Commentary - Undaunted Part Two

LEONA, TOM, AND TREVOR

I fell in love with Leona Mills and Crazy Tom and wanted to explore them in detail. So Part Two begins back in time and I reveal how Trevor became a part of Undaunted and what Mills plays in all this. I wanted Leona and Trevor to roll off each other and here I got a grasp on Trevor's snarky humor. And the crack about Leona's youth was purposefully put there so I could callback to it in part five.

And one can tell I had a lot of fun with writing his part, in particular. That moment in Kill Bill where the Bride's name is beeped out cracked me up and I figured this would be a hilarious FX if used. But if it were a graphic novel, then maybe it'd be whited out and indicate only Trevor could hear not the reader. I will never reveal his real name and none of his aliases nor nickname even hint at what it is.

But here, I was sort of building up the premise of Volume 5 and Phase 3 of HSG from Trevor's point of view and how it influences his story. He knows he's being manipulated but he came to her anyway. He knew she'd have some sliver of information that he needed. So it was the ultimate 50/50, would he accept or not and have to play a role in Mills' scheme. Then to contrast this stuff with jokes, with the Rachael Mills one, I couldn't stop laughing at that one.

I totally wanted Trevor to have a Batman moment and I came up with him walking into the shadows and disappearing. I also wanted to play with the Company's theory he was once a black ops spook. The truth is, he probably read a bunch of books and watched movies and shows about fighting and military training. Then totally out of left field, the cheesecake idea came to me and I wanted Crazy Tom be say something...well crazy. And with Leona, the one line about redemption sets up what happens to her in iStory Book Four from this story's point of view.

PRESENT

Then, we're back to the present like Trevor was dreaming about that moment in time. And I was planning on writing a Costa Verde story for part three but after iStory came out, I scrapped it and went ahead with coming out with the big reveal about Trevor's past and putting more emphasis on that. So to add to it, I set up the line here about how Mills arranged for Trevor to meet Seal. In hindsight, the Costa Verde story would have just bogged down the flashback.

I always liked the idea of how Trevor booby traps his safe houses so with the ending, I went in detail about his procedure. He does work on a computer, wipes the hard drive, then blows up the building. After awhile, it got humorous to me on how he blows everything up.