Right.
The idea is that John and Alex will stay together, so we cannot repeat the love-story-construction of Part I. Let's hope we'll get some mileage out of Alex's mysterious post-suicidal personality (he's suffering from serious amnesia, has no recollection of his personal past), and, in particular, out of his sexual ambiguity vis à vis John --- Alex had been informed of his homosexual orientation, more or less accepted the information, experimented a bit with straight sex, and is now living with an anxious John, a narrator who doesn't quite understand whether Alex is just trying to be nice to him, or trying to be a bit too nice. Ideally, Alex would have shed his depression but maintained most other parts of his personality, but that's perhaps too much to ask for, as John understands himself. From the point of view of the further story, Alex will have to walk a fine line between ignorance and insouciance.
Anyhow, bloodcurdlin' drama, blood, corpses, howls, tears, despair, etc, all this won't come from a chamber-drama about the understanding of misunderstandings between the two main characters. So we have to look elsewhere, and our first regard fell on vampires.
Lets hope we don't have to explain why.
So, it vampires, and now what? Vampires are not enough, of course, unless we are going to travel to fantasy land and introduce them as real characters, an option we weighed and dropped, not because we think it's silly, but because we don't write well-enough to pull it off. Okay, we also think it's silly, the main reason for bringing vampires up.
So our vampires won't be real, or they will be (real) in the sense of self-dramatization, role play, costumes, make-up, psychosis, or gift-shop dentures. Whence the idea of some sort of pageant that will elect a Miss Dracula, or King Dracula, or King Vampire, or whatever.
We've thought it a good idea to maintain a tight schedule on the time line; the first part covers a week, from one Sunday to the next, and the pace of the narration creates a certain sense of breathlessness which helps to maintain the tension and turn the pages. Accordingly, the second part shouldn't take more than a week either. So we could try to fill the week with an elimination contest along the lines of X-factor/BigBrother/Get-me-out-of-here histrionics, the vampires being this year's theme of the annual, tourist-attracting Georgia Beach Festival Week.
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| There's something undead about them, isn't it? |
Would-be Draculas will compete for the prize, and they need supporters to pull it off, there will be judges and a voting audience. So we are going to have tribes vying for resources and hence the classical setting for eccentric groups engaged in sectarian strife, preparing the ground for a Romeo-&Juliette dramette.
Now, one of the rules of erotic writing requires the simultaneous engagement minimally three senses, sounds, say, plus movements and smells, and along those lines we would like our tribes to differentiate along various axes in a multidimensional sectarian space, and we thought it a neat idea to complement the obvious dichotomies of fangs/no fangs, blood/no blood with some odder behavioral traits, whence our new interest in verse meters: one or two tribes will seek deeper identity in rhyme and rhythm. You, as a member of tribe X, will have to speak in a certain meter, or, perhaps, in Rap. This creates complications, and we can have a few people putting in a brilliant performance once is a while; if you have a whole day to write a few lines of Rap, they better be brilliant anyhow. Plus, littler kids will find it difficult to pull off, so there's fun in it for the whole family, including Shakespeare-loving grandfathers.
Continues here.
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