Graeme Rodaughan's Blog: Writing The Metaframe War Series, page 9

For Halloween - Ghosts of Boyfriends Past

Ref my profile page for the link.

Something of Myself

I have a driving ambition to be the best writer of suspenseful, thrilling, action orientated vampire novels that I can be.

I'm a stand for human dignity and I enjoy empowering those around me because I prefer the company of those who are awake to their own power over those who are blind to it.

I value courage, intelligence, compassion, independence, ingenuity, liberty, empowerment, and human dignity.

I base my own moral perspective on the pillers of informed consent, and compassion through empowerment.

I'm a pessimist about how much humans can know, and I don't believe in much at all. I'm both curious and comfortable with mystery.

I don't assume that I'm right.

There are things in this world that are of great, sublime, awesome beauty and there are things in this world that are of great, sublime, awesome horror.

I hope to reflect both polarities within my stories, and leave it up to whatever audience I attract to judge the value of what I do for themselves

Goodreads Giveaway #1

Hi All,

A goodreads giveaway is now in operation from the 5th October to the 5th of November.

Enter for a chance to win 1 of 2 signed, first edition, trade paperback copies of A Subtle Agency, by Graeme Rodaughan.

Hunting Anton Slayne?

Just get in line behind the Boston Police Department, Chinese Triads, the Shadowstone Organization, the Red Empire and the Vampire Dominion.

Witness to a brutal murder, Anton is inducted into the Order of Thoth by the mysterious Mr Wu. He soon discovers that vicious local gangsters, determined Boston Police Detectives, and relentless Shadowstone operatives pale into insignificance as he is drawn into the machinations of the enigmatic vampire, General Chloe Armitage.

When mastery over Anton’s soul is at stake, survival is the least of his problems.

Castle Dracula Book of the Month

Castle Dracula is running two Book of the Month reads.

Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko who I list as an influencer of my own writing.

And A Subtle Agency by myself.

This is the first time that I have a book selected for a group read, and it is side by side with an author that I very much admire and respect.

I invite everyone to click over to Castle Dracula and join in the fun of reading and discussing a great pair of books that are very appropriate for the month of October.

Cheers Graeme

FREE Kindle Promotion - Halloween 2016

Hi All,

Halloween is coming, and to honour the occasion I will be running a free promotion on Kindle this weekend.

A Subtle Agency will be free for Kindle download from Saturday the 1st October to Sunday the 2nd of October.

Beginning Midnight Pacific USA time.

The main Amazon link is here

From there you can easily navigate to your home market if you are outside the US.

In a universe where reality can be re-programmed, any wish can be satisfied or any nightmare realised.

Set in a near future Boston & New York; in a world that looks a lot like ours, vampires rule from the shadows, but they are not unopposed.

Standing against them are two ancient secret societies. The Order of Thoth and the Red Empire, united in their opposition to the vampires and bitterly divided by their different values.

A young Anton Smith, a Boston university student in his freshman year, and star Hockey player comes to the attention of the 2nd most powerful vampire in the world, General Chloe Armitage and she has a visionary plan for the future in which she needs Anton to play a critical part.

Anton's world and everything that he thought he knew is shattered, he is thrown onto the streets of Boston and must quickly adapt to survive. But will he learn what he needs to know quickly enough to make a difference or will he become a knight in an ambitious vampire's chess game where the future of humanity is at stake.

Cheers Graeme

An Interview with Anton Slayne

‘I’m sitting with Anton Slayne at Patrick O’Malleys Irish pub just off the Boston CBD. Anton’s recently landed a gig as the main character of a new series of books, beginning with A Subtle Agency and has agreed to give an interview for my Blog.’

‘So let’s begin Anton, how did you get the gig?’

‘Well, I saw an advertisement in the Boston Mercury for a main character for an upcoming novel, they said they were looking for someone who could play a star hockey player and Boston University freshman, so I brushed up my CV and sent it in.’

‘So what happened then?’

‘Well, there was a couple of rounds of interviews, and everything seemed to be going really good. I thought, solid, I’ve got it, my first major role - no more bit parts for me.’

‘Sounds like something unexpected happened.’

‘Yeah, they asked me if I wanted to be a vampire, and I can tell you, alarm bells started ringing straight away, and I thought to myself, well there’s a big red flag. I mean, what the hell - vampires? Really?’

‘Vampires?’

‘Yeah, what I thought too. Anyway, so the old geezer who’s running the show, he said he was toying with the idea that I might be better placed as one of the vampires.’

‘Shocking.’

‘Too right, so I said to him, that no way whatsoever, I was gonna play a damn vampire. And he ruminates on my response for minutes … so I’m waiting for the old fart to make up his mind, and then he comes out and says, it will all be okay, you don’t have to be a vampire.’

‘You would have been a relieved.’

‘Sure, but I’m going, what the hell in my mind, as I thought it was a sports story, and so what is all this talk about vampires. I just didn’t get it.’

‘So, did he do anything to clarify the situation?’

‘Well, he gave me an outline of the novel, and I read it. I’m still thinking this is a sports story, right, and I’m a freshman at Boston U, right. Yeah right, so I’m looking for a hockey tournament, with me as a star player. I’m looking for a championship game with me scoring the winning goal. I’m looking for hot cheerleaders and lots of them. I’m looking for drunken frat parties and pranks and laughs and fun. …’

‘But it wasn’t anything like that was it?’

‘No, nothing like it. It was a real downer, I was some guy who’s mother get’s murdered in our living room, and who’s father is abducted by really tough vampires. Not only that, I’ve been living in some weird witness protection and basically I’ve got enemies everywhere just looking to put me in an early grave. I nearly get killed half a dozen times in the first book, and then I see in the second book that I get shot, thrown off a cliff, and then hooded, gagged, bound and buried alive and that’s only in the first three chapters.’

‘That’s a tough gig.’

‘Even worse, my number one enemy, Chloe Armitage, who kills my mother and abducts my father, wants to use me in some plot of her own. And get this, her time on page is almost the same as mine. Hey, I thought I was gonna be the main character. What’s up with that?’

‘So what convinced you to take the job?’

‘Well, a guy has got to eat, and I was sick of playing bit parts in online computer games.’

‘It’s that simple?’

‘Yep, it’s that simple.’

‘Well, thank you Anton, its been wonderful to get some real insight into the inner workings of the job market for main characters.’

‘Sure, no problem.’

‘Thanks again.’

‘Cheers, hey, and thanks for the beer.’

‘It’s all good.’

Best Selling Fiction

According to Courtney Carpenter there are 21 Key Traits of Best-Selling Fiction

Lets check this out by application to my stories.

1. Utility - Very high, provided you're a vampire hunter.
2. Information - Vampires don't like silver or sunlight
3. Substance - See point 1 above.
4. Focus - Vampires are bad.
5. Logic - Vampires are consistently bad.
6. A sense of connection - On the off chance that vampires are real...
7. A compelling style - If you fear vampires you'll love my book.
8. A sense of humor - There is at least one joke in chapter 6.
9. Simplicity - Just about hunting vampires.
10. Entertainment - There are fracking vampires in there!
11. A fast pace - There are vampires and/or fights in every second scene.
12. Imagery - The vampires are really well drawn.
13. Creativity - The origin of the vampires is novel.
14. Excitement - Fight scenes are short, sharp and frequent.
15. Comfort - The vampires die.
16. Happiness - The vampires stay dead.
17. Truth - It could be true. No really, it could be true...
18. Writing that provokes - You will think long and hard about vampires while reading my book.
19. Active, memorable writing - Last sentence of the prologue, and again in the 4th scene of Chapter 7.
20. A sense of Wow! - Has reputedly happened at least once. (On good authority...)
21. Transcendence - last chapter of the last book of the series due for release in Q3 2023.

The Genesis of the Vampires

Available on the preview page.

Location, location, location - Kinda

I'm working on chapter 3 (of 9) of A Traitor's War and I had to dig into location research as I have a big fight coming up in Chapter 4. (not a spoiler - any one with a passing acquaintance with my writing knows that there will be fights.)

My original scene definitions for chapters 3 and 4 were a little vague on the location which I envisioned as a derelict residential and light business district.

Actually writing the scenes has forced me to tighten this up, and as usual, the process has produced a better result than the plan.

(... what's that about a plan never surviving contact with the enemy ...)

I like to place my action on real world physical locations which I then modify to support the dramatic needs of the narrative.

[For Example] Swap out the car park, extend and widen the finger of land and put a warehouse on it.

The Boston warehouse site from A Subtle Agency

The reason that I do this is so that I can better visualise the combat and maintain the proportions of the action.

If a vampire can run 5x faster than a fast human and the warehouse is 100 yards long - he is going to get from one end to the other in 2 to 3 seconds - longer if he is being actively targeted by a Ramp master.

Given that a Nightfalcon helicopter is modelled on an uprated Blackhawk can one land on the warehouse dock? I measured it, and it could - so I allowed it.

I take google snapshots and draw maps on paper and measure it all up.

The goal is to produce a seamless, and immersive experience for the reader. Getting the proportions wrong can be a jarring experience for the reader.

I assume that my readers are smart and observent, and will spot flaws if I don't polish them out.

I have a scene in A Traitor's War where a couple are walking past a park at night and a vampire snatches the girl.

Initially I had the girl on the right hand side of the guy. On examination of the location, and the fact that I had the couple heading to a known landmark from a specific direction. I had to swap her to the left to put her next to the park, and him next to the road.

So I rewrote the angles of the scene.

(Pretty obsessive eh?)

Getting back to chapter 3 and a good location for a fight scene.

Five Story Apartments

Imagine this site. Imagine it derelict and abandoned in a distressed neighbourhood. It butts up onto a river, there is a nearby express way. I can put a some other features in around it to add some story value.

But imagine being in a small tightly knit fighting force that has to infiltrate a multi-story site at night that has an opposing group of vampires in it.

It's dark, it's derelict, it's a maze. Your opponents are stronger, tougher, and have better senses. You have superb training and skills.

What's going to happen?

Connective Tissue?

The Metaframe War series is an example of the Modern Epic. I.e. The individual vs a corrupt authority; with Star Wars, The Matrix, and The Hunger Games being exemplars of the Modern Epic genre.

The major character, Anton Slayne, like Luke Skywalker, Neo, and Katniss Everdeen is in a Maturation plot.

All of these characters have a "training montage," within their story where they explore and begin to master their skills, typically with a wise mentor.

For example, Neo vs Morpheus - Training Scene on youtube

I'm currently working on chapter two of A Traitor's War and a solid half of it is loaded with "training montage" scenes. I have three left (of fourteen) and I'm looking at them with a sceptical and jaundiced eye - they are just not interesting enough, and yet I sense there will be holes in the story if I simply take them out.

The problem is, those three scenes look like connective tissue, simply bridging from one scene to the next without vigorously moving the story forward.

And that's the last thing I need - clunky connective tissue gumming up the narrative flow, slowing the pace and generally stuffing things up.

I needed a solution. I needed something that would get the most out of these three scenes and make Chapter two work a lot harder than it was.

I was out walking the dog this morning, (I have a Labrador, German shorthaired pointer cross) and thinking about this problem, as you do, when I realised that one of the scenes, if it was in another characters POV (not Anton's) would provide an excellent way to foreshadow a latter scene in the same chapter.

Then it hit me, the other two scenes both required the voice of characters other than Anton Slayne.

Another problem that I was musing on, being the introduction and development of major, but secondary characters in A Traitor's War was also solved by this solution.

With one stone, I had killed two birds. Now I've got three scenes that work as well as the rest of the chapter, and a second chapter that works as hard as the first chapter.

All going well, chapter two will be complete by the end of this weekend.

Snap!