Sabriya of Shenzhen - Journal Entry No. 5

So, I started writing. No so fast, Stan.

You may note in the poster to the right that the picture of Sabriya has changed and "Shanghai" has changed to "Shenzhen." More about that later.

The first scene of the first chapter (target 1,000 words) is suppose set the tone and location of the story in an omniscient voice. Per Journal Entry 4, Step A, I had long ago pre-visualized the setting. So, I stepped to B. and began the "objective or universal POV" of the location and tone.  This is what I came up with.

It was a wild boar snort before midnight, June 1995, when thirty-three thousand taxis and motorcycles jammed the streets, freeways and ferries of Hong Chi. The colorful conveyances shuttled high-maintenance women from the crowded luxury shops of Chao and responsible men from the financial district, back to their plastic kitchens and bamboo bedrooms in the banyan festooned foothills. Meanwhile, young couples, apparently without responsibilities and wardrobed similarly, flocked to the club district and its frolicking nightlife, and male tourists, who had long-ago shed their responsibilities, trooped to Qui Plaza’s red-light district where strumpets displayed their available assets for rent. Along the densely populated late-night streets wet and muggy from a late afternoon squall, the intoxicating mix of diesel exhaust and steam from foodie stalls hawking exotic stir-fries, kabobs and crepes, anesthetized the masses in their search for meaning.

EXCEPT,  I had put off committing to a specific (historic) place. I really didn't want to get tangled up in writing another long historical novel because getting the history right is always difficult.  "Hong Chi" sounded generic enough, and not like Bangkok or Hong Kong where I'd face the historical challenges of also including the local political reality that always seemed in flux. But I faced a dilemma. I didn't want the story to be so generic that the culture could not be clearly identified. The story is about human trafficking, so I stopped writing 500 words into the 1,000, and started to read (again) about human trafficking and organ harvesting in SE Asia. It became obvious that China was at the top of the list, not just because of independent gangs, but because in the far north-western autonomous region of Xinjiang there are reports of forced government organ harvesting of ethnic minorities.

Time and place are important elements to nail down, so I've made a working choice. 1995. SHENZHEN.  Shenzhen is the large, colorful, Chinese city adjacent to Hong Kong. Shenzhen is in the historically famous province of Guangdong, which was known as Canton where the Opium Wars took place along the Pearl River. I have read (twice) the non-fiction biography Canton Captain about Merchant Captain Robert Bennet Forbes (1804–1889) (written b y James B. Connolly). I was fascinated by the place and wanted that research effort to play into the Sabriya project. Another inadvertent piece of research is that we have a close aqutaintance that lives in China, who has visited Shenzhen, and worked for the UN on anti-human trafficking projects.

Finally, being a visual person, an knowing that early on in the manuscript I would need to physically describe my characters, and that ethnic background would play into those descriptions, I had to make decisions that pushed my desire to be generic off the table. 

Here are the steps I've taken in the last few days.

MAP

I created a map and identified the location of all the major scenes in the treatment. Google Maps is very helpful here, especially since all the locations identified in the map below (yellow dots) have photo galleries accessible on Good Maps. So, I can see what the land and buildings look like as photographed in the last few years. 

TIMELINE

Next, I had to nail down the historic events and ages of all the major characters in the story. The principal story takes place in 1995, before Hong Kong was handed over to the People's Republic of China (in 1997) marking the end of 156 years of British rule. For my story to work the United Kingdom still needs clout in China.  I've created timelines like this successfully in the past using Excel. The image below shows an expert of the Excel timeline for Sibriya's story. It lists the major characters and their ages corresponding to events in the plot beginning in 1979. The last row is 1995. I will add political and other events to this Excel file as needed. (Yes, there are multiple story events each year, here represented simply by the letters A through Q.)

CHARACTER BOARD

My character picture boards were created decades ago by cutting out images from magazines. Years ago I used pictures from Google Images (often celebrities dressed up for a movie character.) But this time around I used Microsoft Pilot AI. Here's the result. The prompts for creating these images include their ethnicity and ages. Of course, once I created these images based on ages and ethnicities, I had to change the poster. The previous Sabriya image looked too European to come from S.E Asia.

Let's see if now I can get back to writing ... although all the above is part of writing. Right?