Although there’ve been a couple of action-ish moments in previous chapters – the glimpsing of the rooftop fight, and Cal’s unfortunate encounter with Kay’s dad – those have been either mostly off-screen or somewhat blundering and accidental. ‘Infection’ marks the first bona fide, full-on action sequence.
Action sequences are a lot of fun to write.
I suspect I find them a little too much fun, and probably get rather carried away. The main challenge is to not just turn it into a visual description, at which point it’s more like a movie synopsis. I don’t find that prose fiction makes for a particularly natural home for action, honestly – visual mediums are far better suited.
So with ‘Infection’ I knew it had to have some kind of decent structure, and that it had to have hooks back into the characters so that it (hopefully) had some kind of resonance.
The other thing to remember is that for Marv and Kay, this is not normal. Cal’s led a pretty extreme life, but otherwise everyone in A Day of Faces lives fairly mundane lives. That’s kinda the point. I didn’t want them to suddenly turn into superheroes.
That said, the setting does give me some license to have fun. When you have a reptilian protagonist with venomous fangs, that’s fairly inevitable. Undercutting everything is a vein of self-deprecating humour, especially on the part of Kay, which I hope keeps things light without short-circuiting the drama.
Anyway. We’re nearly there. Two episodes to go. Gulp.
Soundtrack: Went back to the Matrix scores for the first time in about 10 years. I’d forgotten how good they are, and how apt for a heist/infiltration scenario like ‘Infection’.
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