Sabriya's Hope Writing Journal No. 15

 

Scenes/Beats for Final Battle of Sabriya's Hope

I'm finally there, at the granular level, not the structural or plot level, for the final chapter of Sabriya's Hope.

Although the online serialization of Sabriya's Hope is current at Chapter 22, it's only halfway through the novel. There are about 23 more chapters...depending on how I parse what is written. All of the chapters are written (or I should say drafted) except the Final Battle, which may stretch into 2 chapters. 

In the final battle (charted above), I need to resolve about 12 subplots; a few require only 1 beat to resolve. Of course, Sabriya's character's final resolution requires eight beats.  The challenge is how to do that efficiently so the reader can follow the action, much of which is simultaneous. 

My solution was to create one e-card for each beat of each of the 12 subplots on a Keynote slide. I DID NOT know what order the e-cards (and beats) should be in when I started, but as I created them, I placed them approximately in sequence from left (beginning) to right (end).

Then I had to sit back and try to envision the characters' entrances and exits, what happens to each, and move the cards around until I felt good about the action sequence as it would be explained in words. When I was done, I had 9 scenes (each bounded by a green box above).

Starting tomorrow (April 10, 2026), I will begin writing words and full sentences (not outlines). As I write, I'll decide which beats in each scene to describe first, second, etc., and then figure out the transition to the next scene. 

This will take several days, a lot of word-smithing, and many on-the-fly revisions. It may be 4,000+ words and need 2 chapters. Then I 'll let it sit for a day and come back and try to make the sentences more fluid, eliminating repetitive words, and working on ending sequences with emphatic (hooking) action. I will use One-Look Thesaurus extensively. 

SABRIYA Writing Journal 5: Starting to Write

So, I started writing. Not 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 supposed to set the tone and location of the story in an omniscient voice. According to Journal Entry 4, Step A, I had long 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 dressed 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 food 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 lengthy historical novel, because getting the history right is always challenging.  "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 apparent 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 essential elements to nail down, so I've made a working choice. 1995. SHENZHEN.  Shenzhen is a large, colorful Chinese city adjacent to Hong Kong. Shenzhen is located in the historically famous province of Guangdong, formerly 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 by 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 acquaintance who lives in China, who has visited Shenzhen and worked for the UN on anti-human trafficking projects.

Finally, as a visual person, I knew that I would need to physically describe my characters early on in the manuscript, and that their ethnic background would play a role in those descriptions. This realization led me to make decisions that pushed my desire for a generic approach 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 Google Maps. So, I can see what the land and buildings look like as they have been 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 example of the Excel timeline for Sibriya's story. It lists the central 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 the ethnicity and age of the individuals. Of course, once I made these images based on age and ethnicity, I had to update the poster. The previous Sabriya image looked too European to come from S.E Asia.

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

Creating Accurate Road Maps

I'm writing a story. It's a novel based on a screenplay based on a legend based on a ream of historical documents and letters. It's rich. It's about Early America and includes events like the New Orleans fire in 1788 and the Ratification of the U.S. Constitution that same year.

There's a sea voyage from New Orleans, to Philadelphia, and a covered wagon journey from York, PA to Charlestown, VA (now WV) and there is a dangerous ferry crossing at Harpers Ferry, MD when John Harper actually operated the ferry. The story is filled with political giants (Washington, Jefferson, Franklyn and the Carroll clan) and there are bigoted immigrants, religious zealots, and an unconventional slavery abolitionist.

This week I'm trying to write about the segment of the journey that takes place along 100 miles of frontier road from York to Charlestown. There's a covered farm wagon pulled by two huge conestoga horses named (Calvin and Luther), and two conestoga freight wagons pulled by two teams of four mules driven by teamsters (the predecessors of today's Teamsters).  Tied to the back of the various wagons are four smaller horses and a dairy cow.

There was research about covered wagons, farming, and money. Did you know the conestoga freight wagons were built to ford rivers and streams so the stuff inside stayed dry? This was four years before the 1792 U.S. Coinage Act, so there were some 12 different coinages in circulation all minted in different countries? The Spanish 2-escudo gold doubloon was the most popular.  And a Spanish piece-of-eight (of pirate lore) was used in trade. Very confusing when you wanted to buy something. I had to build am Excel conversion table to keep it all straight.

But what was the trip like from York to Charlestown like in early October 1788? There there many creeks to ford in early October. Did you know few traveled long distances in the spring because the roads were too muddy, and the summer was too hot. So most travel was done in the fall and winter.

I needed to construct a map for the journey, so I could name the towns (if they were around back then). And what about water crossings, and mountains? Was there a road that avoided the mountains, like through a pass?

I tired using Google Maps, which you see below. The problem with Google Maps is that the route you want to trace will only follow existing roads today. And it's hard to see elevations on Google. So, I looked up the cities and towns along the way. Most had elevations listed...but they weren't for the roads, but for hill peaks and airports. This was useful, but there was no real contour information that covered wagons might encounter.

I then found two free resources that were much better than Google Maps. The first was TopoQuest.com. It provided a lot of information and I was able to see where the common roads found their way around hills and between mountain peaks.  See below for Harpers Ferry You can easily read the topographical lines and elevations and where the roads (today) are. There are also labels and the location of actual buildings (at the time of the map's creation).

But the cleanest is at https://viewer.nationalmap.gov/advanced-viewer/
This is the United States Geological Survey site for the Advanced Map Viewer. The ease of zooming in and moving around, and other tools here, is amazing.

There are numerous tools, too, for measuring things, like distances, where you can make your own path. You're not forced to use the existing streets, but you can with little effort. Here's an example.

There are a host of tools at the top that allow you to measure square miles (BTW 1 sq. mile = 640 Acres.) the tool bar allows you to create layers, legends, add data, see elevation profiles, and paint on the map to print out or download.

There are dozens of other features at USGS.gov including historical maps of cities. It's all worth checking out and bookmarking in your browser.