Night Swimming: Flashlights, Y2K and Something Old in the Springs

Night Swimming is a horror novel about a seventeen-year-old pot dealer in Ocala, Florida, who notices on Christmas Eve 1999 that the shadows in his pool hall have started moving on their own. There's a complete draft, all 27 chapters, and you can read it here. Here's what it's about, where it came from, and what I already know I have to fix.

What it's about

Jason Amano runs a small operation out of the back room at Qball's Pool Hall. His crew is the kids nobody else wanted: Katie, who lives in a motel room and swims in December; Josh, a chemist with a broken heart; Amanda, who looks after her little sister while their mom works nights; Crystal, a swimmer who hangs around warehouse raves; and a few others. When the lights go out at Qball's and a shadow stands up off the wall, the only thing that works against it is light. Flashlights, road flares, a Zippo, a calculator screen.

The trail leads to Silver Springs, and to something that has been sitting in Florida's limestone for a very long time. It wants the people, and it's picked midnight on Y2K to take them. Jason's only real skill is running a network, so that's what he does. He turns a weed-dealing crew into a resistance, city by city, with pagers and payphones and a burned-out veteran in a swamp cabin who's been watching the shadows for twenty-five years.

Under the monster stuff it's a book about connection versus isolation. The thing in the springs picks people off when they're alone. The kids' one advantage is that they refuse to be.

Where it came from

The book didn't start as horror. It started as a screenplay, a neo-noir crime story about a teenage LSD dealer's rise and fall in Ocala, with a pool hall called Qball's, a best friend named Josh, a girl named Kate and a partner named Dom. That script ended with a murder at a stoplight in the rain. Nobody fights a cosmic entity in it.

When I came back to the material, I kept the town, the pool hall, the dealer, and the feeling of being a kid on the edge of things in late-'90s Florida. Then I pointed all of it at something much bigger. The early synopsis pitched it as grunge philosophy against cosmic horror: kids who already suspect the universe doesn't care about them turn out to be the ones best equipped to stare at something that really doesn't.

I also leaned hard into the period. Nokia flip phones, pagers, Clearly Canadian, Soundgarden on the jukebox, Y2K survival kits stacked at the Circle K. The springs sit at 72 degrees all year, and that number ended up doing a lot of spooky work. Probably too much.

How it changed

The first draft was shorter and thinner, twenty chapters or so. I expanded it into a longer draft of 22 chapters and about 103,000 words, adding a chapter for Crystal (The Convergence) and one for Amanda (The Integration). That's the previous version you can open under each chapter on the site.

The current draft went the other way. It's about 84,000 words in 27 chapters, and the changes are mostly structural:

• Five new chapters: The Morning After, Government Static, Network Voices, What We're Fighting For and Other Fronts. They get out of Jason's head, show the sheriff who thinks the kids are the threat, and show what the war looks like in Gainesville, Tampa, Miami, Orlando and Jacksonville.
• The swamp chapter was replaced by The Veteran's Tale, which skips the long trek and opens at the veteran's cabin.
• The run-up to midnight was rewritten, and nearly everything else got tightened.

The newer text is leaner. The older one explains itself a lot more.

What's still unfinished

Plenty. It's a complete draft, not a finished book.

• The middle sags. From roughly chapter 8 to 16, the same beat repeats: someone runs into something impossible, reports back to Jason, and the network grows. It happens too many times with too little change.
• The ending moves too fast. 27 chapters of buildup and the climax goes by in a rush. It needs more room.
• POV wanders. Some chapters are Jason in third person, some are Jason in first, plus Katie, Amanda, Crystal and a handful of one-off voices. The plan is to settle on Jason and Katie in first person and handle everyone else through them.
• The rules are fuzzy. Why does light work? Why these kids? A reader is allowed to ask why teenagers with flashlights win, and right now the book doesn't answer well enough.
• Small stuff. Two chapters are both called Reality Storm. The dashboard clock in chapter 22 says December 21st when it should be New Year's Eve. The shadows move wrong a lot.

Note

The next revision plan is a big one. Compress the middle, add a real midpoint crisis, and give the climax the space it's been missing, likely landing around 21 chapters. So the version up now won't be the last one.

If you read it, I'd most like to know where you got bored in the middle. I have my guesses. I'd like to see if yours match.