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Whaleboy
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Please make all cheques payable to Whaleboy
Jan 2003
time: 05:37
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Sorry I've been gone a while... work's been manic and my current novel's been keeping me occupied. However, I'm planning the next one. It's based around my school days... featuring Northampton School for Boys (or NSB), and it's plan to take over the world. General British anarchy/comedy. Don't ask how Socrate's and his desire for retribution comes into it  .
Check out a demo of the beginning...
Of all the winter nights to befall the streets of Northampton, this was surely the darkest. Impossibly large droplets of crystalline water fall from the Plutonian sky, landing thick upon the Earth like the blood of wounded Seraphim. The buildings and municipal tiles resound with the assault; a symphony rising in this dimly lit auditorium as rain pervades upon it.
A young man, his face partly shrouded by locks of saturated hair struggles to distinguish the murky light intended for the church clock across the road. Ten-past-eleven. The whistle of the bitter Northeasterly howling violently through the streets joins the drum of the rain, each gust drawing a curtain of water, whipping it against the road. Suddenly, with a ceremonious flicker, the streetlights and illumination from the nearby – and empty bars dies. The young man retrieves an ancient pocket-watch and shines a small flashlight upon it. Quickly he turns it off and withdraws back into obsidian oblivion to watch the distant lights of a taxi struggle to draw nearer at a snails pace for the rain and darkness.
Eleven-twenty. The taxi draws up to the side of the road. Inside, illuminated by the glow of his cab light the driver can be seen peering to the side intensely and awkwardly, fearing what may emerge from the pavement. Stepping forward once, the young man emerges from the darkness, his sodden features and heavy overcoat appearing ghostly and forlorn, though without a hint of necessity about his countenance he calmly sits on the back seat and utters a mere three letters.
The driver’s eyes widen instantly, his pupils dilating to make out a horror he had consigned to the invisible depths of his most tortured memory. With a flick of his wrist he locks all four doors. Horrors, whose angst tears at the walls of restraint within his core, acquiesce into a most terrible realisation; the tormented soul on his back seat wishes to return! With shaking hands and a profuse sweat upon his brow he drives, past the church and familiar buildings until the sanctity of St Giles Street is lost. Though the town is nestled in blackness barely comprehensible to open eyes, Billing Road seems somehow darker.
The limbs of trees, innocuous during the calm of daylight are thought by the driver to reach out like tentacles; harbingers of evil most surely since their malicious skyward dance can only reside in his mind. The young man relaxes contentedly, easing back while gazing out of the window, only to imagine what wonders may exist outside. He feels the weight of the package wrapped in an oilskin and the folds of his coat as the taxi ascends a small hill. They head east, the blackness so impermeable to the headlights that the young man insists the driver turns them off. The driver’s terror cuts like a blade through his rapid heart, and like an automaton at his passenger’s whim he complies without protest, for protest implies hope. Over the hum of the two-litre engine, the driver can be heard to sob quietly to himself, his suffering causing an invisible grin to appear on his passengers drying face.
“I can take you no further!” he blurts while pulling up not far past Cliftonville - not far past an easy escape. Though the roof is pelted from above, the taxi is subject to another vibration, the driver’s convulsions so violent that the passenger feels he speaks the truth. He taps the man on the shoulder causing him to jump further, and presses two soggy five-pound notes into his panicked hand.
“Please…. just… go!” screams the driver, viciously rapping at the money in his palm, the currency duly collected by the young man who walks nonchalantly forward, pausing only to laugh quietly at the screech of the taxi’s tires as it speeds back into town.
*****
The planning method for this is very cool. Previously I'd just evolved a plotline, adding characters and the like. Now I started by spending a day with a friend writing a dialogue, discussing elements randomly and noting down ideas like a brainstorm. Each of those I turned into a progression and linked together into one logical structure, which then, polished, becomes your master plan. Once you've got that you can essentially write from it and be creative and not have to think! 
Thoughts on the demo and the planning method?
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12-09-2005 00:57
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