The event which formed the basis for Shadow Tier happened in October 1993. Between then and 2019 (26 yrs.), when I started writing, I would make many attempts to turn the event into a story/movie.
Being the tech nerd and visual person I am, I thought flow charting the major plot lines made sense. I still have the original on paper.
I still do this, but with sticky notes and plot lines taped to my wife’s wall of cookbooks.
Time passed, and life was busy. I wrote proposals for government contracts, and we used storyboards to lay out our response. The movie industry followed a similar practice, so my second attempt was to put plot ideas on to storyboards. For those who do not know, a storyboard is a combination of words about the scene and a graphic portraying its core theme. Here is an early Star Wars version.
Time passed, and life was even busier. During the intervening years I wrote a scene here and a chapter there. In 2017 I moved from northern Virginia to Colorado. I was looking at going home to California, but stopped in the Denver area after two years of massive fires in California. Then I met my wife, told her about my story and she gave me the push I needed to just start writing. I started Thanksgiving break November 27th 2019. It took six months for the first draft, then a year to polish. During that year of editing and rewriting, I jumped into the writing community. But more on that another day.
Best,
Steve