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Apr. 18th, 2007 01:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienIn which I plot-noodle furiously.
OK, I admit it, I'm stuck. This is probably has a lot to do with being sleep-deprived, sniffly, and stuck on top of a high mountain with far too many people, but it may also be related to trying to write a complicated plot.
The story so far, roughly speaking:
Protagonist, has been working on a Super Sekrit Project for the President. (Not a real President. This is an alternate 1989 in which the Eastern Bloc may be crumbling but the real threat is from alien invasion.) He gets abducted, drugged, implanted with various devices, and appears on TV having ostensibly defected to an enemy power, but it turns out that he was actually in Oregon the whole time. He's recovered -- apparently thanks to some clever sound analysis, but in fact that's a set-up too, and the agents who debrief him are working for the real enemy -- and goes home to recuperate, whereupon he realizes that there's another implant, cunningly hidden in an old injury that's started acting up, and it's giving him morse-coded instructions to assassinate the Prez when he comes to inspect the Super Sekrit Project. Fortunately it wakes him up, so he realizes what's going on and briefs the President, and they agree to appear to go along with the plan in the hope of exposing the conspirators. (It's kind of dicey, though, because even though he realizes what's happening the conditioning is still having some effect.)
Now, this is where I'm stuck. One of the instructions was to trust a Secret Service agent wearing a green pin. Off-stage, they've been working with the Secret Service to make sure the President isn't in real danger -- so how come Agent Green Pin (whose part in the plot is, I think, to push the President onto the knife) doesn't know that the plot's been compromised? This would have to involve some last-minute substitution of agents on duty.
Also, I'm tempted to have the good guys (unbeknown to the protagonist) substitute a trick knife for the real one. There also have to be shots fired, and some kind of unmasking of the villain.
I'm reasonably sure that in the original conception, the good guys were not supposed to have figured out the plot in advance; however, they're too smart and got there ahead of me.
It doesn't sound too impossible when I lay it out like that, but the actual doing it is defeating me, because I'm insufficiently awake to move protagonist beyond the point of getting up on the fateful morning. (When he started contemplating going back to bed, last night, I realized I had to stop and go to bed myself.)
OK, I admit it, I'm stuck. This is probably has a lot to do with being sleep-deprived, sniffly, and stuck on top of a high mountain with far too many people, but it may also be related to trying to write a complicated plot.
The story so far, roughly speaking:
Protagonist, has been working on a Super Sekrit Project for the President. (Not a real President. This is an alternate 1989 in which the Eastern Bloc may be crumbling but the real threat is from alien invasion.) He gets abducted, drugged, implanted with various devices, and appears on TV having ostensibly defected to an enemy power, but it turns out that he was actually in Oregon the whole time. He's recovered -- apparently thanks to some clever sound analysis, but in fact that's a set-up too, and the agents who debrief him are working for the real enemy -- and goes home to recuperate, whereupon he realizes that there's another implant, cunningly hidden in an old injury that's started acting up, and it's giving him morse-coded instructions to assassinate the Prez when he comes to inspect the Super Sekrit Project. Fortunately it wakes him up, so he realizes what's going on and briefs the President, and they agree to appear to go along with the plan in the hope of exposing the conspirators. (It's kind of dicey, though, because even though he realizes what's happening the conditioning is still having some effect.)
Now, this is where I'm stuck. One of the instructions was to trust a Secret Service agent wearing a green pin. Off-stage, they've been working with the Secret Service to make sure the President isn't in real danger -- so how come Agent Green Pin (whose part in the plot is, I think, to push the President onto the knife) doesn't know that the plot's been compromised? This would have to involve some last-minute substitution of agents on duty.
Also, I'm tempted to have the good guys (unbeknown to the protagonist) substitute a trick knife for the real one. There also have to be shots fired, and some kind of unmasking of the villain.
I'm reasonably sure that in the original conception, the good guys were not supposed to have figured out the plot in advance; however, they're too smart and got there ahead of me.
It doesn't sound too impossible when I lay it out like that, but the actual doing it is defeating me, because I'm insufficiently awake to move protagonist beyond the point of getting up on the fateful morning. (When he started contemplating going back to bed, last night, I realized I had to stop and go to bed myself.)
