Bugzters works pretty tightly as a screenplay, but in the rewriting I did I cut out and trimmed down a couple of characters I liked so I'm aiming to add them back into the story. I'm finding that harder to do than I expected, because it interrupts the rhythm of the piece.
That's not to say it's wrong to put them in; in the initial drafts, they made perfect sense. For example: Mrs Routledge is a school crossing guard who winds up suspecting one of the Chesters is up to no good with the kids she's there to protect. She doesn't know there are 4 of them, and her suspicions are on the child-predator side as regards the Chester she sees...so she does her best to keep tabs on him. She even runs him off from the school, once, and warns the cops about him. That may help set up the arrest of one of them...
Another deal is the agents from MESCIS, who had more of their too-cool-for-you chatter going on, not to mention Ms. Chris' casual sexual harassment of the CPO. That may be a bit adult for the book, but I think it's kept enough in the background. I'll have to play that carefully, since I'm aiming this at 4-7th grades.
Thing is, by adding them in I need to find a new rhythm for the piece. As a script, it shoots off and runs 90 to nothing. As a book, I can meander a bit more (so long as I don't get lost in that meandering) and dig deeper into the characters. Especially Alex and Taylor...who are dealing with the typical 11 year-old kid things on top of the Bagh-star situation. That's proving to be a trick, even in working up a new outline.
That's not to say it can't be done; The Lyons' Den started out as a script that became a play that became a book, and I think the book works fine. It's not as easy a read as I thought it would be -- keeping track of Ace's patois apparently takes some getting used to -- but it does the job, and I think Daniel winds up being a rich, complex character.
This is going to be more interesting than I expected...
That's not to say it's wrong to put them in; in the initial drafts, they made perfect sense. For example: Mrs Routledge is a school crossing guard who winds up suspecting one of the Chesters is up to no good with the kids she's there to protect. She doesn't know there are 4 of them, and her suspicions are on the child-predator side as regards the Chester she sees...so she does her best to keep tabs on him. She even runs him off from the school, once, and warns the cops about him. That may help set up the arrest of one of them...
Another deal is the agents from MESCIS, who had more of their too-cool-for-you chatter going on, not to mention Ms. Chris' casual sexual harassment of the CPO. That may be a bit adult for the book, but I think it's kept enough in the background. I'll have to play that carefully, since I'm aiming this at 4-7th grades.
Thing is, by adding them in I need to find a new rhythm for the piece. As a script, it shoots off and runs 90 to nothing. As a book, I can meander a bit more (so long as I don't get lost in that meandering) and dig deeper into the characters. Especially Alex and Taylor...who are dealing with the typical 11 year-old kid things on top of the Bagh-star situation. That's proving to be a trick, even in working up a new outline.
That's not to say it can't be done; The Lyons' Den started out as a script that became a play that became a book, and I think the book works fine. It's not as easy a read as I thought it would be -- keeping track of Ace's patois apparently takes some getting used to -- but it does the job, and I think Daniel winds up being a rich, complex character.
This is going to be more interesting than I expected...
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