A View to a Kill

Person A is going to die.  That's always been on the table.

I'm talking about my current story-in-progress of course, Hair of the Throug that Bit Me.  Which, by the way, isn't probably a great title, as it has little to do with the actual story itself, other than the band Bitted Throug is in the story.  Anyway I managed to write a scene today, and I'm going to try and write one or two more before I go to bed, but first I want to talk about the story a bit, because it's complex and I don't know if I'm assembling it in a way that works.

Back to Person A, who dies.  Person B kills her.  Originally I was going to make that more of a surprise, but when I  wrote the last scene with both of them in it, and included the background information I'd discovered in Bitch regarding the legendary samurai Major Kushana, well, by the end of the scene it's probably pretty obvious that Person B is about to kill Person A.  Or at least planning to.

The story was never really a mystery anyway.  We're not here to solve the mystery of who did the murder.  But some misdirection is always a good thing, it keeps the story interesting.

Anyway, previous to that scene it was very clear that Iktome marine 1 and Iktome marine 2 were going to try and kill person A, and also that Person C would really like to see Person A killed.  So I was really working on trying to make it seem like one of them did it, when it was really Person B.

The scene I wrote today involved Person C.  He was supposed to go back to the ship and steal something, and if possible I wanted to write it as if he might have murdered Person A, or at least have him see the body but not make this immediately clear to the reader, or have them wonder who did it... but when last we saw Person C he was headed off to buy some drugs.  So I began the scene as he was still high and as the high was wearing off, and he wound up back near the ship.  My thought was, hey, he's crashing from the high, he's in pain, he realizes he has no money and no drugs and blames everything on Person A, and is planning to rob her but might be in a mood to actually kill her... and then I  thought, maybe he blacks out for part of the theft and doesn't know himself what he did.

That seemed like a good route to go, since I wanted it to not be clear what happened when he went back to the ship.  But I didn't like what I'd written so far.  Later in the day I went back to the start and rewrote the whole drug-induced dream sequence to cover the whole visit to the ship.  You're not sure if he's hallucinating that he visited the ship, or talked to anyone, or not.  But he wakes up and has the stolen object in his possession, and isn't even sure himself if he saw Person A dead, or maybe killed her, or what.

Generally I like this approach.  I'm just not sure if I like the finished scene, but the approach -- he goes back to the ship while high, you see things from his point of view, it's hard to know what really happened -- that seems like the best way to do it.

Now I think I have a problem in that it's been many scenes since Iktome marine 1 and 2 were dispatched to kill Person A, and while they probably fail to do so (because Person A is already dead), I want some scene in between where they're working on that goal -- but not one where they discover that Person A is dead.  My thought is, they wouldn't go to the ship to kill Person A, they'd wait for her to leave so they could ambush her on the station somewhere.  And when she doesn't leave, maybe they try to spy on the ship.  Or maybe they run across another member of the ship and question them?  But that would seem suspicious and stupid if they're trying to not be seen doing the murder.  However, if it's Person C, they're already friends with him, and if he's high, they might not get a lot of info out of him.

I dunno if that scene is needed or not.  It feels like something should go there -- that they should appear at some point between being dispatched to kill Person A and reporting back that Person A was already dead.  There's a lot of scenes in between, that's why it feels like an extra scene needs to be inserted.  At the same time, I want to get to the end of the story quickly, I don't want to drag it out.  By this point everything's in motion pretty much.

Well anyway, I don't know if rambling about it in my blog helps me figure anything out, so I guess I'll just write the extra scene and then decide later if it's really useful to have it.