Okay, I've been going through the many chunks of feedback I've gotten on Alpha Slip and am slowly compiling a list of changes for the final draft. Since this is the one I want to be able to mail out to agents (hopefully by the end of June) I'm hoping to get it right first time. Yeah, I know that's a bit much, but a guy can dream, right?
Under the cut I've put the list of changes to be worked on so far, and I'm hoping that any folk who have already read Alpha Slip will take the time to click through and say yep, yep, yep, nope, yep, and then remind me of anything I missed. This isn't a scene-by-scene list, more of an overarching collection of all the big things that will influence the final draft.
If you haven't read Alpha Slip... don't click through. That would be silly. You'd just be spoiling it for yourself.
Massive, MASSIVE thanks to Nyss, Andy, Takyris, Munacra, Jojo, Charlie, Trevor, and at least eight others who have struggled through a messy, nasty first draft and given me some great advice. Much love.
Sure?
You SURE?
You really don't want to read this for yourself at some point without spoilers?
...
Well, okay.
Alpha Slip - Final Draft Changes
Punch up the opening scene/line.
Slow down opening chapter, introduce everyone properly. It’s not a race.
Scott should present a single personality at first. Define him properly.
Kick the description of Oxford and his death back to chap 1, before the meld.
Vice is boring as a protagonist. Doesn’t decide things on his own, isn’t very deductive, goes along with everybody else’s plan. Has few redeeming features and a few terrible ones.
1) Define his character to yourself a bit better. Find some eccentricities.
2) Find pivotal moments that make us love Vice. Remember his past!
3) Look at the main choices throughout the novel and make Vice the arbiter behind a few. Make him deductive as well. Constant confusion isn’t sexy.
4) Something must go stunningly right for Vice, where he exerts power over the meld. And yet, more instances of almost shutting down. Knife edge between brilliance and madness.
Need more student life, before the events of the novel. Show a student melding, maybe even a burnout recovery to foreshadow what will happen to Vice. Show the school years, the formative experiences of the group. We need to have Vice more involved in the pasts of his students, because they are the present. We need to see the months leading up to the final test, to cement their mistakes and fallability, and what will lead them into their dream careers. All of them ended up exactly where Vice thought they would. How coincidental!
State during previous melds that everything inside is, in some way, influenced by the outside. That dreams are reactive composites. Logical connections between events in a meld, things can’t simply occur.
Too much talking in early chapters. Cut a lot of it, make Vice and Julia a proactive team. Julia is the young, fearless one, pulling Vice back into a world he feels too old to inhabit. Make Julia drag him to the crime scene, do their own amateur investigation, get pulled too deep into the mess. This then gives the police a stronger reason to watch them.
Surveillance state – how can I make this relevant? The world of the meld is Vice’s creation. This is the world Vice feared would come, if not for the intervention of good men. If he hadn’t gone and hid, maybe he could have prevented things. Maybe he was in a key position, had the right ears, but he selfishly retreated into misery and thus things went bad. This is his fear for himself. Decide why he would have thought everything would have reached such a state.
The purposes of meld tech on a global scale must be explored, beyond the simple psyche good/police evil. Make lists of applications, explore!
Dates and time:
The dates must all be clear. We must know the war is real, and continues during the exam. Not just a figment.
We need some steady pulse of prediction, akin to THE STING, that relates back to Vice being trapped in the test. Not as cliché as “Wake uuuup,” but a recurring motif.
The stakes must always be real. We must feel Vice fight for his students. now the question is not whether he can live, because he's seen what his life is like, but whether he can get back and help change the future
Kill off the little secrets to support the big one. The 36th can be clarified very early through exposition, as can the refugee bombing. Make mysteries inside what is revealed. Whatever Vice knows, the reader must know.
Government agent sloppiness is bad. Police and Webcroft should be a tightly organised and terrifying threat. No holes in their plans.
China should influence the war somehow, push world politics more than a simple characterisation process. Must be related also to Mars.
We have multiple threads: The surveillance state, the murderer, the war, the melding. These need to be intertwined at all stages. The murder causes the surveillance; something Vice does must make him want to get rid of the surveillance; the surveillance was clearly caused by an event in the war, melding is a direct reaction to surveillance state… figure this out! All threads must link at all times.
If he isn’t going to somehow conquer the surveillance state, then it shouldn’t be that big of an issue.
No reason for Vice to run from the police after Buckley kills Fraser. This is the event that could save him, if he went to the police. So he needs an excellent reason to keep running. Vice must have more reasons to fear the police than a simple hatred of surveillance.
Make sure to not confuse dream Mitzey with real Mitzey. Sometimes real Mitzey talks! Whoops!
Recruiters would learn eventually that Vice has access to their feeds.
The Hare Krishna need to play a greater role in Vice’s development, and his solution to Buckley’s imprisonment in the meld. They can’t just be an escape clause.
- - -
More to come, with your help. Thanks!
3 Responses
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With regards to the "steady pulse of prediction:" it seems as though Vice's 'memory leaks' serve as one major clue that suggests that reality isn't what Vice is seeing. If I recall, there was a scene wherein Vice physically interacts with his dead dog, and it seems so real, but the experience fades when he jostles himself back into 'reality.' Or maybe I imagined that. Anyway, more like that could give that sort of faint impression that you're looking for. To me, this also comes out in Buckley's seemingly super-human abilities -- moving faster/quieter than he should, sending messages and taking lives while he's also apparently under surveillance, doing nothing. That sort of thing.
With regards to 'sloppy police and military' and other inconsistencies: perhaps at times, if Vice has expectations of luck being on his side, then maybe in his mind he might let the feds slip a little. But when he's not expecting any luck on his part, the feds' work should be immaculate.
There are a handful of instances of awkward language -- Ch14, 'solar plexus' where 'gut' would suffice; Ch13, 'anyone's' reads less awkward than 'anybodies' to my eyes; sex scenes in general, but good luck with that; American vs Australian English, as with 'bloody Democratic Great Britain' (unless that was intentionally jabbing at GB), or 'lorries' rather than 'trucks' or 'semis.'
On surveillance: Perhaps it is a cause that Vice once cared about but could not/did not dedicate himself to because he had other priorities, and his imagined escalation of that society may spark him to be more active about it in the future. Not that there's a whole lot of room to work with that, but it's a thought.
Meld tech: psychoanalytical use; recreational use (as a drug analog, as a means of acting out fantasies, as a means of reliving cherished moments, as a method of introspection), use as a sort of drawing board for projects in art, literature, technology, business; a replacement for the polygraph or other lie detectors; a means of holding certifiably private conversations (tie it in with surveillance!); something akin to virtual training for government agencies and armed forces; mental exercises for the cognitively impaired or the elderly to improve daily functioning, assisted by personal mental trainers. What will meld tech eventually evolve into, and who's working on it? Will there be some form of meld-based internet analog? What kinds of applications/program are being developed/have been developed for peoples' implants? What technologies have become obsolete because of meld tech?
I could say more but it's 2:30 AM and I have class in the morning, so I'll finish this up later.
Looks like a lot of work, but all those changes sound really promising! And hey, Vice wasn't a boring protagonist. He was a unique, multifaceted protagonist who, occasionally in the previous draft, behaved in a boring way.
Thanks Matt! I gotta say, your critique was so damn solid that it's been a major influence on the planning of the next draft. I might as well give you a credit on the cover.