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…)
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…)
Last weekend I jumped on a train and headed down to London to check out the Wattpad LondonCon. As with most things Wattpad this year it was an exercise in exploring the unknown and, much like writing A Day of Faces and taking part in the Story Fair, it was a resounding success.
The event was held on the top floor of the Foyles bookshop. Somehow in my 35 years I’d never heard of Foyles, much less visit the place. It’s six floors of book heaven which reminds you of how much we lose if we shop only through Amazon and co. They really seem to have nailed what a large, physical bookstore has to do in order to stay relevant in the 21st century. As a reader and writer, entering Foyles is less like going into a shop and more like stepping into a temple or church. (more…)
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…)
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…)
I joined Wattpad a couple of years ago – I forget exactly when – and published my first story on July 14th 2014. That story has had 13 ‘reads’. I didn’t start using Wattpad properly until May 2015, when I started writing and publishing A Day of Faces, my on-going weird sci-fi serial.
In September I tentatively took part in something called the Story Fair, run via Facebook by a handful of far more established Wattpad authors (who have tens of thousands of readers between them). That event brought in a whole bunch of extra readers and also unexpectedly got me involved with the upcoming Wattpad Block Party, which is going to happen in February. You can find out about the event here. (more…)
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…)
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…