A Day Of Faces (9 page)

This is one of those point-of-no-return chapters, which is going to have major ramifications in plot and character going forward. As such, it’s a little terrifying writing it as part of an on-going serial, without having tested the waters farther downstream.

Kay’s father is dead, and that’s going to shift things around substantially. My main concern is actually one of tone - the show’s been fairly light so far, despite a couple of gruesome moments, and throwing in something as dramatic as what happens in ‘Nurture’ takes things down a darker path. The trick now will be in retaining a pulpy sense of fun adventure while not shying away from the consequences.

Soundtrack: This chapter was written in a bit of a rushed haze, and as such I have no memory of what I was listening to. I’m sure it was exciting, though.

Interlude #1

Unexpected narrative shift! Unexpected not just for readers but also for me, as this was a rather late addition to the story. There’s a broader story going on in the background of ADoF which I wasn’t going to reveal until much farther down the line, but it occurred to me that ‘Nurture’ was such a good cliffhanger that it’d be good to string it out just a bit longer, while also ramping up the stakes a bit by glimpsing behind the curtain.

The idea is that ‘Interlude #1’ raises more questions than it answers. Stylistically it’s a departure as well, shifting to 3rd person, and riffing a little on the unnerving mundanity of that first scene in Cabin in the Woods.

The idea also is to make it entirely clear what exactly the motivations of these guys are, and whether they’re to be considered bad guys or friendly. Simultaneously, it raises a few red flags about Cal himself.

Who you gonna trust?

We’ll return to Kay and Cal next time…

Soundtrack: Witcher 3, still.

Adaptation

The previous chapter was called interlude but actually raised a whole bunch of questions. This chapter acts as more of a natural pause, following on from the events of Nurture but taking a deep breath before diving into the final episodes of this first series.

I’ve always rather liked cliffhangers which are resolved in slightly non-linear ways. It’s very easy to have a 1960s Batman-style “how will they escape!?” ending, followed up by a direct answering of that question. But I’ve always felt that makes the cliffhanger feel rather artificial, such that it may as well have not been there at all.

Instead, it’s far more interesting to jump time, or perspective, or something, so that the reader has a moment of dislocation, whereby they’re not immediately sure what happened after the cliffhanger. That’s what Adaptation is all about, as well as serving as a slight return to the very first chapter.

Of course, what this is also doing is delivering a bit of background exposition via the convenient professor character. Not subtle, but hey. It had to go in somewhere.

Soundtrack: The Portal 2 soundtrack. Quirky, weird, experimental. Hopefully a bit like this story.

Vision

This is one of those chessboard chapters, by which I mean it’s all about positioning the pieces just right. It’s setting up the series finale, which inherently involves a bit of exposition. The trick, therefore, is to do it in a way which is hopefully interesting and justifiable, without resorting to “As you know, Bob,” style clumsiness.

One way to sidestep that is to grab every opportunity possible to surround the exposition with authentic character reactions. Therefore we get to see Kay, Marv and Cal responding to the dialogue and events. The idea is to prevent the dialogue from simply being plot, and make sure it is working on other levels as well.

The big thing in ‘Vision’ is the introduction of spectres. I’d like to say that they were in the plan right from the start but, really - they popped into my head during the writing of this chapter. Or, at least, the specifics: natural camouflage was always going to be a theme in the story at some point. As with the other powers, though, it’s about exploring the practical consequences of these conditions, rather than simply presenting them as ‘powers’.

Invisible babies being lost? Genuinely freaks me out. Both this concept and a lot of the stuff in ‘Interlude #1’ have a lot of ‘me’ in them compared to the rest of the story.

Anyway, I kinda want to do a flashback episode set entirely during the time when spectres were common. Hmm.

Soundtrack: Deus Ex Human Revolution score, because it’s the sound of change.

Infection

Although there have 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’.

Lineage

After ‘Infection’s stealthy, heist-like shenanigans, ‘Lineage’ turns things up to 11 with a full-on shoot-out.

Something that’s become a bit of a stylistic theme of A Day of Faces is having little mini time-jumps between each chapter, so that the cliffhanger from the previous instalment doesn’t get immediately resolved. It’s usually a chance to inject a bit of Kay’s personality into the narrative, or some additional detail which would otherwise get run over by the plot.

Hence we don’t see how they all got back together, or how Kay and Marv managed to get up the remaining floors and up into the Aviary itself. That stuff might have been pretty cool, but it would also have just been a continuation of ‘Infection’s action sequence, without really adding anything new into the mix. Better to skip forwards to when something interesting is happening, and infer what came in-between.

Something I was acutely aware of by now is that there’s a number of unanswered questions, with more coming in every episode. Hopefully I’m doing it in a way which is fun and intriguing, rather than drawn-out and frustrating. Time will tell.

The big entrance at the end fairly obviously links back to the character of Holt from ‘Interlude #1’. Originally this would have been Holt’s first appearance, as ‘Interlude #1’ was a last minute addition to the story, providing a diversion into stuff that isn’t going to resolve itself for a while. It changes the entrance of the scarred man in ‘Lineage’ from being completely out-of-the-blue into something more intriguing - it’s still not entirely clear where the characters from ‘Interlude #1’ fit in, but the puzzle’s starting to reveal itself.

That’s the idea, anyway.

Soundtrack: Repeating myself, but you can’t beat the Matrix scores for writing this kinda stuff.

Apex Predator

‘Apex Predator’ marks the big finale for the first ‘story arc’ of A Day of Faces. If this was a book, it’d be the end of part one. If it were a comic, this’d be volume one’s conclusion. If it were a TV show, this would be the final episode of the season.

Instead, it’s an online serial, so I’m not entirely sure of the terminology. Bear with me on that one.

There’s two things I want to reference here. The first is the computer game Deus Ex - the original, from way back in 2000 (or thereabouts). It was a sprawling epic, traversing multiple continents through a very twisty-turny plot. Crucially, though, by the time you got to the end of the game you could look back and see the incredible path you’ve been on, and marvel at just how much had changed. The journey itself made you catch your breath.

Deus Ex isn’t unique in that, obviously, but it’s a particularly acute example that’s always stuck with me. All good stories have a plot that goes somewhere or characters which change during the story. If you get to the end of something and everything still feels very status quo, it feels like you’ve been wasting your time.

Thus, hopefully by the time you get to the end of ‘Apex Predator’, and think back to what was happening in ‘Generation’ at the start of the series, it’ll feel like you and the characters have gone on a legit and unexpected adventure. That’s one feeling I wanted to invoke.

The other one is exemplified by the conclusion to season 1 of the 90s TV show Babylon 5. In that episode, ‘Chrysalis’, the show completely pulls out the rug, redefining itself in the process. It’s not just an exciting finale, with everything back to normal by the start of season 2. It has proper ramifications, and things are never the same again. You have a sense that things will be different from now onwards.

‘Apex Predator’ should have that feeling in spades, if I’ve done my job right.

This experiment of writing a weekly serial has been really thrilling, and I hope the results are worth your reading time.

How to write an online serial

I don’t claim to be an authority on this topic, given that A Day of Faces was and is my first attempt at such a thing. What follows is a collection of tips based on my own experience.

Why online?

Self-publishing in any form used to be considered a joke; something only failed writers did to create their own vanity projects. Back in the 90s, before the internet properly took hold of the mainstream, perhaps this had an occasional element of truth. Arranging a print run for your own book and pushing it into bookstores when agents and publishers had rejected your work took a certain amount of ego. That’s why it’s been called the vanity press.

Fast forward to now and the landscape is entirely different. Self-publishing isn’t the same thing as it was back then - pre-internet, self-publishing was a way to bypass or combat the traditional publishing industry. These days, it’s simply another part of the broader creator movement. Self-publishing for a writer is no different to a filmmaker putting their work on YouTube or Vimeo, or an artist showing their work on DeviantArt, or a photographer exploring Instagram, 500px and Flickr.

That comparison goes both ways. YouTube is full of absolutely terrible videos. It’s also home to incredible short films and creative teams like Corridor Digital, who release hugely innovative videos almost every week. Amateur filmmakers have forged professional careers based on their YouTube channels.

Online self-publishing is the same. There’s an almost infinite amount of crap, sure, but you’ll also find a range of incredible work available for free. The next generation of professional writers are emerging from this scene.

It’s a mistake to think of online self-publishing as competition for traditional publishing (on shelves or digital). Just as YouTube doesn’t stop people from going to the cinema or watching television, self-publishing online has turned into something different (although it should be noted that young viewers are increasingly choosing YouTube as their primary platform, above scheduled TV - in sharp contrast to previous generations).

Basically, don’t be embarrassed at the thought of publishing online. It doesn’t mean you failed to get published traditionally - it just means you’re going a different route. And hey - there are more and more stories of self-publishing also leading to traditional publishing success, so one doesn’t negate the other.

The most important thing is that you’ll be getting your work in front of readers. Prior to online self-publishing, if you didn’t get a traditional book deal it basically meant that you work would never reach beyond friends and family, save for occasional genre magazines. You either had to be a full-on professional novelist, or you were nothing. These days, you can choose your own level of involvement. If you have an urge to write but no particular desire to make a living from your work, you still have the potential to reach hundreds or thousands of readers.

Why serialised?

In this context, I’m defining serialisation as being a regular stream of content, spreading a story out over a long period rather than releasing it as a single entity. Although you’re reading the ebook collection of Arc 1 of A Day of Faces, the story started life as a weekly serial published online.

Serialising avoids the
curse of endless editing
. Many unpublished writers, myself included, have used the excuse of “I’m working on a novel” for far too long. The manuscript has sat around on a hard drive for years, making only minor progress. You tell yourself that it still needs editing, that it’s not ready, and a decade later it’s still not been seen by eyes other than yours. Perhaps it’s a fear of releasing it into the wild, or you simply don’t ever find the time to dedicate amongst the other important things in your life - job, family, pub.