Restructing Act 1

I asked a couple of author friends for quotes for the cover of The Return of Dr. Necropolis after last week's As For Football Army Football Show. This was our second and probably last Lifestyle show of the current off-season, called Telling Your Story. I then decided to go back through the story one last time, using Speechify to read the text back to me. I've been keen to *finish* this thing lately, so that I can start thinking about both Army Football and this book's launch.

I couldn't have told you what or why, but something had been bothering me about Dr. Necropolis's early portions. The intro just didn't feel like it was working. 

In going back through, I finally figured out how to fix it.

Click to expand to full size

If you're wondering, the problem existed in the first act's organization. Essentially, three things needed to happen "first". We have:

• A Flashback scene with Frank and Jaynie
• An Ordinary World scene with Frank
• An Ordinary World scene with Tiffany.

I list the scenes in that order because that's the order in which I wrote them. In fact, Tiffany's Ordinary World scene is literally the last thing I wrote. I'd been contemplating it for months and finally decided to include it because of test-reader feedback about the way Tiffany's character comes across. Because of its function, it's almost a self-contained short story all its own.

But we can't have two prologues. I'm honestly not sure we need even a single prologue with the current organization, but my initial idea was to put Frank's flashback first, then Tiffany's Ordinary World scene, then Frank's Ordinary World scene. But Tiffany's scene works better as a prologue because it functions outside the rest of the story. 

This placement also sets up Tiffany as a primary protagonist. That's good.

It must be said, too, that Frank's flashback works better as part of a single, coherent piece with his Ordinary World scene. Taken by itself, that first flashback is awful. If we don't reframe it with that back half of that introduction to his character, I'm afraid it might make the book itself a harder sell. Especially if we put that part first. A couple of test-readers have recoiled viscerally at that first flashback scene -- fair play; as I said, it's intentionally awful -- so yeah, maybe not the way we want to lead off the book's first few pages.

The Return of Dr. Necropolis (Act 1, revised)

This new organization gives us one fewer chapter -- that's no big deal -- and a cleaner overall structure. We now unambigously Open on Action, give some Background, get into the Conflict, and then we have quite a lot of Development. That's better in every way.

I mention all of this because I decided to put a new tab together on the blog advertising the new book. I'm planning to drop the first eight chapters there (Act 1) and eventually put a link to the book itself as well. 

We'll see if anybody will read this thing.