Creating a Book Trailer Before the Book is Written

Sounds crazy!  Well, that's exactly what I did.

As I mentioned in my last blog, I've been inspired to write a historical thriller fiction based on true events. The protagonist of my story is a young writer named Victor Hugo.

I spent the summer researching his life, the events taking place in Paris, and the political climate of France at the time.

Originally I was going to set the novel in 1830, but my notes and outlines were getting too full of key players (characters) who needed to be in the story.  It concerned me became the one common criticism I received from reviewers of my debut novel, Depth of Deception, was that there were too many characters at the beginning of the book (though it seemed to work out as the story unfolded for them).  I try to listen and learn from the feedback of readers. As I continued to research, I noticed that I had jotted  "Flashback to 1827" several times in my outline notes. So I took some time to focus my attention on 1827 and realized that there was enough there to create a trilogy. The story would start in 1827, and then Book II would take place in 1830, and Book III would be set in 1832.  By doing this, certain characters would already be established by the time we introduce the new players.

After four months of researching and creating a very clear outline of the characters, stories and events, I needed to motivate myself to start writing.  It was about this time that a few fellow writers were communicating on Facebook about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) taking place from November 1 to November 30th. For this, writers challenge themselves to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.  As I've mentioned before, Depth of Deception evolved from a draft that I wrote for the 3-Day Novel Contest.  So why not try this again? 

So if I succeed, I'll have a first draft completed by November 30.  Then I would deconstruct, edit and polish that into a second draft.  It will be winter by the time it's complete.  I had images in my mind for a book trailer that I would create from scratch, but winter would be inappropriate for my story and too cold to film in the location I wanted. So I did something crazy: I gathered my resources and with the help of some friends, shot some still photos of some of the scenes in my mind that I know will not change drastically. Since I haven't written any dialogue, I didn't want to have any actor saying something that won't be in the book. So using stills would solve that problem and I would photoshop and edit in the style of my short film: First Light (see blog).

Here are some sneak-peak pictures from our photo shoot. 

Check back November 1, when I'll be starting to post updates and links to the chapters as they are being written. 



Illustration of young Victor Hugo (1830) and our actor playing young Victor Hugo in the book trailer for my next novel:
 'LUTETIA: Darkness Beneath the City of Light' (set in 1827).