I have to admit – I wasn’t entirely sure of the plot in the beginning and looking back, it shows.
After thinking of various plots, the one I went with:
- Henry Alan Blythe is lead counsel for the Legion Corporation, secretly run by a board of dastardly vampires.
- Zombies can be created when a person a) drinks vampire blood and then b)dies. The vampire who supplied the blood can control the zombies (Blythe, here. Also, when he doesn’t control them, they’re just free range zombies who trudge around and bite at will)
- Doc Farraday has unwittingly sold an elixir that contains, among other things, vampire’s blood across the West.
- From Colorado onward, zombies have destroyed everything, and werwolves (allies to vampires) are herding them East…
- …to get on a train so they can be transported across the Mississippi and unloaded in the East, so they can cut a line of destruction and mayhem all the way to Washington, D.C.
- Slade, who never backs down and his deputy, Gunther, who makes a strong case for backing down, must stop this from happening…
- …and they’ll find out about it when the Buchanan Boys, fans of Doc’s elixir, get shot in a duel and become zombies
- And when Miss Bonnie’s saloon is blown up, creating more zombies.
- Blythe is an adept mastermind and the board should really sit back and enjoy his work.
- But Slade is resistant to glamour (vampire hypnosis). Vampires can look into most humans’ eyes, find out what they want and deliver a mental promise they’ll have it if they just do whatever the vampire wants them to do. But Slade has such little belief in “hope” that he can’t be exploited that way.
- Thus, the board thinks Slade has darkness in him and could be turned into an ally.
- Which is basically my way of explaining why Blythe doesn’t just shoot Gunther and Slade in the back of their heads and then take a nap 20 minutes into the story to begin with. He does want to, but he’s a good employee.
- A boy werewolf, who recently learned how to be a werewolf so he isn’t very good at it, will teach Slade and co all about vampires, werwolves, and zombies.
- SPOILER ALERT – Blythe has evil shenanigans planned vis a vis Slade’s two women, something evil in an attempt to make Slade so upset and angry he turns evil.
- SPOILER ALERT – And he has to stop the zombie train. While riding on Miles the Amateur Werewolf’s back as his furry steed so I can put it on the book cover.
- SPOILER ALERT – The West ends up “zombed” or full of zombie, thus giving me the chance to write more ridiculous sequels and maybe sell enough copies to treat myself to a night out at Applebees.
QUESTION – This is pretty much the dumbest thing ever written, right? Is any of this coming across to you as you read?
Should I just give up?
Bookshelf Battle 
DO NOT GIVE UP!
If you don’t believe your book, your reader won’t. Take your damn novel out to Applebees. Get to know it. Fall in love with it. Then finish it.
Eh it just there’s so much going on.
I think I do better writing first person where the narrator is the main character. The hard part there is you are limited to what the character saw or experienced around him.
Thus you can’t go into, say, what the villain is doing when the hero is not around, or what a character is doing when he is away from the narrator. All the action has to happen around the narrator.
But I feel like that makes it easier to describe whatever is going on, as long as you’re doing it how the narrator i.e. how that character would tell the story.
Sometimes I also just wonder if I’m better at writing funny posts, columns, observations, etc.
I don’t know. I assume someone would have told me this is unfixable garbage by now.
It’s not unfixable. have you consider a rotating first person point of view?
Yeesh I don’t know. There’d be so much rotation
you’d have to pick three or four main. More than that and third person is the only way to go. But I like the narrator/fourth wall flirting thing you have going to be honest.
You said you didn’t like it before. I’ve grown on you (like a fungus muah ha ha).
Fungus can be very useful. LOL
Here’s something I wrote in first person:
(Er, I meant to say here’s something Jake Dashing wrote in first person)
There’s a definite difference in flow, isn’t there?
Not the dumbest thing ever written. Did you ever see ‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’. Thanks for a look behind the curtain.
I did and I loved it…but he goes with a “this is so dumb its funny” approach. I’d like to do that myself but it is hard to do on paper and better in a movie.
Anyone that can make NPH crap in a hat…