Purposeful Wandering

When I started my revision adventure, I made a list of all the scenes in Cold Blooded. Then I went through and marked all the ones the were important, and the ones that weren't. Scenes that needed to stay vs scenes that needed to be cut.

A lot of the scenes at the beginning that were marked for deletion involved main character Des just… wandering around. Like, he'd walk around town, or around the college campus, and he'd run into people and have awkward conversations and leave. Nothing really important was happening, so I declared that we needed to skip all that.

And because of that, my beginning is very sparse at the moment, as I have yet to figure out what else should go there to fill out the world and the characters and the plot.

Then I had a sudden realization the other day. The wandering was not for nothing. It was important. Des goes wandering around town and around campus because he's looking for a connection. Not that he'd know what to do with it if he found it. Like a dog chasing a car. He wants to go out and be a person and make friends. But when he actually encounters people, the reality that he's a weirdo vampire coming off of a period of near-total isolation comes crashing down and he has to make his exit.

So the wandering has to come back into the new draft. More directed and purposeful, from my authorial point of view, anyway. It really is a necessary part of showing who this character is. Then we can see how he grows as a person throughout the story.

I mean, really, this is the story of a guy who's trying to reintegrate with society and live a normal life, and then there's this psycho serial killer who's fucking it all up. Who can't relate to that?

But in all seriousness, I went to a community college in my late 20s. I would often have a gap between classes when I didn't really have anything to do. So I would go to the Student Union Building, looking for… something. I don’t know what it was, or what I was going to do when I found it. And when I didn’t find it, I had to keep walking, because, I don't know, I couldn't just look like I was aimlessly wandering. I had to look like I was on my way somewhere, which led to more wandering, until I found a destination. Which was usually a couch under the stairs.

I'm not saying that my vampire novel is autobiographical. But I'm also not not saying that. Inspired by a True Story or whatever. Write what you know, they say.

So anyway, I've brought back just one tiny moment of wandering, just walking off the beaten path, and I've already discovered a corpse. So this is going well. I've started actually thinking about why the killer is, you know, killing. To be honest, I watched Alexa Donne's video on plotting a thriller, even though my story isn't exactly a thriller, and I started thinking all kinds of great thoughts.

But great thoughts are nothing if I don't actually write the story, so I'd best get back to that.

I'll see you next… week? Or in a fortnight, maybe?