...for a faux-movie poster I'm doing for Resurrection Men. (I wanted to play with fonts, and once the idea got in my head it wouldn't go away.) I don't know enough British or competently-fake-Brit voice actors to fill all the important roles!

These are what I need (names mostly withheld for spoiler issues):
-Teatime when he was alive (young, educated, high-ish pitched)
-Carcer's brother (Cockney-ish, pitch variable, should sound a bit like Paul Ritter in the Night Watch radio play)
-an insanely determined Sto Lat watchwoman (whatever you think works)
-a Genuan medium (needs to be able to do both British and American [Southern] accents well)

And just in time for Hogswatch, too!

That's right, folks, it's the first chapter of my newly rebooted fanfiction, formerly known as We Rob Banks but newly returned to the internets as Resurrection Men and available as of this evening on fanfiction.net: [link]

Chapters Two and Three are written and awaiting beta-ing (by the wonderful :devferris-as-in-wheel) and One shall be appearing on dA shortly, once I've inserted HTML tags, and a banner image for the same is also forthcoming.

I think I've come to a decision regarding the basic plot and format of the new version:

1. It's set in the spring, summer, and probably autumn of UU1990, right after Night Watch. Teatime has spent the past year or so (the time since Hogfather) hanging around the city as a ghost and figuring out how to possess corpses; Carcer has just come back as a zombie after being executed.
2. It's going to be a regular, long, multi-chaptered fanfic, because I can finish writing that sooner, because that way I'll get to keep all of my nice descriptive passages from the old one, and because I need writing practice more than I need to learn to write and draw comics. However, it will be heavily illustrated, and some of those illustrations might well turn out to be comic adaptations of specific scenes or storylines within the overall fic.

That's right, dudes and ladies--TMOH's epic but tragically unfinished Discworld fanfic We Rob Banks, as seen on fanfiction.net and in part on this very site, may be returning to the interwebs! Since my year-long Teatime burnout ended two weeks ago, I've been debating resurrecting the story, but though there's some parts of it I still love there's a lot I'd like to change, especially in the plot hole department. This means I'm going to be making some pretty substantial changes to the fic some of you know and a few of you possibly even love, probably right down to the very format. But how do I know I'm changing it in the right ways? I don't, and that's why I'm turning to you, my potential (and perhaps former) readers, to tell me whether my current plans are going well and what you'd like to see next. With the story figured out ahead of time, WRB 2.0* will be far less likely than its predecessor to meet an untimely end.

*For the record, I'm almost certainly going to change the title.


Here's my problems so far:

While the drabble-chapter setup I used in the original fic was convienent to write and some of my reviewers said they liked it, I think it's part of what led to WRB's death. Because each chapter could only be 100 words long, forty-seven chapters left our protagonists still wandering around in the Sto Plains.
Teatime's resurrection is a gigantic plot hole. Why does he come back alive, while Carcer's stuck as a zombie? Why does that not happen until after Carcer's dead, too, even though that's two years later? What the hell is up with his hourglass in chapter 47? I need a better explanation for his continued presence post-Hogfather if this fic is even going to pretend to make sense.
After a couple dozen chapters, the old fic fell into the trap every episodic story risks tumbling into: rambling pointlessness at the expense of the main plot thread. Why do Carcer and Teatime need three chapters just to get hold of a new horse and cart? Why do they hang around in a bar for an unspecified time afterwards? What were they going to do once the highwayman thing gets resolved, and why did Teatime's end of that get ignored? What role is Susan going to play in the story? If I rewrite, I'll need to tie these things back in better or cut them out altogether.

And here's my proposed solutions:
There's two different ways I thought I might want to go on the format change:
First, and probably easier, would be to do it as a long fic with normal-length chapters. For the first few chapters, I could basically just patch together the existing drabbles with additional elaboration and filling in of the gaps between scenes; once I got past the good bits, I'd just write the rest from scratch.
Alternatively, I've considered turning the old fic into a shiny new webcomic, which would take longer and force me to give up most of the descriptive bits of the fic, but which would also let me make use of the visual concepts that underlie a lot of what I write. Plus, the ability to tell part of the story via drawings would help it move along faster than any prose style would, so it'd cut down on the slowness issues of the original.
I'm also come up with a new way of dealing with Teatime being dead during the fic--he's technically a ghost, but in the time since his death (more on that in a minute) he's figured out how to possess people so that he can interact with the physical world. Unfortunately for him, he can only inhabit bodies that have already been, er, vacated, so he's stuck hopping from corpse to corpse as each temporary form starts to decompose. This leaves us with two possible options regarding Carcer:
One, Carcer's still alive; if I do this, the fic would be set during the year between Hogfather and Night Watch, when Carcer's 29 and hasn't come to the attention of the Watch yet. This inverts the dead!Carcer/live!Teatime setup of the original fic. It also means that Carcer's crimes won't be as big of a deal as they were in the old story, since Vimes doesn't even know who Carcer is yet, so they're not getting pursued as fervently or showing up in the papers as soon. And since Carce has to come back to Ankh-Morpork in the end to participate in his canon storyline, we know a little more of what's going to happen. Whether these changes are for better or worse isn't really clear to me yet; that's one of the things I want y'all to tell me.
On the other hand, both Carcer and Teatime could be undead, with one a genuine zombie and the other the aforementioned ghost-piloting-corpses-thing. This keeps most of the old fic the same, but there'd be a little change to the protagonists' dynamic--there's no way either one could be threatened by the other's Knife Nut tendencies, so short of them threatening to torch each other a la chapter 16, they can't control each other like they normally would other people. Again, don't know if that's good or just overcomplicated.
Finally, I need to come up with a sufficient number of individual, episodic, road-movie-esque plots to sustain a story that follows Carcer and Teatime from Ankh-Morpork all the way to Genua. Most modern road trip films don't even try to send a car from one coast of the U.S. to the other--for two guys in a one-horse cart with frequent distractions and side trips, it'll take months! Consequently, I need to know what kinds of sub-stories y'all would like to see them subjected to so I'll have some idea of how to fill in all that time. And since I've got to plan a whole story out beforehand if I'm to have any hope of reaching the end, I need to know what to put in now in order to get there later.


So, what do y'all think? Is this worth doing? What do you think of my plans so far? Are there any problems I haven't dealt with? What do you want me to add?

I took a break from homework to look up some reference for my novel (long story short, I think it might be straight-up historical fiction after all) and I just found the answer to the question I asked in [link]

This site: [link]