I toyed with posting a section here as an example but I think I'd prefer to finish the thing and do a second draft before I show just how unready for reading this thing is.













As it turned out, Vinnie's meeting with Claire (the aforementioned ingenue) became one massively long scene, the longest I've ever written as continuous prose. It covered around twelve hours from their first meeting and most of it was conversation and interaction (with a couple of monster attacks). When I read it back it was clear that I needed to intercut it with some other stuff, including some actual events and something that didn't require the reader to go to page 40 before any threat appeared.

I therefore did what I tend to do with Untold Tales with this problem and intercut another narrative where the major threat unfolded, so there's two stories going that eventually crash together. Inevitably the non-Vinnie strand is a bit darker than the Vinnie one, not least because the only surviving protagonist in it so far is Tanner.

When I'm a bit further in I'll have to check that the two strands don't have incompatable tones.




Actually, Buffy's not a bad tone example to aspire to for this.







That's the big problem I have to face. I think probably Vinnie's "unique selling point" is the weird Addams-family type world he dwells in, complete with scholar ghouls and unpleasant relatives and werewolf guilds and the whole underworld infrastructure. Without that he's a bit generic really. So while I want to avoid a huge info-dump and lumping so much in there that suspension of disbelief becomes impossible I also want to stick with what makes Vinnie interesting to me.

You've pinpointed one of the areas I'm struggling with though.