by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
I have finally finished a pretty good scene summary of the first act of the scifi novel I’m developing and now I’m pondering the rest of the book. It seems to me that I can use the one good plot I have — that of what happened me in South Korea with ROKon Magazine — as the basis of the first half of the second act. The second half of the second act will be where the 2016 presidential campaign becomes relevant.
I am well aware that I can talk big all I want, but when really comes down to it, my writing is what’s going to be important. I can talk tough all I want, but this novel is becoming extremely ambitious and as such it may make me happy but in the end it will just suck because my writing is so bad. And, as I keep saying, it’s very possible that some hack will use the original first act scene summary I posted here briefly as the basis of a screenplay.
But I probably have a limited window of opportunity to get ahead of that because, well, it would taken even the most basic of hacks a little while to write a screenplay inspired by what I posted. It might have been interesting, but it really wasn’t all that good. At least in my opinion. This new scene summary, however, is turning out great and I’m very pleased with the general direction it’s headed.
I hope to get a lot of work done on it today. Right now, I just have to figure out the exact chronology of things as I write so I can use what happened to me in Seoul as the inspiration for a big chunk of the plot effectively. In a way, if I pull this off, I could see someone seeing the high concept for this novel as Under The Dome meets Lucy meets Mission: Impossible — Fallout meets The Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind meets Network.
Sorta.
Those, at least, are some of the major influences of this going forward. I really need to make this story character driven so people will actually want to read it. The premise is really personal and semi-autobiographical in some respects — not to mention completely ridiculous if it isn’t properly explained to you — but I’m slowly beginning to get a better understanding of what the story is about and what the characters are going to do.
I hope.
We’ll see.
