Rainwater Chapter Card
Rainwater is the working title of a story idea that I have started to develop. The title will change once I have the story completed. Rainwater is the last name of the main character in the story.
Lamar Rainwater is the protagonist in a spy action adventure story that I have been working on outlining and writing. Lamar Rainwater is a CIA agent that grew up in Oklahoma.
The premise of the story is that Rainwater is sent by the CIA to Uganda to investigate the murder of Oklahoma’s first openly gay United States Senator.
I have worked on this story by using index cards to brainstorm ideas. Then I generated a chapter list and on index cards I wrote a summary of each chapter. Left-click on the image for the Rainwater Chapter Card above to see a larger image of the card.
Although I’m not an artist, I drew a sketch of the events in each chapter.
This post explains what I have done with the first chapter of the Rainwater story with the use of index cards. The main character does not appear in the first chapter so I will explain more about the main character when I discuss chapter 2.
Rainwater Index Card 1
This first sketch on an index card shows a female servant taking a cup of hot tea to the openly gay United States Senator from Oklahoma–Mr. Bradley Hogan. [Characters' names may change as story develops.] Hogan is in Uganda, Africa.
Why does this story have a gay Senator from Oklahoma in Uganda?
Great question.
Inspirations for story ideas come from various sources that merge together as I brainstorm ideas. This idea comes from news events like the anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda, Africa. This bill included the death penalty in some cases for homosexuals.
Even if one disagrees with homosexuality, this was a horribly cruel bill, but the kicker is that bill was allegedly associated with support from American evangelical groups including a group that the Oklahoma United Senator James Inhofe often visited and supported.
Rainwater Index Card 2
Although Oklahoma has had an openly Atheist U.S. Senator, Mr. Thomas Gore who served from 1907 to 1921, as far as I know Oklahoma has never had an openly gay U.S. Senator.
Oklahoma has two U.S. Senator seats. So the question that tickled my creative mind is–what if Oklahoma had an openly gay U.S. Senator who visited Uganda to support gay activists and an openly anti-gay U.S. Senator who visited Uganda to support anti-gay legislation?
Rainwater Index Card 3
The Rainwater story opened with chapter 1 where the gay Senator from Oklahoma drank some hot tea and experienced a hallucination of spiders crawling all over him. He desperately tried to pull them off, but in doing so ripped his own face off. This resulted in him bleeding to death.
The police arrived to investigate after the female servant found the gruesome body of Senator Hogan.
The dialogue between the cops at the crime scene contains some dark humor inspired by the television show CSI that usually opens with a teaser that has one of the CSIs making a joke about the crime scene. The intention here is to show that some Uganda officers have a disregard for a dead person who was gay.
Rainwater Index Card 4
The chapter ended where a cop entered the scene and commented, “Wow, he got ripped off!”
The U.S. Senator Hogan from Oklahoma is now dead.
But was he murdered? If so, was he murdered for being gay? Was this a hate crime?
The next chapter begins with an introduction to the main character who will be assigned to investigate the death of Senator Hogan and to determine if the murder was a hate crime.
Rainwater Index Card 5
