Konrath, J.A. - DRACULAS (A Novel of Terror)

PAUL:Kickass scene where Clay saves Adam, Stacie and baby and gets them heading up toward the roof — already written.

JEFF: Randall going up the stairs, protecting the kids. They’re walking up four flights. Randall will take the rear, keeping the draculas back. They approach the roof, but don’t get there yet in this scene…Randall loses one of his teeth.

BLAKE: Stacie, Adam, baby and Clay arrive on the roof. Randall and Jenny are already there. Clay goes off to help Randall bar the door, and then help Jenny with the kids and the copter. Stacie’s death scene. Adam says goodbye.

JOE:Jenny seeing Randall’s missing tooth, and watching him lose another. As the draculas are finally arriving at the barricaded door, beginning to beat on it, Clay wants to shoot Randall. Jenny won’t let him. Randall insists he’ll fight it.

JEFF:Randall’s transformation. Draculas break through, and as a full blooded dracula, with a chainsaw, he kills a few dozen.

BLAKE:Adam is attacked in the chaos while he’s mourning over Stacie, Adam gets bitten trying to protect her body, Randall chainsaws another dracula and saves Adam from being torn apart.

PAUL:While that’s happening, Clay is helping to load the four boys onto the chopper, still holding Adam’s daughter, Daniella. The first wave of Draculas have been killed, a moment of quiet on the roof.

BLAKE:Adam knows what being bitten means. He goes to Clay, takes his daughter, says goodbye, then gives them to the TV people. Asks Clay for his gun, wanting to kill as many of the draculas as possible, and then kill himself before he turns. Clay says, “Actually, that can be arranged.”

JOE:Randall is mortally wounded. Clay and Adam walk over, tell Jenny the chopper is ready. Jen says she’s staying until he’s gone (important: she isn’t saying I’m going to stay up here and die with you, she expects to be picked up when the chopper comes back and Randall’s gone). Chopper takes off. Set up that she expects to see the friendly TV chopper again…hahahha.

PAUL:Clay and Adam setting the bombs as already written and Adam’s death scene as it all goes up (from his detonation)

JOE:Last scene with Jenny. Randall dies. Draculas are running up the stairs again. Hears Adam’s explosion. Jenny thinks the TV helicopter has returns, looks up, but it’s an Army helicopter. BUT DON’T EXPLAIN WHAT THE CHOPPER IS DOING. Maybe she just sees the soldiers lug something out of the chopper, and it lands with a big thud on the helipad and cracks the cement and then the chopper pulls quickly away. - but no explosion yet.

PAUL: Scene with Shanna in the parking lot seeing the 1st (Adam) explosion and talking with creepy Dr. Driscoll. I’d like it to end with her seeing the helicopter going up to the hospital (as she’s being dragged toward quarantine — but are we sure about this because how will Mort reach her in quarantine? What if Driscoll gives her a choice: Quarantine for 24 hours or a painful test (I’ll let you figure out the details, Paul) which will tell instantly if she’s infected. I like the idea that this infection is already very much on the Army’s radar) and asking are they rescuing more people? One of the soldiers, or maybe Driscoll smirks and says, “Not exactly.”

JOE:Super short, like two or three sentence scene where Jenny approaches the big gray sphere of metal that has landed on the helipad.

PAUL: Clayton fuckin’ Theel’s death. Goes back down for his Tauras, instead of running out to safety when he could’ve made it) and big, big boom.

PAUL:We see the hospital blow from Shanna’s POV, and then…

six hours later - dawn

SHANNA:the hospital a smoking pile of rubble…Shanna still in shock. Clayton hasn’t come out. She knows. The army is done with her but she can’t make herself leave. Place is still crawling with media and army and law enforcement. She sees a young, attractive man (younger than she is) in scrubs, his face blackened, holding a little baby. This pulls her out of her heartbreak, briefly. She approaches him…I think we know where this is going…

Blake

• • •

Nice work, Blake.

I like everything, but I’m still not sure why Clay has to die. I still like a final scene where he crawls out of the rubble, his Taurus in his hand.

Or at least make it ambiguous if he died or not, so we could use him again if needed.

Everything else I’m 100% with.

Joe

• • •

I think you’ve got a point…Clayton might be my favorite character of the bunch. A helluvalotta fun. Paul, how strongly do you feel about killing him?

Blake

September 17, 2010

I like the symmetry of him dying with his beloved Taurus. But we can sort of have that cake and eat it too with a coda showing one of those search dogs sniffing out a survivor in the rubble who manages to say he’s deputy Clayton R. Theel.

Paul

• • •

As they start to pull the rubble off him, he hands them the Taurus. “Here. Take her first.”

Paul

• • •

That’s a problem we need to address. Even though we came at them independently, the couple dynamics of both relationships are too similar. We need to change that. The couple scenes strike me as repetitious.

Shanna and Clay have known each other only 6 weeks. It makes more sense for the physical part of their relationship to take a front seat. Clay is no dummy, but he has a very narrow range of interests. Shanna cares for Clay but doesn’t love him enough to marry him.

Randall and Jenny, OTOH, were married for years, and presumably had a courtship before the nuptials. They had a deeper relationship than sex before things went sour. Her cracks about his intelligence are a defense mechanism, a way to vent her anger at him for letting her down.

Jenny should be more focused on (and attracted/intrigued by) Randall’s return to the sweet guy she married. She loved him, he broke her heart by becoming a drunk, but now he’s pulled himself up by his bootstraps. At first she’s afraid to give into it, but she’s learning to love him even more. They had good sex, but that’s not what they were about, not what she misses — she misses the emotional attachment. She LOVES this guy.

So in other words, Randall and Jenny have a history and an arc. Clay and Shanna have neither.

Won’t take much - a little shading of the dialogue, a few extra lines of internal monologue here and there. I’m willing to go in and make the two couples more distinct.

Paul

• • •

Clay: “I might have a way to make it really count.”

Paul

• • •

I noticed that too, Paul. The funny thing was, we were writing similar dynamics independent of one another.

My original “fix” was to at once point have Jenny meet up with Shanna and explain that “Love means you gotta put up with them acting like cretins. All men are cretins. But if you can find one you love, you have to stick with it. I should have.”

That would’ve turned the Jenny/Randall relationship into an example/object lesson for Shanna. But Shanna and Jenny were separated too early and never reached that point.

If you want to go in and tweak it to make them more distinct, I’m all for it. But we should keep in mind that all relationships deal with issues like these.

As for Clay being found by rescue dogs, I really like that idea. Maria just read what we have so far, and expressed some strong opinions about who she wants to survive, which is pretty much “everybody.” Considering we’re killing off the majority of our main characters, having a few live might make this more palatable to the reading majority…