Writing Process: Urban Legend

On December 29th, after three attempts during separate NaNoWriMos over four years, I finished the first draft of a project I call Urban Legend. And that means I can finally talk about it. I’m a little superstitious about things like that. I try to avoid talking up a writing project that doesn’t at least have a first draft, no matter how excited I am about it. But there’s now a completed first draft, clocking in at 62,266 words, so here we go.

Urban Legend follows Detective Deena Kane as she pursues a masked, costumed serial killer. The killer, dubbed Skullface by the local media because of his distinctive mask, starts off killing low-level gangland figures, but soon escalates to killing police officers. The dead cops, however, all have ties to a mysterious security firm, a non-profit organization run by several organized crime figures, and a shady real estate developer running for Mayor. As the detective pursues the killer and the ties that bind his victims, she realizes that the city’s darkest forces have her surrounded and the only person she can trust may be the man she’s been hunting.

This story is important to me in numerous ways. I grew up a fan of comic books, particularly Marvel Comics. My older brothers had a stash of comics that I would sneak into frequently, and I found myself deeply enthralled by both the science fiction and crime noir storytelling of books like X-Men, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and Daredevil. I consumed these stories obsessively, well into my late 20’s. One of my great ambitions in life was to write for either Spider-Man or Daredevil, and Urban Legend was the name of a story concept I came up with for Daredevil when I was a teenager. In that concept piece, the local media of twenty years from that point (that was 1992, so it would have been 2012) pieces together stories of the Man Without Fear and what he meant to Hell’s Kitchen and New York City. My story included an elderly Foggy Nelson running for Mayor against the incumbent Richard Fisk (The Rose), while Matt Murdock spends his retirement from crimefighting as a law professor and legal advisor after killing Mayorl093 Fisk’s father—the Kingpin—just before Daredevil’s disappearance. It was a fun concept, but I never went anywhere with it. I was 14, after all.

A year or two later, me and a couple of friends decided—like 16-year-olds do—to start an independent comic book studio. Sure, it was a crazy idea, but creator-owned comics (spearheaded by the guys at Image Comics) were all the rage in the mid-90’s. So, putting aside the fact that we had absolutely no idea how the process worked, my good friend Kevin Dawkins and I put together three issues of scripts and half an issue of pages. However, since we were teenagers, we were quickly overwhelmed by how expensive these things are to produce. A few years back, I found some of the old scripts and decided there was some stuff there to work with. I started it as a NaNo project in 2017 and then shelved it for the next two years (with relocating to Seattle and finding a new job, I had a lot going on). I picked it back up in 2019 and again this past November. With the pandemic removing most of my usual distractions, I was able to keep my ass in the chair and finished the first draft.

Hooray!

Here’s the thing: it’s rough. I mean, really rough. Four months over the last four years, and it might have well been written by four different people. The dialogue is clunky, the plot has fairly significant holes, and characters that only intended to walk on stage once or twice become central to the plot. Certain elements that make for visually distinctive characters are immensely difficult to recreate in prose. It needs a lot of work.

It’s okay, though, I’m not in a hurry. I’ve got another first draft I’m working on, then edits to do on another long-gestating project. I’ll be busy. But hey, I finished something that has the potential to be awesome, and that’s only the beginning.