(so what’s update #6
doing here after update #7?
I ska-rooed up,
dat’s wot hoppen…)

[previous]

Now to give them names and faces, histories and descriptions.

Creating characters is part art, part science, part inspiration.

When I was growing up, I read a lot of stories in Boy’s Life, the Boy Scout magazine.  Many of them were about plucky Boy Scouts[1] finding themselves in challenging situations where as luck would have it, their merit badge skills and knowledge came through to save the day.

I must’ve read dozens of these stories, and I can’t remember a one:
They all blend together in a blur of resolute young lads who
never had an ignoble thought or went to the bathroom.[2]

If my characters were going to be memorable,
the first thing I needed to do was to kill off all the good girls.

Nobody likes a goody-two-shoes (me, especially) and by making my girls
the losers,

the outcasts,

the problem cases

I ratchet up the stakes.

Logically there would be a supervising adult with them, one of the nuns, but my story couldn’t use a real authority figure, so I came up with Sister Agnes, a young novitiate who was an upperclassman when the other girls were freshmen.

She, too, had been a problem case and the other girls remember this and have a hard time taking her seriously.

A hard, hard time.

There’s no one way of creating a story, you don’t always start at one point and build out from there.  Once I had my basic idea and knew what type of characters I would be using, the next step was plotting the story out.

This story was going to be more picaresque than something with a more linear plot.[3] There were any number of things that could happen to the girls, so I drew up a list of all eventualities.

Soon they began organizing themselves:
These things could only happen while drifting at sea,
these would be items of immediate concern once they found land,
these were natural perils,
these were man-made.

And each idea had the potential for spinoff ideas:
The sister demands decorum from the girls, but it’s a desert island, how do you balance propriety with practicality?

[1]  Wow!  What are the odds of that!

[2]  Though they could, of course, dig a perfect field latrine and rig a rustic shower out of two saplings and an old bucket.

[3]  A mystery, for example, where each clue leads to the next.

(to be continued)

SAVAGE ANGELS — Update #1

[previous]

The ideas also dictated the size of the cast.  I started out with close to a dozen girls, bumping them off with drownings, sharks, suicide, infection, etc.

Hmmm, maybe too many deaths.
I want the story to have a semblance to reality,
but I want it to be upbeat as well.

More Googling, more research.  Combine incidents, offer less lethal outcomes.  The infection now becomes an acne-related cyst.[1] Draining that cyst now becomes a gross-but-funny scene.

And how do they sterilize it?
Well, turns out one of the
man-made complications
ties in with that, just how
I won’t reveal here.

This is one way of creating a story, following each idea through to its logical conclusion, then seeing how it connects.

Without the need to kill off as many characters,
my cast was soon whittled down to a core seven:
The novitiate and six students.

Already knew who Sister Agnes — “Aggie the Naggy” — was.
What about her charges?

Well, as stated, troublemakers, problems, losers.

One of them is the outcast Filipino girl.

She needs an antagonist, a petty little bigot, a bully.  Southerners of that era, I am sorry to say, were pretty open and upfront with their prejudices.  So we have one spoiled Southern belle in the crew.

All bullies have toadies, so give her an easily manipulated younger girl who views her with hero-worshipping eyes.

There’s the big fat girl nobody ever talks to, the one who does nothing but sit in the library and read and study and get straight A’s on her tests.[2]

We need a comic relief.  We’re going to get some laughs and smiles from all the others, but we need one who can always be relied on to say or do something to break then tension.

There’s an old British sit-com called Keeping Up Appearances about a social climbing middle class woman named Hyacinth Buckett (“Pronounced ‘Bouquet’!”) who drives everyone around her nuts with indefatigable attitude.  Okay, the social climbing is off-putting, but the indefatigable attitude that gets on everyone’s nerves is charming.  So we’ll add a Brit to the mix.

Finally, a character who at first seemed to be superfluous but whom I kept around simply because I needed one more player for the other characters to bounce off of.

When Savage Angels was being planned as a graphic novel, I really couldn’t find much use for her, but when it became a prose novel, suddenly she stepped forward as the narrator — and in retrospect, only she could be the narrator.

(I tend to do that a lot,
include characters and
incidents that seemingly
have little if any bearing
on the story only to later
realize they’re the lynch pin.)

Now that I had their types, I needed their personalities, their histories.

[1]  Acne is a severe problem for many Caucasians living in tropical climes.

[2]  And is her stock ever going to rise once the others realize she has knowledge that can keep them alive.

(to be continued)

SAVAGE ANGELS — Update #1

Found here.

[previous]

For their part, the girls would have no idea where they were and would take pains to hide from the Japanese.  No big distress signals, no bonfires, no visible signs of human habitation.

Reconnaissance aircraft flying over the island would see no signs of people and, since both sides had cracked the other’s codes, they would know there was no enemy interest in Bidney Island so the girls would remain relatively safe.

Relatively.

Who were these girls and how did they would get there?

Well, they couldn’t be from the mainland USA or even Hawaii, that would make no sense.  How in the world would they end up on the other side of the Pacific?

World tensions the way they were,
nobody would fly students into a hot spot,
they would be flying them out.

That meant they had to start in the Philippines and be heading south to safety in Australia.  And they had to fly:  An aircrew could get killed easily but on a sinking ship there would be at least one sailor assigned to look after them on a lifeboat.

So…what are these all-American girls doing in the Philippines?

Obviously the children of diplomats, trade managers, oil company executives, etc.  People of privilege who could afford to bring their families halfway around the world back in the 1930s.

The school would cater to that class of clientele, though as often the case, the nuns running the school would be using it to fund another school for needy children in a rundown Filipino only neighborhood.

The girls in the school would all be white Americans or Europeans, certainly all English-speaking.

There would be one Filipino girl among them, an outsider.

As war tensions ratcheted up, their parents evacuated them to Australia, youngest girls first, until only one planeload of girls in their mid-to-late teens was left.

That would be the flight that got shot down on December 7th, 1941 (yeah, yeah, I know, I know, when the Japanese attacked the Philippines it was December 8th because of the International Dateline; it’s called artistic license, folks).

(to be continued)

SAVAGE ANGELS — Update #1

Found at SnokieStories-dot-com.

[previous]

This is why Google was invented.  A quick search revealed that every island capable of hosting a permanent human settlement had a permanent human settlement.

But what exactly constitutes a “permanent” settlement?

The answer proved to be 30,
perhaps as few as two dozen,
but then things got precarious.

You see, a permanent settlement is one capable of producing a stable self-perpetuating population:  There are enough adult females producing enough children to replace those who die from old age, disease, or misadventure.

30 seems to be the golden number; any fewer than that and one run of bad luck wipes out your chances of staying abreast of the death rate.  Your population can’t reproduce fast enough, the old soon out number the young, and eventually you die out or get absorbed by a larger band.

There are numerous islands in the Pacific too small to support a village that could support a smaller band, say ten members or less.

Slowly, the island itself started to come into view.

Bidney Island (I named it after my aunt who gave me the Swiss Family Robinson book) needed to be small and isolated.  It couldn’t be part of a larger chain or archipelago or else natives might drop by on occasion.

No problem, there are lots of small atolls, reefs, and islands in the Pacific that the South Seas Islanders use as fishing camps, staying a few weeks or a few months then returning to their permanent villages.

Such an island could support six to ten people indefinitely.  And with two vast fleets roaming the Pacific in search on one another, there was precious little incentive for any long range fishing trips by the Polynesians.

To work it had be far enough away from Australia to not be part of their network of coast watchers (civilians and military personnel who stayed hidden but scanned the seas for signs of Japanese ship movements; see Father Goose, yet another schoolgirls-shipwrecked-on-a-desert-island story only with the added attraction of Cary Grant and Leslie Caron).

But that would mean the island could be a potential target for either side, which would bring the story to a screeching halt whoever found the girls.

So Bidney Island had to have no military value.  That required a small, shallow lagoon, too tiny for large ships to harbor in.  It couldn’t be a flat atoll but needed a big volcanic cone right in the middle of it, making it useless as an airfield.

That wouldn’t keep the combatants away forever,
but it would make Bidney Island a very low priority for both sides.

(to be continued)

SAVAGE ANGELS — Update #1

[previous]

As I said, I wanted my story to be easily relatable to contemporary readers.

A girl in 1812 inhabited a vastly different world technically and, as a result, culturally from a girl in 2012:
No cars, no airplanes, no supermarkets, no electricity, no TV, no Internet,  no telephones, no flush toilets.

But a girl on 1912 lives in a far more familiar culture:
Cars and planes (albeit primitive), electricity in most homes (ditto plumbing).  TV is still just a gleam in Philo Farnsworth’s eyes, but there are movies.  Radio is just beginning, but newspapers are linked by wire services.  No computers, but adding machines and typewriters exist so number pads and keyboards are everywhere.

And there are telephones.

Split the difference — 1962 — and not that much changes.  TV and radio, to be sure, but no Internet yet.  Still, most of the changes are in style and degrees; the world of 1962 is easily understandable to a reader in 2012.

Problem: You can’t lose a bunch of school kids in 1962, either.

Split the difference again — 1937 — and suddenly the solution presents itself.  World War Two, at least the Pacific portion of it, started December 7th, 1941.

Now we have a logical reason why no one comes looking for the girls:
All hell is breaking loose, and the loss of a handful of girls is just one more tragic drop in a bucket brimming with tears.

Problem: Every island worth fighting over was fought over.

This is why Google was invented.  A quick search revealed that every island capable of hosting a permanent human settlement had a permanent human settlement.

But what exactly constitutes a “permanent” settlement?

(to be continued)

SAVAGE ANGELS — Update #1

Found at SnokieStories-dot-com.

[previous]

Step one was determining who my characters were, which also meant determining when they lived.

I wanted them to be readily identifiable to my target audience (i.e., North American readers).  I have no problems re historical fiction, but I wanted my readers to feel familiar with my characters’ background so I could focus more tightly on the challenge of survival.

Problem:
It’s awfully hard to lose a bunch of school kids in the 21st century.

They will be missed, somebody will come looking for them.

In Lord Of The Flies, William Golding handled the issue by integrating it into the core of his story:  Though never stated explicitly, the world his boys inhabit is engulfed in a great apocalyptic war.  The insane evil of nuclear brinksmanship was reflected in the deterioration of his characters’ civilized behavior.

Exploring the morality of nuclear war was not my intent; I wanted a story focused on survival, not conflict.

(Besides, it’s one thing to crib
the idea of kids shipwrecked on an island;
lots of books, movies, and comics have done that.
Using those kids as a metaphor for the collapse of
modern civilization is exclusively Golding’s idea.)

I briefly toyed with the idea of a great natural or astronomical disaster but quickly passed on that; I couldn’t see how the story could not be about the disaster instead of the desert island fantasy.

I use “fantasy” advisedly.  There’s no magic in Savage Angels, everything is within the realm of the possible.  But the idea of the desert island as a new Eden, as a place to begin again, to somehow Get It Right This Time holds a fascinating allure to writers and readers.

Then I wondered, what am I thinking about when I say “contemporary”?

(to be continued)

I could backtrack a long ways to get to “the” origin of SAVAGE ANGELS, but let’s set our marker down here:

SERENITY started life as a monthly magazine concept; each issue would have a 45-page Serenity story, a couple of short stand alone stories, and an ongoing serial.

HITS & MISSES was supposed to be the first of those serials, Savage Angels was to be a follow-up.

Well, things changed.  Magazine publishing plunged into the toilet just as I started looking for partners so, finding no takers for a monthly mag, I went the original gn route.

…but that’s another story for another time.

Savage Angels came about during a long idea generating period where I was trying to come up with as many ideas as I could for the tween-to-teen / YA market (Angels is just the tip of the iceberg; wait till you see what we have on deck!).

I’ve always enjoyed shipwrecked-on-a-desert-island stories.  As a child, my grandmother and aunt gave me a wonderful slipcover edition of Swiss Family Robinson; I still have that book even though I almost read it to shreds while growing up.

And of course there’s the great-granddaddy of them all, Robinson Crusoe.

And Island Of The Blue Dolphins.

And even Gilligan’s Island.

And, probably most importantly re the origin of Savage Angels, Lord Of The Flies.

William Golding’s book is a harrowing tale of young boys stranded on an island descending into naked feral savagery.  It’s a kill-or-be-killed tale, and it does not offer a comforting view of humanity.

So I wondered, would the story have been any different if it was a group of girls, not boys?

…and the gears started turning.

(to be continued)