Chapter notes

• Read A Day of Faces for free here.
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• Read all the writing notes here.

Now we’re talking. All the build-up of the journey east leads to this chapter. Hopefully it was worth the wait.

I should probably talk about that opening scene. That wasn’t planned. The first line I wrote for this chapter was Kay moaning about the freighter journey, and how uneventful it had been. That then made me think it could be fun to have her wistfully imagine what might have been. I liked the idea, but decided to switch it around so that the chapter opened with the dream, presented with a straight face before the reveal. (more…)

• Read A Day of Faces for free here.
• Read this specific chapter here.
• Read all the writing notes here.

Here we get some pretty blatant clues about where the story has been set on Earth, and the route of the freighter. In researching this I stumbled across a fascinating blog by Maya Jasanoff, who spent a month on a cargo ship from China to the UK. It’s a great read and was a big help in visualising the freighter journey in the story. (more…)

• Read A Day of Faces for free here.
• Read this specific chapter here.
• Read all the writing notes here.

Aah, the journey east. This has been a really hard thing to pace right, and as of writing this I have no idea whether it’s worked. I wanted the journey to feel significant, but at the same time it needs to be interesting. At the same time, I didn’t want to throw in random action scenes just to spice it up. (more…)

• Read A Day of Faces for free here.
• Read this specific chapter here.
• Read all the writing notes here.

Here I continue the new style of interludes, in which we explore what’s going on with Cal and Holt. One interesting aspect here is seeing Locque inhabitants from the point of view of an Earth human, as up until now the story has mostly been told from the perspective of Kay, with the various genotypes depicted in a deliberately mundane fashion. In Interlude #5 we open with Holt’s evident prejudice against Cal, whereby he continues to refer to Locque people as animals – it was rats back in one of the Arc 2 interludes, and now he’s calling Kay a snake and Cal a salamander. (more…)

• Read A Day of Faces for free here.
• Read this specific chapter here.
• Read all the writing notes here.

These middle chapters of Arc 3 are quite loosely defined in my plot document. I know where the arc is going, and I knew exactly how it was going to start. The mid-section is a little fuzzier and has some room to manouver.

Initially, the ‘truck ride’ was to last only a single chapter. In this chapter Kay, Marv and Furey would reach their destination. When it came to writing it, though, I decided that would make the truck journey a little too trivial and swift. I wanted it to feel uncomfortable and awkward and inconvenient, and that wasn’t really possible if it only lasted a single chapter. (more…)

• Read A Day of Faces for free here.
• Read this specific chapter here.
• Read all the writing notes here.

This is the first chance to spend a bit of time with Rose Furey, although we don’t discover much about her yet. This chapter and the next are primarily character pieces, giving Kay a bit of breathing room before we get back into the action.

An interesting aspect to Arc 3 is that we get to experience Future Earth from the point of view of Kay, which means having quite an outsider perspective on the society and its technology. Until now we’ve only really known about the Big Tech – the dimension turbine – but here we start to glimpse details such as the self-driving container truck. It’s an interesting challenge, having to introduce a futuristic science fiction world based on our own in addition – or in parallel – to the more fantastical world that the story has been primarily concerned with so far. (more…)

• Read A Day of Faces here.
• Read this specific chapter here.
• Read all the writing notes here.

Aha! All is revealed. Or, at least, what happened to Cal.

The funny thing about the Interlude chapters is that they were never part of the original plan. I added Interlude #1 into the first story arc as a way to add some additional intrigue to the growing sense of conspiracy, and to unsettle readers. Interludes 2 and 3 then served to established Wynton Simons as a genuine character, giving the Arc 2 finale more emotional heft than if he’d just been Generic Faceless Might-Be-A-Bad-Guy. (more…)

• Read A Day of Faces here.
• Read this specific chapter here.
• Read all the writing notes here.

And right here we have the setup for the rest of Arc 3. The previous two chapters were more about capping Arc 2, while ‘Flight’ sets us off in a new direction.

One thing I enjoyed about this one was juxtaposing the low key mundanity of a rustic farmhouse breakfast table with talk of rebellion. The Lynt family and their associates I was imagining in the vein of resistance fighters in 1940s France, operating behind a veil of normality. (more…)

Read A Day of Faces here. Read this specific chapter here. Read all the writing notes here. This one was unexpectedly tricky. I thought it’d be easy, because it’s action-heavy and action tends to be easier to write if anything, in my experience. Rather than have a standard chase sequence, Read more…

Read A Day of Faces here. Read this specific chapter here. Read all the writing notes here. I’ve done unexpected jump cuts between chapter previously and this takes it rather further, being entirely disconnected from where we left things in ‘Cortex’. Given that ‘Interdependence’ is the start of Arc 3, Read more…