Closing in...

Just 99 pages left to go through. A couple more typos found -- missing punctuation or a first word in a sentence not capitalized. Simple things. I'm still adjusting bits here and there, shifting around sentences in conversations to make for a better flow. I like to think it's coming across as real...like a record of actual people talking and reacting...but I'm way too close to the story to be able to tell.

I'm up to the point where Brendan is grabbed by some racist men, a blanket is thrown over him, and rope is bound around him to hold it in place. He's thrown in the trunk of a car but he manages to tear a hole in the blanket and see at least a little of what's happening as they drive him out to Deer Park. Then he's tied to a tree and brutalized for dating Vangie.

They come close to killing him, thanks to his heart issues, but can't take him to a hospital; he'd be found out as being illegal and all hell would tear loose, so he's taken home, to heal. This sets up a massive rift between him and his family...because he thinks his uncle had something to do with it.

I'm a bit nervous about this section. It's one that's tightly bound, historically, to the racism and hate of America in the first half of the last century, and I've tried to find a way around it. But the story...and Brendan...keep coming back to it. They want it, so in it stays.

I wrote a horror script about a minister conjuring up a demon to prove the existence of the devil, and thus prove God exists. Of course, there was the usual I need five souls sacrificed to make it work, the minister being the killer, and there's the college kids at an isolated cabin on a lake. But I also added one last demand -- that there be a sixth sacrifice of an innocent, killed by a number of people doing the right thing after being told the truth about the deaths and who had really committed the murders, for all the world to see.

I actually worked it out quite well. The minister saw to it one of the college kids is arrested for the murders, then as a crowd gathers in anger, he gives a sermon telling them the kid blamed him for the killings. He tells them the exact truth, but riles them up to where they become a violent mob and lynch the kid...as news cameras record it all.

No way in hell it'll ever get made. That scene kills any possibility. But I couldn't get the remainder of the story to work without it...and when the muse makes its mind up, you cannot change it.