Done!
Finished!
Finito!
For now. The draft checked in at about 63,000 words, long enough for a novel, but far short than Second Wave and The Children of Amargosa. So adapting a screenplay to prose is not as easy as it looks. Will I do it again?
Actually, my plan for Holland Bay is to have book 3 of that series in progress by the time a publisher pulls the trigger. I hope to get my hands on some teleplays for The Wire and Law & Order: SVU. With that, I’m going to write Holland Bay 3 (for now called Harbourtown) as if it were a ten-episode series on Netflix or HBO. So this has been a good exercise. And it might make the book more readable if it’s divided into episodes.
But there are clearly some things missing that, if you watched this as the movie I wrote, you wouldn’t notice. Why? There are some big ass explosions, and a lot of things moving along quickly. But in writing out interactions between Tishla and JT, you get the impression something was left out. And some of his behavior is grounds for our favorite Gelt to call him out on. Hey, he may think he’s an adult, but were you really that mature at 17?
I need to explain a few things, too. For instance, a couple of characters on the former colony of Gilead are training with swords. If you read Tishla or saw this on a movie screen, you would get the impression that humans picking up swords was a natural occurrence when they interact with the Gelt, a species known for its love of sticking the pointy end of sharp objects into combat opponents. If you only read The Children of Amargosa and Second Wave, you would think, “WTF?”
Some scenes need to be cut, a few added in. Finishing today’s scenes allowed me to add one already, giving two characters who were antagonists closure. On the other hand, one character is eaten by sapient wildlife. (Giving new meaning to the word “hangry.”) The betas may suggest something more conventional for this person’s end, say a baseball bat or just shooting them in the head. How’s that for ending on a cheery note.
And I don’t really tie the Juno storyline up very well. Unfortunately, that may require some surgery. Juno’s most direct link on Amargosa at the moment is Lucius Kray, and he’s too busy being a warlord to worry about a corporation he’s cut off from.
We’ll see. It’s only 63,000 words. I have 27,000 words to play with to make this a proper ending to a scifi trilogy.
What if the Romulans go back in time and kill Kirk’s dad moments after he was born?
Meh. Time to let this ferment like a sour gym sock and work on something else.
This week, Holland Bay 2. Next month, The Exile. The latter in longhand.