Keenan Cross
Abyssal (first draft)
Act 1
Scene 6
The sub, then DIRECTOR’s lab
Abyssal, Act 1 Scene 4
Abyssal, Act 1 Scene 3
Abyssal, Act 1 Scene 2
Abyssal, Act 1 Scene 1
When I wrote that three-act treatment last August I didn’t have the slightest suspicion that we’d be living through something like we are right now by the time I returned to expand it. Then once we were under quarantine, I thought it would be horribly insensitive to revisit it. At this point, I’m not so sure about that. The pandemic element is ultimately ancillary to this story, and thinking about it I guess helps me turn some concepts over in my mind. How constructive that is will remain to be seen. This story has come to mean a lot to me, though, and I think it will evolve a lot now that I’m fiddling with it during a strange reflection of its own premise. Maybe I will, too.
I don’t have specific plans for anything with this, but I’m writing it while imagining it in a visual medium, for practice and variety. This first draft isn’t in any kind of standard format, just something that seems to make sense to me. I hope someone else somewhere gets something out of it.
Keenan Cross
Abyssal (first draft)
Act 1
Scene 1
The field
Free writing 52b: Oracle
Another installment of the story written on an old computer. I’ll type this story up in normal readable text when it’s over, but I’m having fun doing it this way too.
Plot outline: “Abyssal” (working title)
I haven’t been doing as much free writing lately to focus on other things, but something I’ve done lately is exercises in developing plot summaries. This is one I wrote based on a few prompted themes.
Free writing 48: The new houses
The new Conversant struck a bell that rang into session a ceremony, the first of its kind. He was a stocky, balding man with small, shrewd but strangely distant eyes and a slight pucker to every feature. Yesterday, as throughout the long process thus far, he had worn a simple black suit, common for the middlemost class of commoners: today he came draped in antiquarian robes that enough of the audience found offputting that a murmur prevailed over the first words he spoke after ringing the bell.
“…sweep aside the nobility,” were his first audible words. “because they were an affront to God.”
Free writing 30: First Contact
“Sex appeal,” Linda said with a scowl. “That’s what you think it needs.”
J. Greggory, who said that about everything, shrugged: What can I say?
Linda turned screen mirroring off and looked back over her designs. She’d prepared twenty tight drawings based on hundreds of sketches, which had been the result of months of close work with engineers and biochemists and scientists in a dozen other fields. And she had presented them to the board, and they had been okayed – pending J. Greggory’s approval.
“For whom,” she risked asking. “exactly?”
(test)
(this is a test)
The Demihuman Chronicles 