Welcome to this writing journey post! In previous posts in this series, I’ve gone from the first stories I started telling outside of school, to, in the four most recent ones, the behind the scenes story of my self-published books. I’ve covered from earliest memories to when I was fourteen.
This week we’re taking a break from my Diamond Dimensions Universe, and going back to Children of Shadows, the story I started when I was ten, that I’ve worked on sporadically over the years. The version I’m serialising here on Substack is the one I wrote when I was eighteen, combining extracts from the first version, and characters and idea from the version I wrote when I was fourteen.
In the Summer of 2016, I remember being on holiday somewhere without any Wi-Fi, so I spent a lot of time writing. I think I was having a break from novelising Dan’s videos, or had forgotten to download them to work from. Or, maybe I knew already then what I’d do for my Class 8 project.
At my school, Year 9 is known as Class 8 (which is 8th Grade in America), and during the first half of the year we work on projects in our spare time, building up to a presentation after the Christmas holiday (at least that’s how my class did it). We’re meant to learn a new skill and create a decorated project book about the process that we can then show off at tables in our hall after the presentations in the school theatre.
Anyway, what I started to do that Summer of 2016 was work on ‘updating’ Children of Shadows, ready to work into a playscript version. (It was almost cheating, choosing a form of writing as my ‘new skill’, but playwriting is different enough… right?). In the original version there was basically three characters, a boy and girl travelling from site to site, and an old man leading other men to find the one from his dreams.
This second version was when I first added some real characters for the man to interact with, George, Angela and their mother. In this non-script version, I only got as far as my father and I had three years before. I combined the paragraph-length ‘chapters’ of both of our versions into longer chapters, combining maybe three or four sections from either the boy or the man’s POV, using some of my father’s more poetic lines as chapter titles and recurring phrases in each chapter. I edited this version up until the boy and girl find a stream, not even actually the full extent of those original hand-written paragraphs I’ve talked about previously.
For the playscript though, I of course had to finish the story. George and Angela and their mother accompany the man and his unnamed companion for a while before thinking that it’s all a wild goose chase. I kept the boy and girl travelling from ancient site to ancient site (though a couple, a lightning-struck oak, a stream, are just mentioned), a stone circle and a man-made hill, where she does push him down. The man finds the boy and together they go to the crater, and the play ends similarly to how the novella I’m serialising ends…
But there were lots of elements that needed to be added for a novella version. And in this fourteen-year-old version the world was in a much worse state. Survivors were eating scraps in completely destroyed towns, and the boy and girl stay together for much longer than in the novella, their adventures are not just conveyed in the man’s dreams or visions…
Writing the playscript was also the time I came up with a real name for the main boy of the story! (If you’re following along the novella, you will find that out!).
Act 1 ends with the boy learning the way to the crater from a real magical stone circle, and the man finding the other half of the photo of him and his son. This was when that became a story concept actually, much more than the first version. I had plans to project the photo halves on the back of the school stage, if we ever did perform the whole thing…
Act 2 ends with the man and his companion with an awoken fallen boy. And Act 3, I won’t say, but it’s actually just one long scene. It’s a short playscript. Still, I learnt about the different sections of writing in a script, something that would help with screenwriting later, the idea of dialogue and stage direction, short descriptions that would lead to a lot of effort to create that imagery.
However, the script still wasn’t short enough to perform the whole thing. I didn’t like planning ahead, and most in my class weren’t exactly falling over themselves to volunteer for an extra play that year. I wanted to do more than just write it though. Maybe that seemed too easy. Sometime late 2016, we performed the first scene for a camera. It was my first time in a director’s - and I suppose a producer’s - hat(s). This was then projected for the presentation evening.
I ended up getting four and a half actors. (One dropped out - if you’re reading this, you know who you are!) Two girls in my class were doing projects that meant they could help out - photography and makeup. I’m very grateful for all of those that helped, including my class teacher and handwork teacher who provided the costumes for the children of shadows, and showed me the right shop in Brighton to buy some grey and golden yellow shawl-like fabric to use as shadowy auras for the children, and the glowing light for the main boy and girl. She made those too! I’m also very grateful that the actors and photographer have given me permission to share all this stuff today, almost seven years later. Fun fact, all of the actors are subscribed to this newsletter - apart from one, who will be soon ;)
Here’s a snippet of the first scene:
Those two children of shadows knocked it out of the park with simultaneous falling over! They just sort of it did it that good first time… (Their performance is certainly better than some of my dialogue. I tried to write for the stage, so characters have to say what they’re thinking, but…)
Maybe the full thing - I do have permission to share the full embarrassing 1 minute 43 seconds - could be a reward for paid subscribers, along with the original, second and playscript versions of Children of Shadows? And the whole project book? What do you think readers? Would that be something you’d be willing to pay for? (I’d have to brainstorm what else I could offer after getting through those documents - maybe access to my self-published omnibus volumes? Or excerpts from what I’m currently working on?)
Please leave a comment to let me know! Your support would mean the world to me!
The presentation in January of 2017 went really well, and it was a rewarding experience seeing that people who didn’t actually know me were interested in my writing, came to the stall and looked through my project book, and the printed script and unfinished version I had there too. Maybe it’ll be the origin story of a table I have at a con some day…
I’m going to share a string of photos of my project book and behind the scenes of our small production now:
Thank you so much for reading! This was a fun post to work on, and hopefully fun to read too. Thanks again to everyone involved in this project, including my ‘writing mentor’, whose also subscribed to this newsletter - hi! This playscript and project as a whole helped evolve the story as I was growing up, and the full-length novels I’ve written since may not have existed without it.
Next week, I’ll be talking about the next batch of books in my self-published universe, how my first short story collection started expanding that story world in many different directions.
(Remember to let me know what you think about paid subscriptions!)
Cheers,
Harvey
I love this. The kids falling over was perfect!