Thursday Thoughts

Breaking news!  Since I have two 4.5 hour lab classes on Thursday next quarter, this may become Tuesday Thoughts for the interim.

Now that everyone has recovered from the shock ...

And the sarcasm ...

I've finally taken some action towards editing Who Wants To Be A Hero? - a novel which I like to describe as, "What if a pantheon of Greco-Roman deities invented reality television competitions?"  For me, it was a fun project, combining my shameful enjoyment of shows like Top Chef, Project Runway and America's Next Top Model (... yes ... really ... I've admitted it ...) with my lifelong love of mythology.  The challenges for becoming a hero are inspired both by the traditional Greek hero arc and by more modern ideas like roleplaying games - for instance, there's a challenge that can only be described as a dungeon-crawl.

The fun part for me was that the results of the episodes were quasi-random.  I gave each character a score in various aptitudes (1-10) and decided which aptitude(s) each challenge used.  If a challenge had multiple aptitudes that might apply, the contestant could "choose" to focus on one or the other.  They could also potentially use an unsuitable aptitude at a penalty.  Then I rolled a die (a ten-sided die, to be specific) and added the two numbers together to determine how well the character was going to do.  The three highest would be up to win; the three lowest would be up for elimination.

... none of this actually showed up in the manuscript, mind.  Instead, it informed the way I wrote the episode and the characters' attempts.  I let my feeling of how the scene had played out influence which of the top three won ... and tried to stick with the numbers as to who had the lowest score and would go home.  This was intended to imitate that moment in a reality show where someone you really expected to go all the way slips up and has a bad moment.  I didn't want my preconceptions to create the straightest, most obvious route.  I also hope that if I genuinely didn't know who was going to win until very near the end, that the reader won't, either ...

So editing this book is going to have some advantages - the plot structure is built in - and some disadvantages - there's going to be some untidiness where I set up elements with characters who then were eliminated.  On the whole, I don't think I'll totally cut out the latter.  A bit of red herring can be good for a story ...