Breaking the story

I've managed to break all of Act II for the script, which is great. So I've got the first two acts laid out and ready to be written. I just have to figure out how the book will end - only about 14 more scenes to draft up and then the skeleton is done! That's very cool.

I even have about six of those 14 scenes already figured out - so I'm in good shape. Here's hoping that once it's all ready to go - I can just start cranking the story out. I'm looking forward to it.

My promise - early (Act II)

Well, I'd written Act I ages ago - and then I got stuck on Act II basically because I didn't know what was going on - so I had to do some research to get an idea of how to carry the story forward. Now that the research is done - I'm trying to develop Act II and character biographies so that everything stays nice and cohesive. The most important part of all of this is:

the things that happen to the characters have an impact on their characteristic makeup, and their characteristic makeup will influence how they move forward into their next challenge, which will thusly affect their characteristic makeup. It's kinda neat, so far.

Plus, all the research has given me a great feeling for what I want to accomplish: a believable sci-fi tale that really latches on to the mysteries and legends of our cultural past and makes them important moments in an archaeologist's contemporary challenges. Plus, it's all going to lead to zombie dinosaurs!

It just takes a while to carry two normal, realistic people on a normal day to confront zombie dinosaurs in a believable way. So I've created a mythology that's built on top of legends that already exist, filling in the spaces between what we know and can only guess at and making it into a history that somehow allows for zombies in a believable way, but at the same time, dinosaurs in a believable way, too.

I have a mock zombie-dinosaurs script that skips the "believable part" and goes right to making zombie dinosaurs happen - people might be more interested in that? You'll have to let me know. If anyone posts a comment on this blog about wanting to see the "mock zombie dinosaur" explanation - I'll post it, I promise.

No updates - but some things done

Well - it's been a while since I've updated this project, and it's mostly because I got stuck - and then didn't work on it, and things like that. No new artwork, no more writing yet, but I was doing a lot of research. Basically, you get stuck and stop when you don't know where to go next, which means you likely haven't plotted out your story yet.


This was true for me - it wasn't plotted out, I didn't know where the characters were headed or what they were going to do. Plus, it a variety of cases, I didn't know some of the main characters, in particular the antagonists: who are they? Why are they trying to stop our protagonists? What are their purposes? Well, I had to figure that out.

And to do that - well, I had to go back about 2 or 3 thousands years ago to build up a back story. Yikes, I know. What do I know about all that stuff? Not much, I discovered, and my story's believability hinges on this back story being accurate, interesting and unimaginable at the same time. I think it's going to work out, especially after learning everything I have so far.

So, here's my bibliography so far:

First off, in the craft of writing itself, I have been through a couple of books, happily.

• Stephen King wrote a great book (right around the time he was hit by a truck and temporarily crippled) On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft which was a lot of fun to go through. A lot of very interesting insights on how he works and how he's grown over the years. Funny anecdotes, plus the trials and tribulations of being a starving artist. Will I write like Stephen King? Well, I'd say: I could only hope so, but at the same time, I'd like to have my own voice. I like how he takes very interesting moments and concepts and transforms them into dangerous and frightening situations to frame a story around. I really like that.
  
  
• Syd Field is the staple book for how-to screenplays. Thus, The Screenwriter’s Workbook: is an apt title. I am still considering whether I want to develop this as a graphic novel, a screen play or a novel just yet. Not sure what I want to do with it - besides the tremendous amount of time it would take, the graphic novel idea would be really fun to finish (probably not nearly as much fun to produce, though).
  
  
• Karen S. Weisner's From First Draft to Finished Novel which has a lot of good information for writing a novel. In my experience, this should be a staple for anyone interested in creatively developing an idea of any kind. Whether it's a television show, a screenplay, a novel, or a short story. This book impresses what's most important in telling a story, no matter what your medium.
  
  
• Linda N. Edelstein’s Writer’s Guide to Character Traits to help develop characters > I've been using this quite a bit to help develop characters in The Extent, as well. Lots of point-form information that lists the characteristics of people in certain situations, all from a clinical psychologist. If anyone were to know characteristics better, it would be her. The important part after this sort of research is to apply the "Show, don't tell" philosophy. Yes, the hero has these characteristics, but how do you show them in your story?
  

• Richard E. Rubenstein's Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews rediscovered ancient wisdom and illuminated the Middle Ages was a great book on science burgeoning out of the dark ages. A very fascinating read about the ages I'm interested in writing about in the back stories. Specifically, it views how scientific information transformed many different faiths (not just Christianity).
  
  
• Jeffrey J. Butz's The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christianity provides a very interesting secondary perspective on the life and times of Jesus and the Jewish world of the first century. This is probably the most important book I read of the bunch. I want to recreate an important Biblical figure for the purposes of moving my story forward, but I have to reimagine what we know about him to build a new legend and mythology for my story. That means you've got to know your stuff, or else things look and sound sloppy. When it's someone this important at a time in history where Christianity was founded - well, it's got to be believable.
  
  
• Michael Grant's Nero which was about one of the Roman emperor's back in the day. There was a great fire in Rome back then, and he murdered a bunch of Christians in the name of justice. Some tertiary research came out of this novel. If you didn't know that the Romans genocided different religions at any given moment throughout their reign, well, you would after reading this. It was like religious groups were lambs, and the Roman citizens were polytheistic gods. Basically, the Romans had to sacrifice religious groups to appease the denizens.
  
  
• I finished a fascinating book by David Klinghoffer called Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, providing a lot more context on the Middle East during the first century (and quite a bit before that, too). All very valuable information for the founding mythology of my story.

So - while there haven't been any updates - there is progress going on, namely research. Though, I'm taking a sick day today (I feel like garbage) so I think I'll try and apply some of the research into story today. If I can generate a believable and interesting back story to build up a legendary end game that I'm hoping to do - then this should be really awesome. And progress can be made.

Zombie Brachiosaurus

Yeah - finished it today. Not sure if I want to play around with some of the filters on the image or not. It's not as clean as some of the other images. Certainly, let me know what you think.

If you click on the image it'll become much larger if you'd care to see the details more closely.

What do you think? Pretty close to the mock-up I posted a few weeks ago, right?

Zombie dinosaurs | New image soon

I'll likely have the new zombie dinosaur image ready to go by the end of the week - I had some time to work on it today, and I got really close to wrapping it up. Just a little more time and then a bit of photoshopping to get it to look like it's actually a part of the series and not just a random sketch, and then I'll post it up.

Stay tuned.

Nanowrimo could be perfect

I've been working on a side-project for almost two years now - and I developed the Zombie Dinosaurs idea while I was 'away' from that other project - It's called Lefevre's Redemption, and you're welcome to read the first draft of it at that link. Help yourself.

Lately I've been close to wrapping up the next big step on that project, and that's re-energized me to stay on it for a while, which has also kept the Zombie Dinosaurs project at bay for a few months.

That being said, I think I've found the perfect solution - for the month of November there's something called the National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo) and basically you commit yourself to producing 50,000 words of text while writing a novel. This, as I've learned, is not the best way to develop a strong story - but writing things down is a big step.

So I'm hoping to have my story plotted out and ready to write before November, and then once we get there, I'll start cranking that baby out - and with any luck, I'll have a second draft of my first project, and the first draft of my second project both finished before the end of the year, which would be absolutely amazing!

So that's where things stand right now. I hope you'll all bear with me a little long and I'll get the plot details and story and all of that ready to go sometime soon. Then perhaps I'll be able to take those ideas and develop them into a script for a graphic novel and finally get to work creating that project, which would be a real pleasure.

Sorry for a grievous lack of updates, and I hope you're as interested in this as I am.

Zombie Sauropod

Yeah, here's a mock-up of the next zombie dinosaur image. In this case it's going to be a zombie brachiosaurus that's bearing down on someone trying to escape. This is a mess of images that are in the general proximity of where items will be in the final drawing. It should be awesome.

My fiance has actually stepped in as my model for someone about to be eaten by a monster sauropod. Cool.