Thursday 4 April 2013

The birth of Dr. Phantom

I don't remember the start of the thought process that got me going, but sometime about two years ago I had an idea about someone who fell in love with a beautiful superheroine, and then somehow got superpowers himself.  To meet her he could try going the hero route and hope to eventually meet her, or he could go for a simpler option and act like a supervillain to get her attention.  I found the idea quite appealing, and a few more scenes came to me fairly quickly, painting the picture of a fairly normal, harmless, and maybe slightly stupid man who quickly ends up in over his head.

The first, very rough draft took about a month to write, with a few scenes hastily written to link the ones that were clear in my head to begin with.  The lead characters were pretty fully formed, one side character in particular grew out of a tiny seed to take a completely different direction than I'd planned, and a host of extras popped up out of nowhere, and now they're all kicking back somewhere in my imagination.  I love the creative process.

Of course, since then I've gone over that first draft over and over and over (and maybe even over).  The characters are clearer than ever and the plot gets tighter each time, but it's slightly less fun than writing the first draft was.  Still, it's finally reached the point that I'm happy for other people to read it.  Now to start the quest for an agent...

Sunday 10 February 2013

Let's try blogging again

I never feel like I've got anything interesting to say most of the time, but we'll see if I can get this blog thing going again.  My main interest is my supervillain novel, The Rise of Dr. Phantom, but I'll probably spend most of my time rambling on more or less at random.  I may even share some short stories I've written to establish character backgrounds.

Let's see how this goes.