Thursday Thoughts

With the World Fantasy Convention coming up at the end of the month, I'm going to continue to write about Flow in particular, and perhaps contemporary / urban fantasy in general - with the exception of The Next Big Thing, which I have been tagged for, and I will post about!  I promise.  But I am swamped with a project I'll post about if I meet my exceedingly crunchy deadline.

Lately, I've been thinking about a potential sequel to Flow.  This following post continues some spoilers as to the plot resolution (though I'm trying to phrase things to minimize such), so if you haven't read the novel and care about such things, pop over to:

Flow - Lindsey Duncan

All right, shameless plug over.  On with the show!

I'm still working out the exact details of a plot(s) for this - I want to do something a bit more complex and spread out than Flow, so it may indeed be plots, plural - but there are a few things I know are must-dos:

Scenes from Hadrian's perspective.  Flow was conceived as alternating scenes between Kit and Chailyn.  Much is made of Hadrian's hyper-accelerated perceptions, but because of the dual POV, the reader never gets into those eyes.  Back when I wrote Flow, I wouldn't have been confident of being able to tackle that level of detail without bogging down the narrative unduly.  Now it seems like a fun challenge.

The dissolving romance.  One core concept for the sequel started before I even finished Flow:  in this later volume, Kit would have a boyfriend of supernatural character who uses his powers to suppress her abilities and allow her to be normal, but as the story opens, this is beginning to chafe.  I've expanded this into wanting to show a romance as it ends, the staying-together-by-habit, the irritation, the dissolution.

The uncomplicated romance.  I actually wrote an exercise (from Ann Hood's Creating Character Emotions, which I highly recommend) which set up the direction for the other romantic element in the book, but I want this to be a happy, middle-of-relationship story.  No irrational jealousy, no wandering eyes, no strained secrets, no "you put your work first" accusations.  There's too much media out there treading the same tired ground of tension for the sake of it.

Evolution.  The sequel will pick up a couple of years after Flow - there are a few points I have to nail down to determine how long.  I want to give a clear sense of how the characters have changed in the intervening time.

And just one more teaser on a likely plot point:

What do you do with the body of someone whose soul has been drained?