Bleach|Blackout – It’s All In The Setting

The setting for Bleach is a house party, the last 60 seconds of New Year’s Eve, in the Midwest. Jeremy (narrator) is in the bathroom where a girl lay dying. The area is decorated with drugs and sex. The countdown to the New Year forms a point of escalation for the scene as well as a stopping point, allowing the narrator (Jeremy) to go back eight days and explain how he has ended up in this place.

For Bleach, the initial setting is used to both set up the story and because it is a very “in the moment” scene to start a story. The smell of smoke and danger permeates a room full of disoriented guests and someone is knocking at the door.

Sandwiched in between the start and finish you will often find a corporate backdrop used as the setting to establish relationships and tell the story of Jeremy’s adventure back home for the holidays.

The end of Bleach circles back to where the book starts, the evening of debauchery where all the men are dressed as prostitutes, all the women look like pimps and decadence and debauchery dictate the rules. Everything seems to be spiraling out of control, and Jeremy realizes there are no guarantees for him or anyone else.

Blackout picks up two years after Bleach in Las Vegas where Stoner and friends are celebrating his bachelor party complete with strippers and crack cocaine. The ride home is blurry and the next morning in Los Angeles brings a surprise when Stoner’s friends, Chip and Jeremy, wake to find police officers and a dead body they are allegedly responsible for, but neither can recall. The move to the West Coast setting allowed me as the writer to show some type of evolution with my characters as well as play the Hollywood angle, a secondary theme running through Bleach.

The settings in both Bleach|Blackout put the characters in a place for them to interact and act on impulse, allowing the reader to not only paint their own picture of the characters, but also spare them a boring back story chapter. While writing both Bleach and Blackout I never thought about any different setting. Bleach had to begin and end with the party of the ages while Blackout had to move, allowing me as the writer more freedom (and liberties) to develop my cast of fictional friends.

Please provide your website link: http://www.davidsgrant.com

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Thank you for sharing details about your book setting. Now, what's the title of your book and where can we buy it? Bleach|Blackout is available online and select bookstores. To purchase go to: http://www.offensemechanisms.com/bookstore.html

Thank you for having me. -David