I have decided to move my writing endeavors to a site more dedicated to writing and writers, in the hopes of connecting with other writers and gaining some visibility (this blog has a handful of page views today, but 99% of them are because this site tracks the blogger's own visits to his or her site). The new site is called wattpad.com, and while it seems to attract more of the fanfic crowd, there is a lot of other fiction being written there, and it supports serial publishing, which is something I was planning on doing here, so I think it will be good for me. I intend to keep posting here, about writing, books, and with links to my stories.
As such, I have begun posting chunks of a short story that I wrote years ago, and rewrote over the past week. You can start reading it here.
I actually don't remember what I called it originally - I think I had just titled it "Mike Rane" after the main character, though it's more likely I called it "Prize Fight" due to the climactic fight scene. I played around with "Journeyman" and "Gatekeeper" this time, the former because Mike is a journeyman boxer (and because at one point he runs away and goes on a journey) the latter because his final opponent might be a "gatekeeper" (a boxer who is almost, but not quite good enough to challenge for a title). In the end, "Journeyman" didn't feel right, and Ray Hamel isn't quite a gatekeeper. I settled on "Journey's End" because it played on the journeyman term, but also the finality of the story. It's also the title of a fantastic episode of Doctor Who.
Of course, the fact that it is the title of a fantastic episode of Doctor Who bothered me, so I changed it again, removing the apostrophe. "Journeys End". They do. All journeys end. The journey to the championship. The journey to professional boxing. The journey to find yourself. The journey of life. Also, while Mike is a journeyman, the story also follows the journeys of Marie, Gary, and even Paolo Glauben.
If you hadn't caught on by now, the story is about a boxer. Boxing is a sport as near and dear to my heart as Pluto is to Mercury. Yeah, I'm not a fan of boxing, but the story isn't about the fight, it's about the fighter. Mike Rane has a unique ability. He and his girlfriend Marie decide that he should use his ability to make some money, and he takes up boxing, with consequences neither could foresee.
My first version of this story featured Marie's younger sister Teresa, involved in drugs and prostitution, and Marie's and then Mike's efforts to save her after Marie dies. Mike agrees to fight the best heavyweight fighter in the world and give the millions he'll get to Teresa, hoping that if she doesn't have to worry about money, she can get away from the people taking advantage of her. It started with Mike climbing out of bed with Teresa; his relationship with Marie is told in flashbacks. Mike is depressed, Teresa doesn't like him (but he protects her, so she stays), and Gary Rodan, Mike's old manager tracks him down and asks him to fight again.
That story was very wordy, very melodramatic. Mike's solution to save Teresa was simplistic, and probably misguided. So, I cut most of that.
In the new version, there's no Teresa. I excised much of the dialog. Scenes become much shorter. My favorite change, though, is that the original was mostly flashback, told straight through, with the main fight interspersed, almost round-for-round. The new version intertwines everything much more intricately. The result is far less linear, and I think more kinetic. The story doesn't bog down in Rodan explaining Vegas and gambling to Mike, or Marie philosophizing about the honesty (or lack thereof) of using Mike's gift while keeping it a secret. Scenes play out around other scenes, basically telling three stories - at three points of Mike's life - all at once.
We learn about the incident in which Mike discovered his gift while we learn about Mike's early fights while we learn about the Ray Hamel fight.
It's risky, but hopefully people will get it, and hopefully it will resonate with them (first off, hopefully people will actually read it). I didn't set out to rewrite the story like this; I started writing the conversation with Marie, and realized that when she asked about how much Mike could take, that would be a good time to switch the scene. As I kept writing like this, I liked it. It reminds me of the way some comics are written - notably "Batman: Hush". The story deals with a string of crimes, but also flashes back to Bruce as a kid, when he hung out with a character introduced in the story. During the arc, he also flashes back to events that happened in earlier comics, as a way of giving background to readers who may not be familiar with the universe. The flashbacks happen throughout each issue, sometimes just a panel or two, and relate to or inform the current sequence. Hopefully I did this as well as they did.
To read Journeys End, Part 1 - The Rodent Returns, click here.
