Often, I feel as though my time is running out. For what? I have no honest idea. That's the beauty of the idea... To have something getting away from you and the frustration of not knowing what that thing is.
Anyway, I realize that one of these things I feel is getting away from me is my time to do any real writing. I'm not a fool, nor am I in denial. Years ago, I would write a chapter every week and Corruption was finished within a year. These days, I barely read anything, let alone write it. Why? I think a big deal of it is my video game obsessions. I've gotten sucked into certain games that I spend hours on, most notably WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2009 and Fable II. I recently got my 360 working online [more on this later, I don't think I posted about this landmark in my gaming career] and downloaded more content for both games. In the end, this has only re-ignited the flame of my obsession.
I remember that I used to find a great joy in talking to people about my writing. Angel and Kitty [my then-girlfriend] were huge fans of Corruption and they seemed to hang on the words I wrote, even though sometimes I didn't see them written as well as they seemed to be in my head. In the end, I think exciting them about future installments of the story and leaving them with cliffhangers is one of the things that got me to write so much. I wanted to see that reaction, the reaction I got when they were done reading what I had written and wanted to see or hear or feel the hunger they had for more. With Corruption ending the way it did, I can't be the least bit surprised if people want more of it [as it's part 1 of 5 in a series and the endings I tend to leave are massive cliffhangers] but in the end, it's a new beginning and I have a huge issue with beginnings.
I think the hardest part of writing a novel or even a short story [nay, even a poem!] is the beginning. How do you create an impression on a reader who may lose interest in the first few lines. What can you say that will pull people in? Corruption's original beginning was actually one that did not hold the reader. As a matter of fact, that's one of the reasons it changed; an ex-girlfriend [yes, I do make it a policy of staying in touch with ex's. I find the emotional scars this situation creates to be quite thrilling!] bluntly said the story was great once the boring beginning was behind her. So I added a bit more of an interesting scene to the beginning, wrote it up as a dream of the main character [a dream which, ironically, had NOTHING to do with the rest of the plot and was never referenced again throughout the entire novel] and went ahead with the "boring" beginning [which was now really the beginning after the new beginning, I guess]
Cheapness, thy name is Seth Cross.
Either way, it was the first blunt and negatively honest criticism I ever received and I appear to have worked past it rather well. No one else since the "publication" [that act of making something public, not to be confused with publishing something] has ever commented that the ending is boring, so mission accomplished!
Now with this next book, I can't feel the same kind of flow. Thomas Stinda is merely not as interesting a character to me as his big brother Alexander. Thomas is pretty cut and dried, even in Re-Birth where he first begins to lose his grip on his beliefs... The Guardian [Thomas] has always been "Good is good, evil is evil, I am one and must destroy the other before they destroy me". A noble idea, provided you're right. When you're wrong about who's good and evil and when there really is a shade of gray in between your black and white views, you tend to become more of a psychotic facist, a fate I've decided to keep Thomas away from with the choices he makes in the series.
My biggest fear, I belief, is a novel without almost any Alexander really in it. I have to change a lot of characters, force them to grow up very quickly to make it so they a) stay alive and b) do what they need to do. I also have to explore the depths of a new protagonist, and somehow make sure he's different from the last one. Perhaps I should truly define the characters of the first novel and then that will guide me to creating new characters by definition. Then, it's merely a hop, skip and leap away from streamlining these definitions with character traits, flaws and common little glitches that people do tend to have.
I guess that's a good way to get things started. When I started Corruption, I didn't have the twists and everything else mapped out, but I had a basic plot and the general characters thought out. As it progressed, the characters became people and they did things I didn't intend them to do originally. And in the end, we got Corruption, a plot wrought with twists and turns and people doing nothing but trying to survive while stabbing one another in the back. No one can be trusted. There is no trust, only corruption, the Corruption of character.
So think on that philosophy. Because I told you to.
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