(no subject)
I think I'm dropping the "deathjournal" from my story.
Which is making me feel odd. It has been an integral part of it for so long.
Basically - at some point in the future, there will be a fad (brief, but very intense while it lasts) for people (especially the young) to write a deathjournal... thoughts and feelings that you want people to know after you've gone, so that loved ones - or not so loved ones! - can find out the truth about x incident, or what you really thought when they did y.
Uni student dies. He had had a major fall out with his mum, and they weren't speaking at the time.
Grief-stricken, she had to know if he had forgiven her. The fact that his deathjournal was missing - and then found to be unavailable for the moment, but would be at some point in the future - was the major motivation for her actions that were the main turning point of the book.
I think I've got other, more believable, motivations for her to take those actions.
It saves trying to make a plausible reason why she knows where it is but can't read it right now (originally there was dangerous information that cannot be made public NOW because of corrupt polititians, but too valuable to lose also in the book, so as an astrophysics PhD student who was involved in sending a probe to a comet, he hid it on board, where it would return X years later when political situation was better... I had it that he wasn't thinking necessarily too clearly when he did that! Plot twist was that it was returning sooner than expected, and to hide this fact, interested parties started bumping off astronomers... yeah, dropped the serial astronomer killer a while ago. Now it's one poltical lobbyist who is killed. Comet returning early wasn't a plausibility issue by the way - notable, yes, but having its orbit affected by some near miss while on its way back to the Oort cloud - really not impossible.)
It was one of the weak points of the plot, I think, because I was trying to explain why reasonably intelligent people did some really dumb things - which isn't so difficult! - but also why they reacted emotionally in certain ways that didn't convince me.
So I've dropped it.
I think.
It's proving emotionally difficult to let it go!
Which is making me feel odd. It has been an integral part of it for so long.
Basically - at some point in the future, there will be a fad (brief, but very intense while it lasts) for people (especially the young) to write a deathjournal... thoughts and feelings that you want people to know after you've gone, so that loved ones - or not so loved ones! - can find out the truth about x incident, or what you really thought when they did y.
Uni student dies. He had had a major fall out with his mum, and they weren't speaking at the time.
Grief-stricken, she had to know if he had forgiven her. The fact that his deathjournal was missing - and then found to be unavailable for the moment, but would be at some point in the future - was the major motivation for her actions that were the main turning point of the book.
I think I've got other, more believable, motivations for her to take those actions.
It saves trying to make a plausible reason why she knows where it is but can't read it right now (originally there was dangerous information that cannot be made public NOW because of corrupt polititians, but too valuable to lose also in the book, so as an astrophysics PhD student who was involved in sending a probe to a comet, he hid it on board, where it would return X years later when political situation was better... I had it that he wasn't thinking necessarily too clearly when he did that! Plot twist was that it was returning sooner than expected, and to hide this fact, interested parties started bumping off astronomers... yeah, dropped the serial astronomer killer a while ago. Now it's one poltical lobbyist who is killed. Comet returning early wasn't a plausibility issue by the way - notable, yes, but having its orbit affected by some near miss while on its way back to the Oort cloud - really not impossible.)
It was one of the weak points of the plot, I think, because I was trying to explain why reasonably intelligent people did some really dumb things - which isn't so difficult! - but also why they reacted emotionally in certain ways that didn't convince me.
So I've dropped it.
I think.
It's proving emotionally difficult to let it go!