JeremyO

I would like to post the plotline for the first part of my book and get a critique. I'm going to affix the second chapter of the book, which I am having the most trouble with. I need to introduce certain elements of the story such as setting and some character building, but I'm afraid this second chapter is too bland. Not enough action to drive along.

Here's the plotline. (Based on a true autobiographical story.)

Chapter 1.
Flash forward / prologue: Jack encounters an ominous cloud which he believes is sent from God to kill him. He gets in his car and awaits the cloud.

Chapter 2.
He awakes and goes to school. His truck is described in detail as well as elements of small town life. Boring? Too much exposition?

Chapter 3. A humorous story about a teacher of his. Reveal characteristics of Jack's desires/wants. Story about teacher relates later in book.

Chapter 4. Jack is elected student council president after delivering a comical speech. High school.

Chapter 5. We meet Jack's love interest and cause for his manic depressive episode. Jack takes caffeine pills to stay awake for an acting competition in which Delia is his partner. They fail to make the final round and receive 7th place at the state championship. Jack feels responsible. He also turned her down earlier in the year to qualify for nationals in acting so that he could go in debate. He feels guilty. He starts to have feelings for Delia.

Chapter 6. He has a conversation with Madison, a girl 3 years older than him who is in college. He tells her of his woes and she comes on to him. He is so obsessed with Delia he shrugs her off.

Chapter 7. Nationals. He descends into mania -- manic euphoria -- narrative about sights in Baltimore and Washington DC

Chapter 8. Worst day of Jack's life. He finds out Delia had been raped by an ex boyfriend. Struggles to help friend who is hearing voices. Another friend has problems dealing with his father's vietnam experiences and a mutual friend who passed away in 5th grade.

Chapter 9. Jack, Delia, and friends camp out. Strange things start to happen that make Jack feel something is out to get them. They drive to one of the friends' cabin to spend the night.

Chapter 10. Jack confronts the cloud in the proper time in the story. It comes for him, passes over and 2 other clouds repeat. He is safe. He concludes that god wants him to live, but he is deeply changed and frightened.

Chapter 11. Jack's employer notices that Jack is acting weird and confronts him. Jack explodes, writes a long letter telling his employer (who is a close family friend) to screw off. The employer tells Jacks parents who schedule an appointment with a doctor.

Chapter 12. Jack goes to the hospital. He hates it. He makes it out and finds out he has bipolar disorder.

Chapter 13. Realizations, tie up loose ends. End part of Story.

Chapter 2 in its entirety so far.... It's mainly exposition. I think I need some action or something. What do you think of this kind of chapter that just introduces the character and places the setting?

Chapter 2: El Bestio Rojo. April 16, 1997.
The stereo exploded so loudly that Jack felt his body disconnect from him for an instant and jerk violently. On his alarm the night before, he programmed “Black Moon Creeping” by the Black Crowes to wake him up at precisely 8:00 a.m. School was in a half hour. The Black Crowes were one of his favorite bands. He always found it a strange coincidence that the name of his town and the band were one in the same. He lives in Black Crowe, Kansas.

A dirty southern rock harmonica introduced the tune, followed by a guitar interlude before the percussion and another guitar joined the fray. Chris Robinson’s voice nudged him.

“Sleeping eyes sleep awhile, and let me get to know your language.”

Jack liked the sound of that. He hated waking for school.

Robinson continued, “If I believe all I see, I would hate to be around for the dawn. Sleeping eyes stay awhile and give me some cause to rejoice. A parody of the scene where my three wishes were granted to me.”

The song then erupted with violence. Robinson, accompanied by a Southern church choir wailed, “What you got buried in your backyard? What secret do you sleep with when the black moon comes?” The chorus repeated.

Jack had no secrets to hide, and he had no real identification with the song. He just liked the tune. His life was simple. He was a good kid. His parents were proud of him, and his little brother worshipped him. He got along with his two twin sisters, and they were only a slight annoyance to him at times. He was a successful member of the debate and forensics team at his high school. He was smart, but he wasn’t a nerd. He had many friends, although he wasn’t among the most popular in the school. He was average in that respect. He had formed a friendly bond with many of his teachers at school, and most of them had nice things to say about him. He had everything going for him. In all respects, he was the perfect kid. But Jack doesn’t think so.

He stood at 6’3” tall, making him one of the tallest boys in the school. Unfortunately, he was rail thin and weighed only 155 pounds. This hampered his ability to play as a lineman on the football team, and though he enjoyed playing his freshman and sophomore years, he had quit his junior year to focus on debate. He was disgusted by the idea of playing junior varsity during his junior year. He found it humiliating. To his dismay most all of his friends played varsity. He had heart, but a 155 pound lineman is not very frightening or effective on the battlefield.

Jack had no girlfriend, although he would have liked one. He blamed it on his lack of athletic talent and his hideous truck, “El Bestio Rojo.” Both were simply an excuse for his lack of courage.

After Jack quickly showered and dressed, he headed out to El Bestio Rojo.

El bestio rojo was an 1981 150 Royal SE Dodge Ram. It was a large, standard cab pickup truck. The body of the truck was painted red, although 16 years of weathering was beginning to show. There was hardly any paint left on the hood and the top of the cab. A gray metallic color was beginning to shine through the evaporating red paint. Actually, most of the patches of paint on the hood and cab were a dull orange color rather than a bright fire engine red as they should have been.

Rust had overtaken the wheelwells of the truck. The front two hubcaps had been missing ever since his dad bought the truck. Jack had put the other two hubcaps on the back wheels because he thought they looked better balanced in that way. The rims on the front wheels were a faded and rust infested white color.

A year ago, Jack’s father bought the truck for $2000 from an old retired veteran in a neighboring town. His father bought the truck because the veteran had racked up only 50,000 miles. The truck was in fair condition when bought, if only displeasing to the eye. Jack considered himself lucky that his father bought him the truck, yet he longs for something better. Jack’s father made a decent salary as a chiropractor, but saw little practicality in buying him something nice at an age when many kids were reckless drivers. In addition, Jack’s father, who was poor as a teenager, felt that Jack should build some character by riding in the same kind of vehicle that he had when he was younger. Jack’s job, which is minimum wage, leaves him little opportunity to buy something himself.

In sum, Jack’s truck was an eyesore. Fortunately for Jack though, the truck was rather dependable. The engine was fine, and it only needed a small amount of coaxing and ritual from Jack to get started. The starter occasionally needed to be replaced due to the leaking of oil onto it, but that seemed a minor compensation for a working vehicle to Jack’s father.

Jack had fixed the truck up with some of his savings from his job at the art gallery. He installed a liner in the pickup bed, a plush red velour seat cover, new carpet, floormats, and an excellent sound system.

El Bestio Rojo was functional even if it is ugly. Jack found a name for it in his Spanish class. He figured “The Beast” was an excellent name, but thought it too generic. El Bestio Rojo translates into The Red Beast. He called his truck The Beast around most people, but he knew the true name. Jack was rather ashamed of his vehicle, and he assumed that no girl would want to go out on a date in it.

Jack climbed into the cab of El Bestio Rojo, hit the gas pedal slightly while turning the ignition, and sped off to school. As he headed down the road, he came upon a green sign denoting the population of Black Crowe: 2,254. The entire county ranked somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000. Black Crowe was a rural community settled by Germans. The town got its name from the town founders, James Black and Warren Crowe. They combined their names together to form the name of the town. They thought it fitting, since when combined, their names created something that seemed logical. Certain travelers from the interstate that passed through town mistook the town for Indian heritage. They mistook the origin of the name to be tied to the Blackfoot or Crow Indian tribes. They overlooked the e at the end of Crowe, which clearly signified the fact that it is derived from a common English name. Jack thought it amusing to tell the story.

Black Crowe was a small farming community, supported by the farming of wheat, corn, milo, and soybeans. At the end of the school day, the elementary and high school’s students were separated into “farm kids” and “city kids” so that the buses could pick up the farm kids from school early. The school consisted of roughly half and half.

Jack passed downtown, stopping for only two stop signs. There were no stop lights in the town.

The downtown lied in the town’s center. There were only four blocks in the downtown crisscrossing to form an X. The main feature was the courthouse, which had been standing since the founding of the town. It had been glorious in its heyday, with a victorian motif, but was remodeled and stripped of its former beauty. There were hundred year old trees and a well maintained lawn surrounding the courthouse. A soaring water tower stood in the courthouse lawn with the name of the town printed in big black letters. It could be seen from anywhere in the town. The law enforcement agency, with its many departments, sat north of the courthouse.

Black Crowe was a quiet town with little if any trouble. If there was any trouble, the local police force and sheriff’s department have ample officers to quell the upheaval. There were 10 officers on the police force and 12 officers in the sheriff’s department. This made for a ridiculously unnecessary amount of law enforcement. That’s not even considering the 6 highway patrolmen that called Black Crowe home. The favorite pasttime of the Sheriff’s men and the police force was to sit at particular points on the “drag strip” driven by high school students on Friday and Saturday nights and attempt to bust them for drinking or speeding. Breaking up high school parties was another of their many duties, whether it be in town, out of town, or even out of the county. The police had the city covered, the sheriff had the county covered, and if there was enough commotion about a party in another town, the highway patrol were called into service. Jack thought that these officers would do anything to make themselves feel important.

There were a number shops in the downtown area. The main
shops included two competing pharmacies, a donut shop for the old men to gather for coffee and tell stories, two banks, two grocery stores, a bar and grill, a general store, medical offices, and Jack’s father’s chiropractic clinic. The downtown was littered with six vacant, run-down buildings serving as constant reminders that the town was in a state of decay. There had once been over 3,500 residents of Black Crowe, but the decline of certain economic conditions and the capping of several oilfields sent residents packing. The buildings in the downtown all jutted up against eachother. There were only a handful of business outside the downtown area, consisting mainly of convenience stores, motels, and a couple of fast food restaurants.

Black Crowe, Kansas was the heart of America. Never mind New York City and Los Angeles. Never mind the city. Jack was shackled to small town life by the choice of his parents. He wanted desperately to live in the city, but this is his life, and he made the best of the situation.

He liked the fact that he could join any activity in his high school and participate without a tryout. Even if he wasn’t good at something, he still had the opportunity, and he liked that. Jack would come to appreciate small town life later in his life, but for now, he found it oppressive.

El Bestio Rojo settled in the parking lot of Jack’s school, and Jack flew out the door. “Crap, I’m late!” he mutters, “Elkins is going to be pissed.” He rushed to his locker, pulled out his books, and headed to Mr. Elkins’ class.

JeremyO

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