- Read A Day of Faces for free here.
- Read this specific chapter here.
- Read all the writing notes here.
The writing conditions for this chapter was about as sub-optimal as could be. The day had been one of remortgaging phone calls and negotiations, culminating in a one and half hour session online which ended in the bank’s website crashing and losing all the data.
Needless to say, I was as far from ‘the zone’ as I’d even been. I was sorely tempted to delay the chapter and publish it the following day, on a Tuesday. I figured it’d be the best thing for the book, as I’d be able to clear my head and re-focus.
But that’s not the point of A Day of Faces. There’s two goals to the project:
- Write a high quality, entertaining serialised novel which people enjoy.
- Prove to myself that I can stick to a schedule, publish quality material every week, and stick to a plan.
Letting the arc 3 finale slip a day would mean a big failure of that second goal. And what if something came up on Tuesday evening that prevented me from getting to the keyboard?
So I put on some loud music, plugged in and started tapping out words. And at first it was excruciatingly slow progress, as I tried to find the shape of the chapter. I knew the bones of the story here but not the specifics of what happened on the Peak, and in my tired state I started to run through all kinds of options. I actually considered having Marv and Furey jump away, accidentally leaving Kay behind to be captured. That would have been exciting and a great cliffhanger finale, but would have derailed arc 4 too much.
Anyway, about halfway through I got into the groove and ended up going over the average of chapter word counts. It’s a far less complex finale than arc 2’s big action sequence but what it has in common with both previous arc finales is that it fundamentally shakes things up and sets up the next arc to be something completely different.
Soundtrack: Mad Max: Fury Road, because it focuses me like nothing else.
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