efforts in the same breath as Kirby. But it’s a good title, and there is no connection to Kirby’s Fourth World, but the title is relevant and resonates with my story. And anyway, titles are not important at such an early stage. So for now, New Gods will be a useful enough temporary title to save my project as.
So here’s to Dark Heart! A novel of blood, sweat and tears, both for myself and for my heroes, who are well and truly wrung by the end of it.
And here’s to New Gods!
