#riversofthemind

Now that Season 2 is done, I’ve been devoting more energy to writing Season 3. Over the course of my first few drafts, I was still working through Season 2 and discovering little kernels of unresolved tension or potential foreshadowing. As a result, my ideas for Season 3 have evolved from a story focused on the conflict about how the government should use Gamma Triple Prime, into a story that takes place mainly in an alternate dimension called The Outer Darkness. The Outer Darkness is a world where time becomes space, and space becomes time. It’s inhabited mainly by plant spirits. Everything there is just different shades of black. It’s the kind of setting that is made for audio drama, in a way.

There’s basically two main threads in the story and I’m trying to make sure they can both be followed. I won’t give too much away, but I can tell you the literature I allude to and reference in order to build the skeleton of the plot. Meagan’s half of the story is a mix of the Wizard of Oz and the Transformation Music in Parsifal by Wagner. John and Sapphire’s half of the story references Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, and The Rime Of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge. As I’ve written the story, it’s drifted away from the “source material” more and more, but I still am trying to draw lines between this story and the works that it references.

A challenge for me has been the length of the story. Season 1 was 11 episodes, and Season 2 had 13. This one already has close to 11, and I feel like it’s barely gotten to the “climax”, so I am anticipating that this next season will be closer to 20-25. And then the half season afterwards, which will take place in the real world, will probably be about as long as the first season.