Writing Helloween Thirteen (Pt. 1)

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Helloween Thirteen is meant to be a summation of the whole Ecto Series. If you look at book 1 and book 4 side by side, you'll see two wildly different worlds, geographically, technologically and sociopolitically. The main characters are different, not just different characters but they've also changed as individuals over time. It has elements of all of the past titles. Nirvana, killer robots, mischievous children, the katana, almost getting arrested in a cemetery, return of an old antagonist and the result of a story arc that started back in book one and went on behind the scenes, bringing everything full circle.  

This was by a large degree the most difficult book in the series to write. By design many of the chapters had to be treated as little stories within the whole that required there own plot development and setting. On top of that, there are three different perspectives/story lines, (sometimes more,) that intertwine through all of this and somehow need to flow together and not step on each other's toes. I have an extreme fear of plot holes and loss of continuity in the story or any of the rules I've established for the world. I can become fixated and obsessed with stupid minutia like how well known should movies from before the Great Outbreak be, are there safety barriers and security that make it impossible for people to run onto the subway tracks and can an advanced four-year-old really draw that well? In this situation it was easy to screw something up if I wasn't paying very close attention to everything. I've already said that I don't make outlines for stories and just write from start to finish what's in my brain but this time was going to have to be different. Things got hard and I took a long hiatus. Eventually I realized that I just needed to make a timeline of events so that I could keep everything straight and stop getting lost.

Even while writing the train fight scene in the first book I was wondering what was going to happen to the clones after everything was said and done. What a strange existence they'd have. The end of the train fight was left open ended in that the reader knows that at least one of these clones survives. I wrote it this way just in case I wanted to revisit it later but at the same time if I didn't do anything with it, it wouldn't leave a gaping hole in the story.

The story is set in New Chicago which is of course a new iteration of the Chicago Illinois that everyone knows. It was where the final battle took place in the end of the first book. I like the idea of going back to it and showing that it has a little bit of post war/battle affluence. Many writers like to use locations that they've lived in and are familiar with. I don't. Unfortunately the only alternative to that is using somewhere you're unfamiliar with. I don't really know much about Chicago other than the interior of O'Hare National Airport. If I was going to use more or less a real city with a mandatory site seeing aspect as a plot vehicle, I needed to do some research on it.

You can always bet on any large city having zoos and parks but what about iconic natural or man-made landmarks like the Chicago River or the Sears Tower. I need to know specific things about them if I'm to use them. For one it would be good to know that the Sears Tower isn't called the "Sears Tower" anymore. When did this happen? I didn't know that. It's the Willis Tower now. I decided instead of specifically using the tower, I'd sort of reference it in a parody type skyscraper.

When I checked to make sure that Chicago had a river running through it, I got completely distracted by how unnaturally green the Chicago River is. It's seriously the same hue as radioactive Nickelodeon slime. It's completely bizarre. I would NOT want to go swimming in it.

The last checkpoint challenge that I wrote was the buried treasure in the sand one. The rest of the story was more or less done except for this single challenge. I was really struggling to come up with a setting and concept new to the game. (That's what I wanted for each one of them.) I actually went to a Chicago tourism website for ideas. When I saw a picture of the Oak Street Beach, I knew that was the ticket.

When I came to the ending of Helloween Thirteen, I realized that it wasn't just the end of this book but also the end of the series. Assuming that nothing else was written after it like I'm planning, I needed to sort of sum everything up and end with the correct mood or lasting impression that I wanted. I couldn't leave things open or awkwardly unsure like in A Fistful of Ether. Part of the reason was that even with everything more or less ending well, this was still an incredibly dark book with some very ominous implications. Is this finally the last apocalyptic disaster that these characters have to face? Even if it's not, I still wanted this family to have an established sense of perseverance and an aura of invincibility.