4/23

I’ve fleshed out the characters and plot a bit further. My setting is a mountain resort town, a kind I’m well acquainted with, both from visiting as a vacationer and visiting family and friends who live and work in the towns year-round. This idea lets me bring in class conflict, another thing we’re seeing in the pandemic, using the microcosm of a town people by locals who serve the visitors who are largely polite but often lordly and entitled. I don’t want to make them caricatures, but I also want the conflict clear. (Disclosure: this is a general idea I got from the Netflix YA show Outer Banks.) I’ve temporarily named my villains Bob and Alec, a mechanic (for now) who is losing his wife to illness and Alec, his nephew. Both harbor bitterness towards the visitors for slights both deep and exaggerated. While Alec’s anger is a young man’s anger, bright and tending towards quick violence, Bob’s runs deeper and is closer to poison, eventually turning him inside out.