29
2008
Writing Jump Leads
This blog post contains some spoilers for the second issue of Jump Leads, so if you haven’t read it yet I’d suggest not reading on. There are also potential spoilers for parts of the third season of Doctor Who so if you’re not up to speed with that show - no actual text, but some links to episode descriptions. If you don’t want those spoilt for you I’d advise against clicking those particular links - you’ll know ‘em when you see ‘em.
The script for second issue of Jump Leads went through a number of forms. Originally the story was about a space station with no power slowly descending into a sun. It wasn’t great stuff - Meaney and Llewellyn attempt to use power from the Flurry to restore power to the station and failed miserably, and it ends with the station crashing into the surface of the sun… which turns out to be a wormhole to a distant part of the galaxy. Meaney and Llewellyn then hop back into the Flurry without asking that all-important question, “What happens to the station next?”
It didn’t work for a great number of reasons, although elements of that original idea coincidentally made their way into two third-season Doctor Who episodes (the “crash into the sun” part was a core element of the story for “42” while the concept of using the main mode of transportation to restore power to a failing space thing popped up in “Utopia“). Putting a lot of the smaller problems aside for one moment, the big problem was the ending. It didn’t work. It was lazy and unsatisfactory and even though I’d finished that script and done two re-writes the story just felt wrong. So I did something I seldom do with completed scripts - I scrapped it, and started again.
Elements from that story, originally called “Some Like It Hot”, found their way into what became the second issue, “It Came From Space!“. The station’s crew - Tudyk, Anderson and Lloyd - remained pretty much as is, with the addition of over-zealous security officer Newman. Some other ideas found their way over quite nicely as well - Llewellyn deciding to abandon them after he writes off their scenario as a No Win carried over quite nicely, and the dialogue in the scene from “It Came From Space!” carried over quite well with some minor modifications.
Once again, though, I hit trouble with the ending. Meaney and Llewellyn get kitted up and storm their way to Command, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted them to find when they got there. I decided it’d be fun to have Tudyk talking to the alien casually, but why…? The axiom of “write what you know” came to mind, and one of the things I know about is historical re-enactment. Back in England, long before my Dad immigrated to the US, he was part of a Medieval re-enactment group. They’d go to all sorts of places - castles, parks, even zoos, and re-enact historic battles. My Dad tells me he gave it up when he moved to the US because American re-enactment groups choreograph everything, whereas in the UK it was all sort of done “on the night” as it were. He still has the suit of armour, though. Might even have some swords too.
This became the inspiration for that ending. I was happy with it. It made me smile, and I saw it as a very nice way to sort of throw a stick in the spokes of the cliché I found my characters stuck in (a scene deleted from the online version of the story has Llewellyn commenting that Anderson and Lloyd would probably start a romance as a result of the stressful circumstances). But even though I was satisfied with the ending, I began to worry - would potential readers find it equally satisfying? Would it be seen as a nice twist on an old classic, or as a lazy, half-written conclusion to a story that wasn’t going anywhere particularly unique?
I worried about this right up up to JjAR posting the relevant pages, and even past that. I’ve spent much of the past two weeks Googling for feedback. Turns out I didn’t have to - a number of people have emailed me to say that they loved this twist. One email from a gent named Tim described it as, “one of the freshest takes on an SF cliché I’ve read in a long time.” Both the story and JjAR’s typically incredible artwork have been almost unanimously praised, with only one real complaint so far - that coming from grumpy, ne’er-do-well Web Gorilla, SupSuper.
The last page of Issue #2 went up on Tuesday, and the full unabridged script is now online as an exclusive download for SoulGeek members. It’s been a long story (certainly longer than I would’ve liked but that’s my own fault) but now we can move on to something new and exciting - Issue #3, written by the esteemed Euan Mumford. Look forward to it.
