Visual Aids

I finished writing the prologue yesterday. It was quite a delivery, mainly because I hadn't written it yet and also because this chapter deals with events that occurred over 80 years ago in the storyline. Add different characters and a distinctive Indiana Jones feel and I couldn't be further away from the main story in terms of style. Still, I had one thing to help me. Back in 2003 when I was volunteering in Eritrea, Africa I already had ambitions of writing young adult stories. I started then with a concept of a young boy who finds out he's a descendant of the ancient Greek Gods. The gods have been imprisoned for two millennia and the walls of their prison are breaking down. All that stands between modern day life as we know it and the return of an all-powerful pantheon of beings is this boy. Sound slightly familiar? Two years later Rick Riordan brought out Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Oh well...

Anyway, the point being that I had a first chapter of how the gods' prison had been breached by this archaeologist back in 1910. That initial chapter I still had floating around somewhere on the crashed hard disk of my old laptop, so I retrieved it, read it and adapted it to accommodate Simon & Sally's story. I added a sidekick to the archaeologist, a young boy called Mick, who will turn out to be Simon's granddad. The tomb they discovered I rewrote as a temple in the Amazon. What sends the archaeologist there in the first place is the discovery of a cultural anomaly, an object that by all means should not have been found in Meso-American cultures. When this archaeologist, who I named Brittany "Bret" Dubois - he was named after the family cat (sic), discovers the main chamber he discovers a site that would blow open the scientific community...if not for the catastrophe that follows next.

Greed is the main theme of Book 1 and Bret, unlike the pulp fiction heroes of the 30's he's based upon (and his more famous movie-cousin Indy), is not shy of taking a golden statue or two. Of course this defiles the temple and the nature of adventure-tomb-mechanics demands that the temple turns into a deathtrap. The only problem was that the way I had described it originally included so much symbolic imagery related to Olympus and Greek Mythology I couldn't possibly re-use it. So I deleted most of the text that followed and stared at the blank page. I couldn't for the life of me wrap my head around how the temple should reveal it's traps so I did what I always do, when I need to think things through: I drew it.

I actually came out of it with some nifty symbolic traps that start when the forbidden object is stolen to the ultimate end, when the temple is lost forever. We know Bret's sidekick makes it out alive, but what about Bret himself? And what is the symbolism of the temple? Well, I can't reveal that because that would spoil events that happen later in the book, but I can give you the drawings I made. Enjoy!