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Before, I had a list of chapters with a brief synopsis of what happens.

Now, I have also included a more general concept of what I hope the characters to accomplish.

My cast of characters is up to about eight people.  :)  I’ve always had a lot of problems having more than two (a hero and a villain).  Keep in mind that the first Harry Potter book had like 15 characters that played a dominant role in at least one scene.

1. Harry
2. Hagrid
3. Dumbledore
4. Harry’s adopted parents, essentially one person
5. Dudley
6. Draco
7. Hermione
8. Ron
9. The Weasley twins, essentially identical
10. The Weasley parents, essentially one person
11. McGonagall
12. Snape
13. Quirrell?
14. Voldemort
15. Neville

So I’m looking at 3-4 major characters and 10 characters that play a dominant role at least somewhere.

NOTE: At 5:41, March 22 I decided that Rahul was a major barrier to the story.

• The voice was very different than what I was used to.
• Rahul himself is not a particularly good character. I aimed for an authentically Indian version of Spiderman (as written by an American who’s never been to India) and I think, at best, it would have been a knock-off of Spiderman. I think this is a reasonably good example of politics getting in the way of entertainment. He would have been a diversity character, and not a particularly compelling one, either.
• The story was already suffering major overstretch. We already have two major “suspension of disbelief” themes (superheroes and aliens). According to a random audience of peer reviewers, reader credulity is already straining over the concept of an alien working for the US government, let alone enjoying baseball.
• I had NO IDEA where the story was going. I still don’t know how the other plot arcs will end, but I have a vague idea of what I will add on in the short term.
• The story would have been enormously contrived.
  • Plot strand one: Hunter/Oliver in year 3 of raising Rusty in the safehouse
  • Plot strand two: Oliver’s investigation of Pemetex’s shady accounting runs into the James Fox/Catastrophe mutation arc. 1 and 2 together do not necessarily get too contrived– a logical consequence of the premise (strand 1) is that the characters will continue to defend the law on the side. So the investigation is believable, I think…
  • Plot strand three: Rahul essentially exiled to US so that he would get himself killed by Hunter. The holes in this plot are so gaping they would essentially be unaddressable. How does anyone in the Indian government know about an American operation so secret that no Americans know about it? Why would the operation go along fine for three years and then blow up in two separate ways at the same time? This is enormously contrived.

I’m too lazy to go through this website and delete every reference to the Indian characters, but not a one will make an appearance in Cowboys and Indians.

Finally, I’d like to really thank the Indians that spent over twenty hours helping me imagine what the speculative Indian household and environment might have looked like. Special thanks go to Nav and RC but a complete list would probably be upwards of ten people.