A Reason For Blogging

I killed a bunch of people last night.  The body count isn’t in just yet, but it’s expected to reach four-hundred dead and two-hundred wounded.

Relax.  I finally finished a scene in my new book, A REASON FOR TERROR.   I’ve referred to the event in an earlier blog on research.  I dropped the giant jumbotron at the Wachovia Center in Philadelphia during a hockey game.  Actually, I was more creative than that. In order to max out the casualties, I severed two of the four cables during the singing of the National Anthem and let it swing above the crowd, then I severed the remaining two cables.  Otherwise, I would have only managed to kill a few hockey players.

This scene actually took months to write.  An enormous amount of research went into it AND a lot of imagination.  I really want the reader to loathe my antagonist, so I decided to break away from the main plot to build a very short scene and introduce a family. A family on their way to the hockey game. A family who will not be mentioned in the novel anymore, other than being a statistic.

As the actual event of the scene unfolds in the book, time slows down.  I take the reader, bit by bit through what in real time would last less than 15 seconds.  I use almost 1,000 words from the time the National Anthem starts to the time the singer reaches “The bombs bursting in air.” and the first cables are cut. 

Here is how the scene ends.

“Jeff instinctively threw his arms over his head and ducked as the cables whistled by. His eyes lost focus for a moment, before noticing the big jumbotron tilting and moving in an arc. It grew larger as it moved in what seemed to be slow motion. Moving closer, up and over him and his family. His legs were rooted in place as the shadow of the monster enveloped the section. The second muffled pop from above came before he thought to pray that the last two cables would hold, sinking his heart. Jeff’s last act was to throw his body over his twin sons.”

This scene is still a draft and will likely change before it goes to the publisher, but its a start.