The Indebted--Blog of The Web Serial

Many of the people who know me personally call me “the busiest person they know.” Statements like this began an inner quest to understand my drives behind what I do and why I write. I reexamined my priorities and my life long goals. Over the last three months I have not posted anything new on my blogs. Despite my desire to share my writing with others the simple fact is that my number 1 priority is to be a consistently published novelist and a consistently published poet.

When I examined the time I have to actually write per week, I was dismayed to see how little time I have—despite sleeping only 4 to 6 hours a day. Then I looked at my writing production over the last year, including blogs and saw just how over blogged I am. My goal, as I stated above, is to be a consistently published novelist and poet. Yet, most of my writing time was being spent writing blogs and articles for the internet. I was blogging nine different topics a week. That is at least nine hours a week. This may not sound like much to many of my readers. However, with everything I have to juggle in my life, nine hours is often the only amount of time I have in a week to write. Meanwhile I am working on 8 novels (one is The Indebted) and 4 poetry collections. Something had to give.

As such, I am changing my schedule of blogging all together. I will keep my Coffee with David blog, going on a consistent weekly basis. My others will be as I have time or a pressing matter to share.

Thank you for reading and checking this blog from time to time. Please continue to follow me on Coffee With David as I share the “behind the scenes life” of this writer who is determined to reach his goals in life: That goal is to publish 300 novels and 80 poetry collections over the next forty years. I know how insane that may sound, but that is my goal should God let me live that long.

In the novella The Indebted, the setting was in a debtors slave labor prison camp in the middle of Antarctica where the prisoners worked on green energy stations feeding a power craved world with cheap energy from the last continent to be settled. Obviously, that story was set in a future after the treaties that protect the environment of Antarctica had expired. In that version, the world had united and faced a global economic depression where the “have’s” in the world consolidated power in mega-corporations and sent the hapless people who had created to much debt to prison to work and to die in slave labor under the illusion that they were working off their debt and would someday be free. This novella ended with the protagonist sacrificing his life to start a prison uprising.

This whole scenario will not work for the web series of The Indebted. I examined the story line set on Earth and with the hero living instead of dying, so that the story could be expanded. I also examined moving the story to the Galilean moon of Europa. After doing a lot of research on that promising ice moon, I figured that story was still checkmated. Antarctica made more sense in comparing the two—it had wind and geothermal sources for power. For Eurpoa I had to find a reason why the “powers that be” would build a prison under the ice in a highly radioactive region of space. What would be there that was of such importance to spend the resources on getting even slave laborers there.

As I explored the possibilities and considered what the possible plot lines would be for the story, I have decided to remove the story itself from our solar system. Instead I am setting it on a different world. The world where the story starts will keep the same frozen theme and will be a prison colony. Despite this similarity, the possibilities of where the plot could go and what the prisoners are even doing in the prison changes.

Possibilities mount as The Indebted is rewritten.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for articles, blogs, poetry, and stories I write.

The Indebted, a story of taking those debtors and throwing them into a slave labor camp in a future dystopia had started originally as a novel idea that turned into a novella. The problem with novellas is that they are too long for short story publishers generally don’t want to touch them and they are too short for novel publishers. This left a problem. Do I hack it apart and turn it into a short story or do I expand it into a novel?

If I cut it down to fit a short story, much would be lost in the punch of showing the darkest side of utopia and exposing the farces for what it was. Short stories are meant to be quick stories that you can escape into and then back out. In a way they are like a standalone television episode.

If I tried to turn it into a novel, then I would run across the current industry problems…the need for new authors with a track record. In response I have decided to gamble by turning this novel into a web serial. Starting in August, I will release episodes from this story and what would have been its sequels in a monthly installment on my website (http://www.davidalanlucas.com/the_indebted.htm). This would require a serious change to the original novella as it would turn the idea into more than just a novel, but into a series that will (hopefully) not end for quite sometime.

The indebted is dedicated to all of those who have found themselves trapped in debt due to no fault of their own but the shady dealings of less than fair and to those who risk everything to keep us safe and free only to come home to the threat of overwhelming debt.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for updates to the articles, blogs, poems, and stories that I write.