Murder

Firstly, I will take your praise for not titling this post, “Murder, He Wrote.” I also could’ve gone with the much gayer, “Murder, She Wrote,” but my queer powers are at their nadir. Something to do with the moon or fucking Trump or having worked sixty hours this week. Probably all three.

Murder is on my mind because one of my characters has to die. There is no way around this. His death will be the pivot point of the main character’s turn. If he doesn’t die, the characters will just shrug at me and say, “Guess we’re done here,” and walk off the page. “Really?” the protagonist will say. “Fuck you, Gideon.” No. Saving him will not do.

But it’s what I want. I have fallen in love with the fella in question, the target, the victim of my literary violence. He’s still a bit of a mystery, and some of that is yet to unfold. There’s quite a ways to go before I have to bump him off. Before then, he’ll reveal himself. In the revealing, those around him will fall in different varieties of love with him. He, too, will fall in love.

Then, I will take all of this beauty away from everyone. With a few ugly sentences, I will end his life and begin some true chaos. The aftermath, I know, will be even less pretty. My violence will beget fictional violence. It needs to be so. The protagonist can’t get from A to Z without walking through the rest of the alphabet. And we need him to get to Z, even if it’s painful. For him and for us. Z is where he becomes a hero. Z is where he saves his world.

He’ll still say, “Fuck you, Gideon.” He’ll say and do much worse than that, I’m afraid. It will hurt, but my pain’s necessary, too. It’s the price I pay for this story.

So, here I go, writing my way from B to Y, knowing that when I get to about P, I’ll have to murder a friend.

PHOTO: Stabby guy, with thanks to PublicDomainPictures, an artist at Pixabay.

PROGRESS REPORT: I have written 52,200 words of this first draft. Many of them will later be cut. We are definitely in the second half of the book now. The stakes are higher and the writing is both more challenging and more enjoyable. This is turning out to be a fantastic experience on more levels than I can count.