More about this first draft.
I wrote the entire first draft in 2009. You guys remember 2009 don't you? You remember the Great Recession? You remember all of the people laid off?
Well, I was one of them. Between the winter of 2008 and the Spring of 2012 I probably was out of work for five different stints or 16 months total.
By the way I'm back and I believe that the layoffs for me have now ended totally.
Anyway, back to 2009....
Man I was scared. For the first time in my adult life I really felt this job was over and my prospects of recovering my income and the life I'd built for my family were coming to an end. Listen, I don't want to disrespect what ANY of you may have experienced during the same time period. Some never recovered. I'm blessed. I know it. That's why I take care of my JOB when I'm on it.
Well while I waited for us to start back up, I wrote the first draft of Children in about six months, Once again, I'd played around with this storyline in my head for years, but finally I got it down and saved on my hard drive.
Real quick: I used the Snowflake Method for construction of the novel. Google it. I advice anyone who wants to write a novel to use it. It works. On the character side I leaned on a book by Orson Scottt Card called Character and Viewpoint. It's well worth the investment in terms of writing (hopefully) well rounded characters.
Anyway, writing Children helped me fight a depression I felt about myself and where my future was heading. I cried a lot writing that first draft. I was scared. I was moody. I was distant. But those scenes and those characters gave me something to focus a ton of bottled up anxiety I was feeling at that time.
It's a dark story. Really dark.
I incororporated a much bleaker economic endgame than the one we truly came through.
But people don't believe me when I say it's NOT about race.
It IS about people, and how terrible our individual decisions can affect others.
More later...
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