Gore Point is the first in a trilogy of action/mystery/horror thriller novels about a brigade of demon fighters. Get your copy here.
Below is a Chapter One of the Author’s Commentary for my book Gore Point, in which I talk about all that went into this part of the story. You might want to read chapter one of the book before listening to this.
The Author’s Commentary is like reading the book along with me. As I read, I’ll tell you the reasons I made the choices I did in the story, give behind-the-scenes peeks into the process, provide insights about my inspirations, and explain many cool things that casual readers will never know. The Commentary is in audiobook format (NOT one long file), but I’ll also include a polished-up transcript (pasted below), which will be delivered as an eBook you can read on your favorite reader once it’s in its final form.
The complete Author’s Commentary — as well as the complete book in all its formats and much, MUCH more (even including a way to read the full trilogy early) is available at the link below:
Gore Point is only available through Kickstarter for now. Get your copy here!
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Here’s the Chapter One Commentary transcript:
Hey everybody, this is Johnny B. Truant and welcome to the first chapter of the Gore Point author’s commentary. I’ve never done anything like this before, but I thought it might be kind of cool and so I just kind of proposed the idea to myself at the same time as I guess I was proposing it to you, by putting it up on the Kickstarter. Then I went on a trip and figured well, okay, I’ll start reading it and just kind of see what happens. I was highlighting sections in the Kindle book as I’m flying on a plane to Indianapolis and I’m thinking wow, this is kind of awesome so I guess I’m glad that I committed myself to this because I found that I had a lot of thoughts about the book and things that you would never know as a reader unless you were to listen to something like this so … I don’t know, this is going to be kind of fun.
Just a few introductory things. Number one is I will try not to spoil anything. We’ll see how this goes. If I do one for Gore Point 2, it may end up making more sense because I want to tell you about foreshadowing and that would require that I tell you about things that happen later in the book. What will probably happen during this one is that I will tell you that things are foreshadowing, maybe, and hopefully a way that is non-spoilery, just because I think that people might want to read along.
So if you’re listening to this and you have feedback either way, shoot me an email at johnny@johnnybtruant.com. I love hearing from readers. I’d love to hear your thoughts on spoilers versus non-spoilers or something else related to this.
Second is I am not going to watch my mouth, so I will swear. So if you’re listening to this with kids around, just know that I’m not going to be clean all the time just because I don’t know, I guess that’s how I’m wired.
And the last is that I’m not going to be trying to be too professional. So you’ll probably hear me like my chair squeaking in my office and I’m not going to edit out my ums and ahs, I’m going for “realism.”
So with all that said, let’s delve into chapter one here.
Whenever I do a chapter like this, well, first of all, I wanted to do a flash forward, or rather a flashback. I wanted to show Adrian and Ray as kids and show the traumatic event that kind of formed their worldviews to some degree because as we’ll see (and this isn’t a spoiler; see, I’m worrying about it already) they’re both — like, Ray believes that everything is random and Adrian believes that everything happens for a reason and I love to have that sort of internal character conflict in addition to just the regular conflict between the brothers. And so that kind of came out of the blue, but I also wanted to establish it. And so Sean …
So, in case you haven’t seen this anywhere else, I co-wrote this book with Sean Platt. And the way that we do that is that Sean has beats, which if you were an early adopter to the Kickstarter, you would have gotten those for free. Or if you added them on at the end, then you would have them as well. And you can see there was a story outline and characters and world and some photographs that would give me ideas or art that would give me an idea of sort of what I was thinking and which points to hit. That’s why we call them beats. But in truth, I kind of wander all over the place and some of the deeper stuff I have to come up with on the fly. So I was writing this chapter because it was…
Actually, I don’t think Sean gave me a chapter by chapter outline. He gave me a simple synopsis. So I think that I decided to do this this flashback and I wanted to have this mood and establish the relationship between the brothers to begin with.
So if you have the beats, you’ll see that the trees that are mentioned are real trees. I don’t know what they actually are called, but I called them teardrop trees because it looks like there’s a branch — and there’s I think a photo in the beats — that shows a whole bunch of them. So it’s not just one tree with this weird teardrop shape to the limb; they all had it.
And so, I don’t know, I thought that that odd thing might be kind of a cool feature to have the boys walking through as they’re going to the gore point. I wanted to mention things like suicide flats, which Sean had given me in the beats, but that I only included because I was like, well, suicide flats and the zone where nothing can grow. These are things that I then spun off as I was writing it.
So when I do these first chapters, it’s kind of interesting to me to have that in the back of my head — all of those little things. Like: I came up with the idea of a Rollard, which is like a blunt force instrument that you’ll see is the only thing that’s effective against all classes of the demons. And so I wanted to kind of drop mention of the Rollards and I want to drop mention of the suicide flats and the dead zone. And I want to talk about the dispositions of each of the brothers and I wanted to establish their relationship, but I love to drop in little mentions of things like the Zen mines or how long the gore point has been there or what people think it is. This whole opening of when Adrian says the priest says that their dad is going to hell, just to establish that.
We don’t really know what this other plane is. I’ve called it hell consistently throughout. I think of it as hell, but the world at large doesn’t really know what it is. They just know that it’s this other plane. And people are, I think, reluctant to look the idea of demons in the eye because that’s such a strange concept. So if there really was a portal to hell in real life, I don’t think that people would start calling it a portal to hell unless they were already religiously inclined or sort of on the tipping point to where they might tend toward it if they saw something that convinced them. But I think that most people would just act like it’s an anomaly. They’re creatures. There’s an interdimensional rift, but I think we would rationalize it. I don’t think we would immediately jump to “hell” for a lot of us.
So I wanted to show this idea of what a repellence looks like. And that was an interesting glossary thing too. Because when I do these, I actually have to make notes and say, well, okay: So a repellence is the entire thing. Like: the brigade arrives, they fight the demons or the “fiends” as they call them, because again, they wouldn’t be thinking of them as demons. Although other people think of them as demons and they fight them and then they close the rift and that’s it. And that’s a repellence, but there are other intricacies of it that have different names.
So I have to keep track of all of that. And it’s particularly difficult between books in a trilogy like this or a series, because I then have to use consistent terms throughout. So it’s a juggling act and I’ve learned to want to power through all books in a series rather than taking long breaks because then I have to relearn it all.
So this chapter has a lot of questions like, what is the size of a rift? What about the unknown ones, including the idea of micro rifts. You’ll see throughout, like there’s a part where their father says, where Adrian and Ray are remembering (you’re in Adrian’s head, so Adrian is remembering). He says, “simple thermodynamics. Hot air is excited, it wants to move, so it moves towards us.”
If you’re new to me, I always add science to everything whether it’s a ridiculous story about zombies or something. Zombies are kind of dumb in concept, scientifically speaking. Like demons. I want to bring grounding to that kind of thing. So if there was a rip between hell and our world, then thermodynamics would be in play. And you’ll see later, like that actually becomes a major plot point. And it came from me playing with my own scientific tendencies early on, and then the big plot point that happens later came because I just happened to mention it early, and I thought of it because: why would a rift exhale? What would it do? Like, it wouldn’t just sit there would exhale hot breath. That’s how it works. And then you get the rules of riftfare from it, which was making up as I was writing this.
So again, I don’t know if you’ve seen the beats. I don’t want to keep assuming people have seen the beats, but the beats didn’t mention any of this sort of thing. We just knew that they fight demons. We knew that there were legions and stitchers. I went in knowing that. But the idea of the two lines of legions and the ideas of the classes of demons … I don’t even know where that came from. The idea that different demons have different classes, or that there’s only one class per rift.
I think that it probably happened because I wanted to establish a splinter in this first chapter. I wanted to have something where something went wrong and Adrian saw it one way and Ray saw it another. And the way that something could go wrong if you already have demons coming out of a rift is to make a demon that shouldn’t have come out of rift come out of it. It came from that necessity of having something that was wrong, and something that could be a debate, and something that could be the mystery,
It always starts as just this a nugget like that. It doesn’t start with a grand plan. But once I had the nugget, this idea of one class of demons per rift, then it tends to spool, and it became the rest of the book.
That’s just sort of a general thing about how I write: I start with something that may be even arbitrary or something that was given to me just as a mention by Sean in the case when I’m co-writing, and then my mind naturally wants to see the logical consequences of it, including science — because I have a genetics degree; I have a background in science. I think like a scientist and I can’t just accept “there are demons and that’s all there is.” There would be physical consequences if there were demons, if that makes any sense.
Once you bring something absurd or unknown or unseen into our world, it still has to obey the laws of our world unless you’re in a world like Harry Potter where magic is in play. I like to say “you get one miracle,” and the miracle can be that there’s magic, or the miracle can be there’s demons, but you then can’t reinvent the world to suit that single miracle. You get miracle and then the things surrounding it need to be internally consistent.
So I think I’m going to close up this first chapter with that background. The purpose of this scene was to really establish that something had gone wrong in addition to establishing the moods of the characters, like who they were, who they are, who their father was, how it impacted their psyches, and therefore how they’re going to respond to the rest of the book, while also indicating this thing where Eldon died as a result of something going wrong just to open a question in your mind so that you start to wonder what exactly it is that happened.