Thursday, August 14, 2008

Story Set-pieces and Where to Put Them. Also capital Letters and where nOt to put THEm.

Work on Jimmy Coates: Blackout continues. I'm writing the central set-piece action sequence at the moment. You've probably noticed that each of my books has had one since the first book, Jimmy Coates: Killer (or Jimmy Coates: Assassin if you're in the USA). The structure of that first book was slightly different to the others because I spent the first half of the book exploring the mystery side of the story.

If you've read the others, you'll spot that they're built around a central set piece action sequence, which usually goes wrong (the Fort Einsmoor prison sequence in Jimmy Coates: Target, the MoMA sequence in New York in Jimmy Coates: Revenge, the Neptune's Shadow oil rig sequence in Jimmy Coates: Sabotage, and the Mutam-ul-it uranium mine sequence in Jimmy Coates: Survival).

When I'm planning my stories, I start off with a similar structure. It changes as I work on the plan, according to the unique elements of each story, but you can still see the main bones if you know where to look.

Jimmy Coates: Power (book 6) is going to be slightly different, with a larger set-piece about a third of the way through, then another at the two-thirds point and obviously a thrilling climax (I hope!), which will make it much more similar in pacing to the first book in the series. For Jimmy Coates: Blackout I'm returning to my more familiar structure.

Meanwhile, today's Olympic interest comes from the table I keep an eye on every four years: the medal table as adjusted according to population size. Check it out:

http://www.geocities.com/unclebryan/Polympic.html

At the moment the British team is ahead of the USA!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

LOL Lies, dammed lies and statisstice. And the UK is still in the bottom half