When I showed the first chapter to my wife, I was concerned that the first part of it didn’t have the punch I was looking for. I printed it up and gave it to her to read. Her first comment was the question: How long had he been sleep walking like this? I was stunned. The main character wakes up to a mauled deer next ot him, blood is on his hands and mouth and my wife wants to know how long this had been going on? To be honest, I had never really given that much consideration, since for me the story starts with the main character waking up next to the deer carcass. Her next question was: why didn’t he call the police? That question I could answer and did: he woke up next to a dead deer and he’s covered in blood. The police are the last thing he needs to worry about.

This brings up a point I would like to reiterate for all of our writers out there – your story doesn’t begin at the inciting incident, or even the first page. What happens before should be a part of your rough draft. Even if it’s in a vague ‘x happened to him’.

For me, this made me reconsider my main character’s history. How long had he been sleep walking? What have his parents done to mitigate this? What’s he doing now? Is it working? To answer the questions in order: since he was five, drugs and stress reduction, more drugs and hell, no – otherwise there would be no story.

I looked up drugs for sleep walkers. One of them is a well known anti-epileptic and anti-psychotic called clonazepam. I was curious about this, and a small idea started. What if the main character, a bona fide werewolf, was taking this drug for sleepwalking, but the sleepwalking was really him trying to turn into a wolf? Do his parents know this? No, when they see him sleepwalking, he’s on all fours, growling and snapping. They think he’s dreaming about something, but in reality, it’s the wolf trying to get out.

Fast forward to him being a grown-up. He takes clonazepam to control his sleep walking, but sometimes he forgets to take a dose. On most nights, nothing happens. When the moon is full, that’s when he changes and goes on a rampage. This is rare enough that Edgar (our MC) doesn’t make the connection to moon cycles and waking up in strange places, but it happens. He just thinks that he’s sleep walking. The deer represents a new level for him.

I looked up what would happen if he went cold turkey, and hoo boy, it is going to be a problem. Hallucinations, depression, anxiety and so much more for our hero. Most of which also happens with serial killers and the post-kill depression.

Now, this is Tribal I’m talking about, so one of the problems I had was that the political message of ‘how can an essentially good person get swept up in this?’ would get buried under an avalanche of ‘well, if he took his meds, none of this would have happened.’ I want to avoid that for obvious reasons.

Well, as it turns out – Edgar’s mentor, Jimmy, finds out that Edgar’s on anti-psychotics and tells him to get off them immediately. The doctor doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but Jimmy knows better because he’s had experience being a werewolf himself. Sound familiar? Turns out I can stay on message with this new wrinkle, after all. This makes me happy for obvious reasons. I just have to finish the second draft. The first one was horrible and I wrote myself into a corner. This one is much better.

That’s all I’ve got for now. I should have the second draft finished by the end of September and I am going to have it released next year. If any of my long suffering blog readers want to volunteer to be a beta reader, drop me a line. Ta-ta for now.