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Writing Notes: Blue and Gray - Ch. 4 (spoiler warning)
6 years ago
SPOILER WARNING: THE BELOW TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
I haven’t forgotten about doing these, just felt it was more important to actually work on projects, ha. I’m between major projects now though, so I can finish up on these.
For the first few chapters of the book I thought I would have all the chapter names contain either place names or geographical features. I actually did that through most of the chapters of the book, but there are a few where I didn’t stick to this convention. For this chapter I thought ‘cataract’ was good since both the word’s meanings worked pretty well to describe where we are in the story.
This chapter is mostly character-building and defining the relationship between Calvin and Flynn, since it kind of lays the groundwork for why they have to run, why they run together, etc., so there’s a lot of expository stuff in the dialogue in this chapter, much more so than in later chapters.
The initial dream sequence with Flynn actually took me a bit of time to write. There aren’t any actual supernatural elements to this story, but I kind of wanted a thread of it to tie in with the themes of the river and the passage of time that I put into the story, and like some of the anecdotes in chapter one I thought this would be something to be able to call back to later in the story. I also thought the contrast of the warm ‘blue’ at the water’s surface contrasted well with the cold ‘gray’ of the deep. I also wanted Edward to be a character that stays with the story for the duration of the novel because he was so important to Flynn, even though he dies early on. Anyway, I’m pretty happy with the dream sequence.
It also took a bit of trial and error to get Flynn to warm to Calvin in a way that I felt was organic and not forced. Obviously you go into a project like this knowing that they’re going to end up together, but when Flynn wakes up his last memory is of Calvin almost killing him, and walking from that to their first kiss was something that I knew would be difficult.
I’m not 100% satisfied with everything in this chapter, but I think to get to the point where I would have been totally satisfied would have required substantially more space than I was willing to devote to this portion of the story. That is to say, I knew where the rest of the story would go, and I wanted the finished product to ideally be between 90k and 120k words, so you can’t always chase all the rabbits down all the holes you’d like to. That’s the case in some other portions of the novel, as well, but this area is one of the biggies.
On that note, I probably could have gone into more detail about Flynn’s regret for serving in the Confederate army. I mean, I know I could have – I used it as an emotional moment in this chapter, but honestly I wish I had been able to follow it further later on in the book. It felt like that arc kind of resolved itself at the end of this chapter though with Flynn’s insistence on leaving with Calvin, reinforced early in the next chapter which I’ll talk about then. Still, it was a thread I wish I could have explored a little deeper later down the line in their journey.
Another thing I wanted to highlight early in the interactions between Calvin and Flynn was that Calvin was basically ready to give up on life at the time, sick with himself for the things that he had done, suffering from PTSD, etc. Flynn healing him of that is a thread I do spend a lot of time with throughout the book and I wanted to highlight it early.
Throughout the book I tried to make events follow as closely as possible with historical events, but I had to make some exceptions in a few places for the sake of the narrative. The biggest deviation in the book probably takes place in this chapter. In real life the battle of Gettysburg went on for several days, and Confederates didn’t begin to retreat until around July 4 or 5. I really, really didn’t want Calvin to stick around a Confederate camp that long though; again, I could have made it work, but I didn’t feel like I could justify devoting the amount of space to it as I thought it would require without inflating the overall novel word count. And if I couldn’t do that, I felt like having them stay there would screw up the pacing for some of the other stuff I wanted to do after they left. I made the decision (eventually) to just truncate the battle’s timeline, which I felt was an acceptable compromise given that none of the events in the book revolve around the actual battle. So, as a result, Calvin and Flynn’s flight from Chambersburg takes place the same day they meet. Not a perfect solution, but one I felt was good enough. Sometimes that’s what you gotta do!
I think I mentioned it in the previous writing notes, but I included Sgt. Thayer into this as a kind of minor antagonist to add a little more pressure for them to leave in the present but also to contrast with the novel’s major antagonist introduced in a few chapters. I also had the scene of the showdown between him and Calvin in mind, an early chance to prove that Calvin is serious about not wanting to resort to violence any more.
The kiss between Calvin and Flynn is the culmination of the chapter and a kind of a prelude to the much, much steamier content that starts in the next chapter and continues throughout the book. Yeah, it took five chapters to get there, but as I have said before I wrote this just to be the type of book I personally would like to read. In a way I was worried about losing readers before then, especially in this exposition-heavy chapter, but I hope that for those who stuck around this long and were expecting a lot of erotic content that all the back-story makes the erotic content more satisfying. That’s the theory anyway! :]
I haven’t forgotten about doing these, just felt it was more important to actually work on projects, ha. I’m between major projects now though, so I can finish up on these.
For the first few chapters of the book I thought I would have all the chapter names contain either place names or geographical features. I actually did that through most of the chapters of the book, but there are a few where I didn’t stick to this convention. For this chapter I thought ‘cataract’ was good since both the word’s meanings worked pretty well to describe where we are in the story.
This chapter is mostly character-building and defining the relationship between Calvin and Flynn, since it kind of lays the groundwork for why they have to run, why they run together, etc., so there’s a lot of expository stuff in the dialogue in this chapter, much more so than in later chapters.
The initial dream sequence with Flynn actually took me a bit of time to write. There aren’t any actual supernatural elements to this story, but I kind of wanted a thread of it to tie in with the themes of the river and the passage of time that I put into the story, and like some of the anecdotes in chapter one I thought this would be something to be able to call back to later in the story. I also thought the contrast of the warm ‘blue’ at the water’s surface contrasted well with the cold ‘gray’ of the deep. I also wanted Edward to be a character that stays with the story for the duration of the novel because he was so important to Flynn, even though he dies early on. Anyway, I’m pretty happy with the dream sequence.
It also took a bit of trial and error to get Flynn to warm to Calvin in a way that I felt was organic and not forced. Obviously you go into a project like this knowing that they’re going to end up together, but when Flynn wakes up his last memory is of Calvin almost killing him, and walking from that to their first kiss was something that I knew would be difficult.
I’m not 100% satisfied with everything in this chapter, but I think to get to the point where I would have been totally satisfied would have required substantially more space than I was willing to devote to this portion of the story. That is to say, I knew where the rest of the story would go, and I wanted the finished product to ideally be between 90k and 120k words, so you can’t always chase all the rabbits down all the holes you’d like to. That’s the case in some other portions of the novel, as well, but this area is one of the biggies.
On that note, I probably could have gone into more detail about Flynn’s regret for serving in the Confederate army. I mean, I know I could have – I used it as an emotional moment in this chapter, but honestly I wish I had been able to follow it further later on in the book. It felt like that arc kind of resolved itself at the end of this chapter though with Flynn’s insistence on leaving with Calvin, reinforced early in the next chapter which I’ll talk about then. Still, it was a thread I wish I could have explored a little deeper later down the line in their journey.
Another thing I wanted to highlight early in the interactions between Calvin and Flynn was that Calvin was basically ready to give up on life at the time, sick with himself for the things that he had done, suffering from PTSD, etc. Flynn healing him of that is a thread I do spend a lot of time with throughout the book and I wanted to highlight it early.
Throughout the book I tried to make events follow as closely as possible with historical events, but I had to make some exceptions in a few places for the sake of the narrative. The biggest deviation in the book probably takes place in this chapter. In real life the battle of Gettysburg went on for several days, and Confederates didn’t begin to retreat until around July 4 or 5. I really, really didn’t want Calvin to stick around a Confederate camp that long though; again, I could have made it work, but I didn’t feel like I could justify devoting the amount of space to it as I thought it would require without inflating the overall novel word count. And if I couldn’t do that, I felt like having them stay there would screw up the pacing for some of the other stuff I wanted to do after they left. I made the decision (eventually) to just truncate the battle’s timeline, which I felt was an acceptable compromise given that none of the events in the book revolve around the actual battle. So, as a result, Calvin and Flynn’s flight from Chambersburg takes place the same day they meet. Not a perfect solution, but one I felt was good enough. Sometimes that’s what you gotta do!
I think I mentioned it in the previous writing notes, but I included Sgt. Thayer into this as a kind of minor antagonist to add a little more pressure for them to leave in the present but also to contrast with the novel’s major antagonist introduced in a few chapters. I also had the scene of the showdown between him and Calvin in mind, an early chance to prove that Calvin is serious about not wanting to resort to violence any more.
The kiss between Calvin and Flynn is the culmination of the chapter and a kind of a prelude to the much, much steamier content that starts in the next chapter and continues throughout the book. Yeah, it took five chapters to get there, but as I have said before I wrote this just to be the type of book I personally would like to read. In a way I was worried about losing readers before then, especially in this exposition-heavy chapter, but I hope that for those who stuck around this long and were expecting a lot of erotic content that all the back-story makes the erotic content more satisfying. That’s the theory anyway! :]
