WARNING: THIS BLOG CONTAINS VIGILANTE SPOILERS.
Chapter 3 - MSG Heist
I'm going to try this author's note blog post to see if it flies. Every few chapters, I might add notes. Sometimes I have these ideas, but they don't pan out. At least for chapter three, I have something to say.
I gave you three chapters in three days to get readers past the world-building and scene-setting and into the meat of the story. That will not happen again.
That slog of a scene that opened the story concerned me. I hope it wasn't too much politics. It was necessary to get that out of the way, the big picture backstory, so I could move on with the news reporting and crime-fighting story. I did that political information dump in a scene and conversation to have multiple voices and points of view rather than a narrator explaining the mess we're in. If there was one aspect of this writing I struggled with from the start, it was long narrative passages. I did the same with the dinner scene with Mom and Dad. I much prefer my characters telling the tale in their voices.
I'm not a world builder aside from developing characters of a time. I write in the real world, using places like New York and LA because everyone knows them well enough, and I don't have to create a world. I simply choose a period, the 1970s, the 1990s, and now 2035.
The thing about writing in the future, even the near future, is that I must do some world-building to explain the years ahead to bridge the gap to 2035. I converted some of these long narrator-driven passages into scenes, but several remain. I had to build a vigilante world with a history, and that requires explaining.
The political angle is always present, but I keep it as a side story, something my characters bitch about or try to ignore, as we all do. Now that Aiden knows there's a new vigilante, we get into the real story. It's about crime, heroism, civic duty, and corruption. As a journalist and a citizen, Aiden must make hard choices as he's drawn closer to the action.
If you find Aiden's choices disagreeable, or you believe the crusader is wrong in his mission and execution, that's okay. I'm cool with that. I am writing to create a social/moral dilemma that will have people on both sides.
And now, as of this weekend, real-world events have me making minor changes to my story. When you see how I weave a little Venezuela into this, you'll see how nicely it fits.