I’m finishing up my “Three Weeks of Halloween” theme this week with the first book of my Intrepid Force series. Intrepid Force isn’t really a horror novel, but the first third takes place in October in New Orleans, and it does have gas lamps, old city atmosphere, a spooky cult and a cemetery full of the above-ground crypts New Orleans is known for. Picture those long October nights. Winds stir the leaves beneath the oaks and along the iron fences of the New Orleans Garden District. Old style trolleys rumble down metal tracks as flying hover cars zip past on the streets beyond their windows. You get the idea.
Intrepid Force is a product of my adolescence or, you might say, my long-extended adolescence. I wrote the first 32-page draft when I was a high school sophomore. Then I wrote a second that was over 100 pages. I didn’t finish either one, but they got me started. When I was a junior, I was the school’s reporter, and one of the teachers put me to work on my novel when I wasn’t writing for the school. Writing only 4-6 pages at a stretch, I wrote over 600 pages that year. It was a rambling mess, but it broke a kind of barrier for me. I wasn’t intimidated by the idea of writing a long book after that. I started college early after my junior year of high school and wrote the first complete draft of the book then. Then, my second year of college, I wrote a draft that had atmosphere and passion. I wrote a third draft when I was in graduate school, but it was the second I went back to years later when I wanted to get back to the “soul” of Intrepid Force.
Even though I wrote alone, I didn’t dream alone. I had two friends, Ivan and Kelly, who comprised my collaboration team. We dreamed up stories during our weekend adventures. I tell people Intrepid Force is a strange brew, and that’s quite true. Ivan and Kelly gave me suggestions, and I stuffed just about all of them into it. It was a lot of fun, but the plots in those early versions were tangled-up messes. For the later ones, I had to take a lot out or, at least, find a reason something might be in there. Even so, when I go back and read Intrepid Force, it’s kind of like looking at one of those old hand-stitched quilts in which every piece of cloth symbolizes something. This week, I’m going to unravel some of those inspirations or, at least, we’ll use them as jumping off points for this week’s writings.
P.S. If, at any time, you feel compelled to read Intrepid Force for yourself, it’s available at: https://www.amazon.com/Intrepid-Force-Timothy-D-Wise/dp/0972554904/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1509361367&sr=1-5