Its not as if I don't have enough novel bits here and there already.
Title: XXXXXXXXX
Author: Moi, naturally
Genre: Thriller/Hidden History
Plot: The good guys strive to unravel clues which lead to them finding Atlantis.
The Antagonists: MiB's and suited sad-sack minions of MiB's.
Guiding influence...one guy who wrote a lot of pulp showcased how to take the normal and make it weird. So...thats what we'll try to do. Take traditional strong plot elements and update them and make them weird.
Intro:Dying Man's Message
The cute virtuous single mother (husband died from story appropriate end) enters the Tex-Mex restauraunt with a guitar case in one hand and a baby carrier in the other. She sets up on a stool, rocks her baby with one foot, and starts to play Spanish guitar. Whenever she stops, the baby starts to fuss (he likes Mommy's playing).
She has one guy on bended knee in front of the crowd proclaim 'I'm dying for you.' as a romantic proclamation. This serves as a foreshadowing because at first its a spooky voice n the crowd.
Later an ill man goes up to her, and puts twenty tightly folded into her hat, and then without looking her way, he goes to the bathroom.
Later, she finds that inside the tightly wrapped twenty there is a note on a napkin. She expects its another admirer asking for her phone number, and tosses it for the trash as she walks in to the convenience store, but misses....this provokes a Oh NO, the Adventure Hook has been Slipped moment...
But then she is pursued inside the store by a cop who saw her litter, and he wants to ticket her for it, but Money's Real Tight, and....Bolt From the Blue....Cop is shot twice in the chest.
I feel like I'm looking in your tacklebox, and I see plenty of hooks and lures but no fishing line or sinkers. hee. edit: what I mean to say is, it looks like a bunch of ideas to get someone interested and have them start reading, but none of them are concluded. second edit: I have nothing else but respect for you and mean no offense in any way.
Thanks for honest critiques. They're helpful.
Impromptu weapon getting...the clerk is panicked so she steals his pistol to defend herself against the guy coming in the front shattered glass door. There's a guy coming in through the front shattered glass, and behind him are several very tough looking guys about ten feet behind. She looks at the beer and wonders if she can set it on fire, and the Icee machine, and the coffee, and then starts shooting through the wall to try to hit the contents of the metal cage outside the front of the convenience store...the metal bottles of natural gas....and she explodes them... and takes out the three guys in the parking lot...knocks down the guy in the front, but he's still active, and she's out of bullets so she shoves the ICee machine through the aisle standing thing and crashes it and the icee machine on top of the bad guy....then she grabs her infant, and runs out the back.
HMMM....something about that is typical. No, she heads back and realizes she needs info, so as the guy pulls himself out of from under the icee machne and yells something semi-cryptic but useful, she belts him on the head with her pistol butt, and then rifles through his pockets for anything of use. One thing she finds is a tracking device which leads her to the twenty folded up, the napkin with the 11110000111111 and a tracking bug.
Now this opens up a number of questions...Napkin Message? To me...why me? And why not just a simple message? And why, oh why on earth would you include a tracking device that leads the bad guys to you????
She also finds some money and ....some other stuff...but what?
And obviously by now she stands revealed as a thoughtful and coolheaded in a crisis person with a ruthless streak (bu t that last can be explained by she's protecting her baby.)
So now she knows the Message is Important...maybe. She looks at it. Nothing but a bunch of 1's and 0's.
I think we'll have the dead guy say something to her when he gives her a twenty....'liked the second song 'Blah, blah song name'.' Problem is, that was her third song.
I like, especially if she really is ruthless, but trying to convince herself that she's only "protecting her baby"
Now we have a question...why on Earth is there a tracking device in the folded up money?
First bad answer....the villains slipped it in there, and then left the messenger go...only to later shoot him. Possibly.
Second bad answer....the messenger wanted to draw the villains to follow him to a trap, and he being wounded forgot to remove it before giving it to the girl.
Third answer...its a homing device sending out a signal to the good guys 'pick me up', but the gg are infiltrated so the baddies know about the signal and got to the messenger first by shooting him, but he escaped, mortally wounded. He doesn't know how he got targetted, and so he thinks he's not putting the woman in any great danger before he heads off to the bathroom to die in a stall at the Tex-Mex restauruant from his gunshot wound.
This means the gg have a mole inside their ranks. Let's say the messenger was also a mole, or perhaps a temporary disguise and he got some data, and fled...
Why do I foresee a Smoking Aces type ending? :P
It's possible that the good guys don't have a mole, but the bad guys picked up the tracking signal independently.
--M. J. Young
MJ, so that leaves a bit of uncertainty for later.
Jhiaxus, I'm not sure I ever watched Smoking Aces. But I assume from the ads I've seen that SA ends with lots and lots of gunfire.
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Our heroine finds something in the bad guy's pocket which will, when deciphered, lead her into the bad guy's way later.
Noting tha tthe tracker leads to her twenty, she dumps the bug, and flees to the neighbourhood behind the gas station.
She calls a friend on her cell phone. Friend is freaking out. Sends her a video on her cell phone.
Its of a policeman saying that they are searching for Heroine in relation to the death of th eguy in the Tex-Mex restauraunt. All it took to achieve this was for one guy to give false info to the police...'yeah, I saw her give the guy a dirty look when he dropped in a tip. thought it was just a buck which is hard for a whole night's work. And then she wanders back there. I thought I heard some pan crashing. No big deal you know. But then I hear this guy is dead, and I think, well maybe I ought to talk to the police....'
'Thank you for your help, citizen. And your name is...'
'here officer...' as the minion gives the police a fake id.
It is not the best of n'hoods, so if she's quick and quiet, she has little problem breaking into a house. The chief problem is finding a house that is unoccupied...and if she takes too long in her search some retired person will spot her.
She's pretty freaked out at this time.
Meanwhile, the good guys and the police go into the area. A gg uses a fake id to get access to teh crime scene, and swears as he finds the bug laying in the aisle of the store. He questions the clerk, and views the vid tape with the real cops. He leaves knowing that the Data Needed is held by a Mother with Baby nearby.