Outline 001

PHILIP BLACKWOOD MYSTERIES #1

Outline

Sc 01 - Prologue...

Sc 02 - ALEX agrees to do TIFFANI a favor an investigate the BRIMES Family's case.

Sc 03 - ALEX and TIFFANI meet with CARLTON BRIMES.  Carlton and Tiffani fill Alex in on the history of the case.

Sc 04 - ALEX explains to CARTON BRIMES (and TIFFANI) that it may not be possible to figure this case out.  We just don't know enough about the paranormal.  He tries not to get their hopes up.  But Carlton just really ants answers, and Tiffani believes in Alex's abilities (which is probably false hope, though Alex doesn't want to out-and-out tell her that).

Sc 05 - TIFFANI doesn't want to pressure ALEX to help the Brimes family, but he can tell she's forcing herself not to pressure him.

Sc 06 - First Investigation Begins: ALEX, TIFFANI and her team...

Sc 07 -
Sc 08 -
Sc 09 - ALEX isn't sure if either CARLTON BRIMES or BRITNEY BRIMES are sane... How can he fulfill his promise (to help them out) to Tiffani?

Sc 10 -
Sc 11 -
Sc 12 -
Sc 13 -
Sc 14 - Tiffani finds out that there was a low-rent apartment complex on the land for a couple of years before the land was bought by the Tiger Group out of Japan.

Sc 15 -
Sc 16 - ALEX believes the BRIMES House is haunted, and knows why the religious purifications didn't work!

Sc 17 -
Sc 18 -
Sc 19 -
Sc 20 -
Sc 21 -
Sc 22 -
Sc 23 - ALEX and TIFFANI learn that CARLTON BRIMES thinks that BRITNEY BRIMES accidentally scratched ARIEL BRIMES and he wants them off the case!

Sc 24 - This is ALEX's excuse to quite the case... But he can't.  He has to figure this out for his own reasons!

Sc 25 -
Sc 26 -
Sc 27 -
Sc 28 -
Sc 29 -
Sc 30 - ALEX knows that BRITNEY didn't accidentally scratch ARIEL!

Sc 31 -
Sc 32 -
Sc 33 -
Sc 34 -
Sc 35 -
Sc 36 -
Sc 37 - ALEX makes a deal with the ELEMENTAL: Inside belongs to the Brimmes family and outside belongs to the Elemental.

Sc 38 - ALEX explains to POE that he doesn't have to protect Doddy anymore, no one can hurt them where they are now.

Sc 39 - ALEX explains all.  The BRIMMES Family is safe here.

Sc 40 - TIFFANI and ALEX are having lunch to discuss how the Brimes family is doing now.  Tiffani asks Alex one final question about the Brimes case...

***

Okay, as straight-forward as this may look for a first stab at the outline, some of this needs explaining, as some of it was harder than it looks.

So I came up with the character of TIFFANI BELLE CRICHTON as a paranormal investigator who would urge Alex to look into this case.  Tifani is the leader of an Austin, TX paranormal investigation team (I didn't have a name for them yet) who has been trying to help out the poor Brimes family.

the reason "Tiffani" isn't "Tony" is painfully obvious: I might want to foster a romantic interest there.

In fact, the episode of CASTLE that I ganked this structure from is Season 6, episode 7, "Like Father Like Daughter".  In that episode ***SPOILERS*** Castle's daughter, Alexis, is deeply disappointed in his actions and his fatherhood has lost that sheen of magic and perfection that it had previously held for her.  For the first time ever (or, since we've been peeking in on the Castle family), Richard Castle appears to his daughter like a flawed, imperfect man.

Then this episode happens, and her idealistic need outweighs her sense of disillusionment (and maybe even betrayal), and she asks he pops for a favor... and IMPOSSIBLE favor.

Now, I knew going in that I couldn't deliver THESE emotional stakes.  I have spent 5 years watching the relationship between Richard and Alexis develop, and when she dresses him down at the end of the previous episode, my heart dropped like a bolder!

But F. Paul Wilson starts off his Repairman Jack series (THE TOMB, 1984) with a jilted romance that blossomed and then died before the first page of this first novel.  ***SPOILERS***  The romance then re-blossoms over the course of the first and following novels.

I didn't want to steal that particular character dynamic...but I wasn't above it, either.

I wanted my options open.

Maybe Alex and Tiffani have some history, and his desire to attract her (or win her back) might be good motivation for him taking a paranormal case when he's desperately trying to get out of the professional paranormal game.  he want's to be a LEGITIMATE journalist, dammit!  He wants to be taken seriously!  This paranormal stuff just keeps dragging him back down!

Alex needs proper motivation to investigate a paranormal case, and the Reader needs to be invested in his investigation.

Also, Scene 1...

It just says "Prologue".

This may actually be the last thing I came up with for "001".

With every project I have begun in the last 2 years I have dedicated a 100-page, wide-ruled Composition book.  This is where I write general notes about the project.  Sometimes these notes are bits of dialog, sometimes they're character descriptions, sometimes they're doodles, and sometimes they are complete scenes.

I got this inspiration one night at work, when most of this outline was filled in as you see it above, that would be a PERFECT "James Bond"/"Indiana Jones" Open...

---

BRITNEY BRIMES (25) is in the kitchen and sees a LITTLE BOY out of the corner of her eye.  She doesn't hear anything, just turns to see the boy running out of the kitchen.

Britney follows the boy, but he's not in the living room.  She walks on to the storage room, and finds the Little Boy standing there, staring at her, looking unhappy.  She tells him she's seen the little girl, but never seen him.  The Little Boy doesn't answer.

Does he know the little girl?  Is he is her friend?

The Little Boy says, "I'm not a boy," his voice deepens, his eyes become dark sockets, and he morphs, "I'm the Debbul."

Britney screams and flees.

---

Actually, this requires a bit more explanation...

See, I was using HOW TO WRITE A DAMN GOOD MYSTERY NOVEL: A PRACTICAL STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE FROM INSPIRATION TO FINISHED MANUSCRIPT by James N. Frey.

I TOTALLY recommend it, by the way!  EXCELLENT book for first-time novelists!

Frey lays out this process of writing Character Biographies and the like that can easily take an aspiring writer from having no story AT ALL to having the strong beginnings of a story, and then developing it into a full-fledged novel!

An EXCELLENT work!

But I have been a follower of John Vorhaus since the 1990s, and Vorhaus has a different approach: Come up with a character, and force him to cross the road to learn more about him.

This is an over-simplification, of course, but the basic idea is that you can learn more by simply writing your character in action than you can with the most in-depth of character bios.

But when I started this novel, I was still following Frey's advice a bit.  I decided that if I was going to have a couple of ghosts, I should know who they were and how they came to be ghosts.

So one day, in my Norcom Composition notebook dedicated to this novel, I created who these kids were in like and what lead to their death and why they are so perplexing as ghosts.  (Remember that the premise for my Paranormal Mystery series is that these paranormal phenomena will look to regular investigators like one thing but Alex will figure out that they are something else.  A coupe of something elses, actually.)

So I created the story of 7-year-old Dorthy "Doddy" Roberts and her 5 year-old brother Paul "Poe" Roberts.

I created an unstable, young, lower-class mother and a no-good father, and circumstances that lead to the father leaving the mother and the mother (drama-queen and drunkard that she is) accidentally killing her kids.  (I say "accidentally", but she did it on purpose; she wouldn't have if she were sober, but sobriety wasn't part of her lifestyle.)

Based on an actual haunting (I heard about on a Spooky Southcoast or Darkness Radio podcast), I decided that the younger brother, in death, would try his naive best to protect his slightly older sister, even though they are already ghosts.

Good story, right?

Better still, a little boy's spirit can do things that the little boy could only imagine while he was alive!  He can change his apparent form, change the sound of his voice, he can come off as a demon from Hell to a suburban family who have never seen a ghost before!

And going off other real-life reports, I figured that Doddy would be very friendly and talkative (as much as she is able) to the Brimes family, and any investigators they might let into their home.

So you have a nice, friendly little girl ghost -- who provides plenty of "evidence" for paranormal investigators to capture -- and a sullen, defensive little boy ghost who can make himself look and sound like the Devil himself.

I'm also playing on another, more subtle aspect of paranormal investigation:

Fundamentalist Christians keep telling us that what we're interacting with aren't the ghosts of the deceased -- because all those spirits get stored up somewhere until Jesus walks the Earth again, at which time the corpses will burst out of the graves and the Chosen will ascend to Heaven -- but demons in disguise.  They warn us that demons are patient, and even what we think are the spirits of deceased, innocent little girls are really demons pretending to be those little girls, waiting until we make ourselves vulnerable to devour our soul.

No disrespect to the Christian faith, though I have my doubts about certain aspects of fundamentalist Christianity.  (I am a big fan of Jesus and His teachings, but I have my doubts about the infallibility of the Bible itself as the one-and-only message from God to humanity.)

So in this Cold Open, if you will, I am directly playing upon a certain fear of a certain belief-system within the paranormal community.

I want to muddy the waters as much as possible right at the beginning.  I want every Reader to bring as much of their own personal baggage as they choose to!  This is my first novel; I want to capture as many readers as possible!

Now, the way the first novel is going to play out, Alex (and me) is much more open-minded toward the paranormal, and so his conclusion (and mine) is not so fire-and-brimstone.  But the point of this series (if it becomes a series) is o challenge what we THINK we know about the paranormal, and hopefully get us talking about the subject in more open forums.

There is something going on out there, and dogmatic worldviews -- be they religious or scientific -- have prevented an open discussion.  Not every culture is like this, and ours doesn't have to be.

End of sermon.

But I wanted to point out how my personal knowledge of the paranormal field provided me the "happy accident" of creating on a much more subtle level than I could have done intentionally. If a film production company bought the rights to adapt my novel and wanted to take out that first scene, I would fight strenuously to keep it in because it accomplishes much more than it, at first glance, seems.

Moving on...

Okay, the rest of the outline seems pretty self-explanatory.

It's worth explaining that while ghost hunters don't believe in Bigfoot and Crptozoologists don't believe in UFOs, NOBODY is willing to talk about fairies (known to a few open-minded researchers as "elementals").  Fairies just  too much pop culture stigma.  Ask a random person what a fairy is and he/she will describe Tinker Bell; but fairies can be tall or short, positive or malign, gorgeous or horrifying.

And if you do your paranormal due diligence, there is actually no reason to discount them as purely folklore or "superstition".  Respected paranormal researchers have encountered fairies, and "elementals" might explain some paranormal phenomena that doesn't fit into the standard Residual Haunt, Intelligent Haunt, Poltergeist, or Demonic classifications.

My goal with this series is to (hopefully) get people thinking about the paranormal in a new way.  And I want to give them a platform from which they can do that.  I mean, "muggle" is a word now!  It means more than "non-magical human"!  It has developed its own nuance!  If I'm lucky believers and non-believers will be able to reference these stories as an entry way for more deep debates about the paranormal.

That's if I'm REALLY lucky.

If I'm only slightly lucky, then I'll merely redefine the role of the paranormal as it's written by Fantasy authors.

And, of course, if I'm not lucky, no one will read these novels, or this blog.

;)