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SPOILERS ALERT, Gentle Reader--I'm gonna share my novel-length response to @junkman in Notes, so if you haven't done so yet, please catch up on all five episodes of my ongoing serial Foreign Body before reading these "Writer's BTS Notes"...
Hey Dan--thanks again, my good man...
I must do justice to your novel-length comment:
HOW THE MYCELIUM TAKE OVER HOST BODIES
As I had said in response to your other comment, indeed mycelium and zombie ants will evoke The Last of Us, but I hope to introduce different elements in my tale. For one thing, there are two distinct types of takeover. In Part 4, which is an homage to Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four, our 'micronauts' hijack and pilot the nervous systems of--respectively--a baby snake, a bullfrog and a firefly, before releasing all the creatures once the mission to free their rocketship was accomplished.
But the pilot found inside Kevin's brain is different from that. It's dead--we hear from two doctors that it was mummified--but it still seems to be speaking to Kevin. I'm edging towards a haunting, more than a mycelium takeover, in the case of the boy.
PACING OF THE FIRST CHAPTER
"Shooting the sheriff in the first para", I love that--yeah this began life as a potential collab with a filmmaker--so part 1 was drafted as a sizzle reel or proof-of-concept for the pilot of a TV series. That's why it takes off with a bang like that. I do agree a lot of serials take so long to get started that readers lose interest--the entire audience is ADHD now, that was just my way of dealing with it...
JARRING MINI-SCENES (WITH MORE TO COME)
Satinder was meant to come out of the blue (and leave all red). Basically if this had become a TV series, it was an announcement that the rocket which crashed into Kevin's skull was not a single explorer. There's an entire wave of these 2mm tall aliens. Satinder, and the setting of his tropical home, place this scene in India or Malaysia whereas Kevin and his mother are written as being in the US. The globe trotting wasn't just for cool locations to shoot the TV, we are saying the aliens have arrived and they're everywhere.
As for poor Satinder in particular, it starts as a typical jungle mishap in Asia, then goes to a crazy place: A tree falls and damages his house. In the trunk is what looks like a nest of bees or wasps. He goes to burn them out but half-a-dozen fighter jets return fire and kill him.
As the story progresses, there will be another couple of mini-episodes of the aliens being encountered elsewhere around the globe. Jarring? That was the aim. Successful? We shall have to wait and see LOL.
MORE ON THE MICRONAUTS' SWAMP ADVENTURE
As for the four micronauts lost in an earth swamp, yep, closed third person POV--if this were a movie or a comic, the audience would see what the creatures they possessed are, almost immediately. In prose, I decided to suddenly drop the deus ex machina--as you correctly called it--reveal, to detonate the info, in one go. I'm not sure how else to make it clear that we're not dealing with monsters as far as our human scale is concerned--that these are small creatures that would fit in our hands--if the third person narrative remained closed all the way until the end of that scene...
ON CHARACTERS
A lot of characters are introduced in quick succession, that's true but the only two main characters I want the reader to care about are Kevin and his mother.
Kevin is a funny character to write. You found him distant and disinterested in what's going on, almost, even tho he's the one with a rocketship in his head.
Why did I write him so passive? I almost don't know--a magical thing happens when I write. The characters' arcs are plotted, but I don't think about their dialogue or reaction to certain events--i just let the story tell me where to go when I get to their parts.
And Kevin is based on, among other things, nine year olds I know who are absolutely cool when certain big things happen unexpectedly around them (is this a comment on the very young being numbed by modern technology? Maybe); and also the kid in The Shining--in particular the Kubrick movie, moreso than the King novel.
Some kids are just like that--in part 1, Kevin treated the alien's thoughts(?) broadcast in his head as just a foreign language (Korean? French?) like what he overhears from his mum's TV serials... But then he reveals that sometimes the voice speaks to him in English and asks him to do things...
Then in part 3, we may believe that the alien--who calls itself a name that sounds a bit like Hogarth--has asked Kevin to play heavy metal (the Slipknot lyrics "the preservation of the martyr in me" were unplanned, a fortuitous discovery when I googled for jarringly hard songs).
So there's that also... unlike the four micronauts who had said their mission was to poison the Earth's waters with self-replicating microplastic,* Hogarth--who appears to have crashed accidentally and died in Kevin's brain, without an escape plan, four years ago--does not appear to be on an invasion mission.
So what is he up to? Other than looking for some chill tunes?
*This is an inversion of HG Wells's War of the Worlds' deus ex machina solution (earth microbes killing the martians)--the microscopic invasion army plans to wipe us out with microplastics--a plan that terrifyingly... could work?
