Unkind Cuts, Part Two

Here’s the situation:
I write a first draft then put it aside for a minimum of six month while working on another book.

This let’s me come back to the story with fresh(er) eyes when I start editing.

I currently have one quasi-published novel (Cheeky, no longer available on Kindle Vella because Bezos shut the program down), five completed first or second drafts (including this one), and the start of another novel which I’m working on sporadically (need to get this one out so I can devote full time to that).

The work we’re discussing -- let’s call it The Mom Story -- is a quasi-follow up to another completed draft, The Uncle Story.*

Both are set in TV stations.

I wrote The Uncle Story first, then a wholly unrelated story after that, and then got to work on The Mom Story.

As mentioned above, I do a lot of research for my books.

A lot of research.

For The Uncle Story I had the TV station pretty well laid out.  I knew what kind of people worked there, what their jobs were, more importantly how the station fit into the community.

I even made sure I used a call sign that no real TV or radio station ever used, a fairly involved search, I might add.

So when it came time to start on The Mom Story, being the lazy sod that I am, I figured “This story takes place a decade after The Uncle Story, it doesn’t involve the same primary characters or a similar plot, why not reuse the station, the community, and a few supporting characters?”

So I did.

In The Uncle Story I bring up a local political organization that carries a lot of weight in the community.  While not a dominant part of the story, it allows me to examine culture attitudes of the era and provides enough external conflict to force my primary characters to take them into consideration.

By the time of The Mom Story, that organization is pretty much passer following the death of its leading figure.  In The Mom Story a new organization has sprung up, seeking to capitalize on the legacy of the earlier one. 

In The Uncle Story, that leading figure had a trophy wife, a former fashion model.  She appeared in only one chapter where the focus was not on her as much as the type of people who belonged to the organization.

In both stories there’s a minor supporting character, a sleazy film pirate who runs a mail order business.

When writing The Mom Story I realized he could find some potential blackmail material to threaten my protagonist with, material that the new political organization could use against her.

Question:
How could he get his hands on such material?

Well, since the material in question is movie memorabilia related, and since he runs a mail order movie business, it provided a rationale for him to get his hands on it then figure out how to threaten the protagonist with it.

But if he had blackmail material against my protagonist, he could also have blackmail material against the trophy wife / widow from The Uncle Story.

Which would be great for the new political organization since it would let them coerce her into supporting their movement.

How to get them all together?

© Buzz Dixon

* Despite these titles, the characters are not related.  Rather the titles refer to their relationship to other characters in their stories.