Melding of the Minds

And we're back in the saddle.

Faced with our first truly creative sparring, Charlie and I went back into our corners, sulked, drank heavily, and came out fighting. The end result was a merging of ideas.

To go back to my earlier analogy: Charlie said "Flying saucers." I read that as "Aliens from outer space." Charlie meant "killer tea plates." We've now come back and totally agreed that it means "a bunch of mean, drunk (i.e. 'sauced') pilots."

OK, the analogy doesn't quite stretch, but what it means is we came to a really cool conclusion that wasn't what either one of us were pushing. So we're happy, moving forward, ordering matching his and his towels, etc.

Now, with a very nice set-up to go along with our killer premise, we need to fill in the details. Location. Characters. Etc. We know now what sort of evil we're dealing with, we've gone down that road and come out with motivation, surprises, history, methods, etc. We've crafted a very light, sketchy outline of the parameters of the story. Why this is happening here and now. Next, we create our good guys.

How are they going to overcome the evil that we've created in our little world?

We're still a long way from writing. A long way from the nitty-gritty. A long way from actually making things scary.

But the road is now a little easier to walk down.

First hurdle hurdled.