Pop Until You Drop, Part One

    Well, it has taken me over a year and a half, but I finally finished the first draft of Pop.  You can find the first installment of the first chapter here.  It is the follow-up to Dada, which I finished earlier.  You can find the first installment to the first chapter here.  The plot for Dada:  Chris Burton, a man in his mid-twenties, suddenly finds out that he is to become the guardian of his fourteen year old half-brother Sam after an accident left Sam without any other family.  After a two day road trip back to Sam's home, Chris learns about the real reasons why he is Sam's guardian.  Namely, Sam's mother and sister died in a car accident, but Chris and Sam's father is in the hospital suffering from cancer.  He was looking for Chris, after Chris's mother abducted him after a quickie divorce, as a donor.  The accident came just as Chris was found, prompting the sudden change.  Chris and Sam's father was ready to die without Chris knowing about him, but Sam revealed all, but only after Chris caught Sam watching  hidden camera footage of him undressing.  The plot for Pop continues their story.  It's four years later.  Sam is eighteen and a recent high school graduate, bound for the University of Kentucky on a swimming scholarship.  He is six foot four, and still growing as is found out later on in the book.  Chris has put on over twenty pounds, of muscle.  He has also gotten his Master's degree online, turned a fan fiction story into a bestseller book series, and is engaged to be married in a few weeks.  As I mentioned in a previous post, this was originally going to be the first scene in the second part of Dada,  but I spun it off into a sequel instead.  I really wanted to play off the difference of the brothers in this scene.   At the end of the first book, they were looking very much alike, even wearing the same clothes.  Now, the only thing that places them as brothers is their hazel eyes, still identical after all this time.  I wanted to emphasize these differences to show how they had changed, but still alike.  I slowly build up each revelation in the first few chapters, capping it off with the biggest one--Chris and Sam's Dad survived his battle with cancer, although not without some problems.  The biggest one being that his legs never quite recovered from the long bedrest, forcing him to use a wheelchair at times.  This also meant he couldn't live in the old house, forcing him to move a few blocks away, but with Sam staying mostly with Chris in the manor.  At one point, I seriously thought about killing off Chris's father, but I changed my mind.  First, Chris deserved the chance to get to know him.  That was what Chris had been hoping for most of his life.  Second,  Jonathan Burton provided the art history background that forms the structure of the story.  See, Dada and Pop are both art movements and names used for fathers.  Both of the books are statements about the movements in the titles.  Dada was summed up in the first book as 'everything can be seen as a work of art, artwork in itself has no particular meaning, and therefore nothing in the world has additional meaning.'  For Pop, I only hinted at what I feel is the meaning of the movement, although I detailed my explanation more thoroughly.  Basically, Pop art is about how one can value an artwork for what it means to the artist, even if the work in of itself might not have the same value to the viewer.  I used examples in the book, but the same can be seen in Chris's actions, how he bought a car because of its color and features and not because it was eco-friendly. It can also be seen in how he tries to rescue a favorite building of his.  It can also be seen in the way Sam acts out when he finds out his father is taking a job at Berea College and selling the manor.  Sam can't see why his father wants to move, and Sam blames his brother for it all.  However, this is not the case.  Chris is just keeping the many secret reasons why their father needs to move away.  Chris hates keeping secrets, and this anxiety is eating him up for most of the book.  I hated to make Sam such a brat after he finds out about the manor, but it couldn't be helped.  His father didn't want to talk to Sam about his personal reasons, because he still sees Sam as a child.  Jonathan did tell Chris, causing Sam to pile all of his anger on Chris, since he doesn't want to hurt his father.  These feeling cause a wedge to form between the brothers, that will persist through the middle of the book.  The next installment will focus on this split, as well as an awkward business trip, convoluted wedding planning, and an unexpected guest.