Chapter notes

 

A Day of Faces is published weekly on Wattpad. Arc 1, which you have in collected form here, was published during the summer of 2015. At the same time as publishing the story I was also blogging about its progress. The following notes are updated versions of those behind-the-scenes blog posts.

You can find more of this sort of thing on my website at simonkjones.com.

 

Generation

A Day Of Faces grew out of a simple, daft “what if?” concept: what would happen if everybody born on the same day looked the same? It’s since become something a bit more complicated but that’s still the central idea.

And it’s still very daft. But that’s kinda what I’m after with this, coming off the back of an extremely lengthy and precise writing process for what became a novelette called ‘Millennium Surfing’. That is hard(ish) sci-fi, and with A Day Of Faces I wanted to do something entirely different and have a bit of fun.

‘Generation’ is a gentle intro to the world. You get a few hints about how it works, and it’s all done very deliberately nonchalantly, with throwaway descriptions of horns and tentacles. It’s meant to pique your interest without diving too far down the rabbit hole.

In terms of inspiration, I had two things in mind at this point:

The film American Graffiti was slightly influencing the anachronistic setting and the portrayal of some of the characters. This world is meant to feel off-kilter, like an irrational blend of multiple genres and periods.

The bigger influence is Brian K Vaughn’s comic SAGA, which is currently my joint-favourite Thing To Be Reading (along with Kieron Gillen’s The Wicked + The Divine, of which more another time). SAGA embraces its own weirdness while maintaining an internal logic and resolutely refuses to explain its bizarre creatures (so far) and that was definitely an attitude I wanted to try to replicate with ADoF.

‘Generation’ is a gentle intro, with the next part diving into the deep end.

 

Soundtrack: Almost Grown by Chuck Berry

 

Survival of the fittest

Having the word/phrase definitions at the start of each chapter wasn’t planned as such - it just seemed fun at the start, and I’m now kinda stuck with it, at least until the end of the arc. Got to keep some kind of consistency, right?

So there’s the thing: I’m planning this out, loosely, on season arcs. Although I’m mostly writing by the seat of my pants, there is an idea of where this is going. There is direction and purpose.

That’s mainly because unformed stories always reveal their ignorance to the audience. Even the knowledge that writers are making it up as they go can undermine a story’s worth. Novels and movies are inherently completed by the time you see them: when you start reading a novel, you know that it’s been finished, and that it is as the author intended (for better or worse), because you’re holding it in your hands.

Television, comics and other serialised forms don’t always have that luxury, and it often undermines their storytelling authority. Take Battlestar Galactica, which hung its plot on the antagonists “having a plan”. As the show reached into its third season it became apparent that the writers didn’t actually have a plan, and were in fact backing themselves into a corner. It remained a well-produced show, but its ending was never truly satisfying.

Let’s not even bother getting into LOST.

Contrast with Babylon 5, a show which was planned from start to finish, over five years of TV storytelling. It didn’t go entirely according to plan due to actors leaving and networks meddling, but it had purpose, and knew what it was doing. Importantly, you knew when watching season one that the creators already knew what would happen in season five, giving everything a connective resonance that added up to more than the sum of its parts. They might not have made those episodes yet, but they existed in the creator’s head.

So, with chapter two of this arc of A Day of Faces, I already had a vague idea of where the story would end up in Arc 4. It wasn’t mapped out in huge detail, but the broad strokes were there.

‘Survival of the fittest’ is about expanding the world more, encountering more genotypes, showing that these people live pretty normal lives. It’s also about finding a way to use the word ‘nictitated’.

 

Soundtrack: Let’s go with anything by Nine Inch Nails. That’s what they’d listen to at the Jasmine.

 

Prey

Action is always easier to write. That’s why the word count on chapter 3, ‘Prey’, is almost double that of the previous two sections.

After the gentle everyday stuff (plus weird science fantasy gubbins) of the first two chapters, this is where we first catch a glimpse of what will become the main plot.

Having every single character be super-powered is an interesting writing challenge. From a social point of view, it results in a society in which powers aren’t special. The culture has already adapted - hence the police are equipped to handle all kinds of convoluted threats.

It also means that sequences such as this one are pretty fun, with different characters countering and negating the abilities of others. This is still a pretty simple introduction to that kind of stuff - I’m intending to have some truly crazy action later in the arc.

By this point the anachronistic nature of the setting should be extremely apparent, with familiar elements mixing in with the fantastical stuff. That’s not just there to be contrary: it has purpose.

 

Soundtrack: Can’t remember what I was listening to when writing this one, so let’s just go with A Change is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke. Listen to it while imagining the whole chapter playing out silently in slow motion. Go on.

 

Alpha

This was all about racing to catch up with the publishing schedule, while assaulted on all sides by unavoidable crap things.

So on top of a hectic work schedule, I had a blocked sinus/cold thing which developed into a full-blown migraine, a child with chicken pox, an eye inflammation…you get the idea. Nothing too awful, but lots of things which add up to not really being in quite the right state of mind for writing.

None of this would have mattered if I’d kept up with the 2-3 chapter buffer that I started with. You know, the one that I then let immediately erode, such that I’m now writing each week to publish the week after. Not ideal. Hopefully I’ll be able to speed up and build up that buffer again soon.17 This is the first time I’ve tried serialised releases, and publishing a story before I’ve finished writing the whole thing.

It’s kinda nerve-wracking.

Anyway - Alpha is a big one as it connects Kay with another very important character, and starts to bring in what will become the main plot.

Mostly, though, it’s about Kay and her house and parents. It’s about finding out where she comes from, which will go on to inform her actions down the line. Before things really kick off, it’s important to know who she is when things aren’t kicking off.

The cemetery out the back of the house was originally the car park of a supermarket. I went back and forth on that one for a while (they’re more-or-less the same thing, right?), but eventually went for the more gothic option. Not least because my own house has a cemetery right out the back and, you know - write what you know.

Still enjoying dropping in little snippets of information about the different genotypes in this universe. The fun is in presenting it as being utterly normal. It’s that nonchalance which is hopefully making it entertaining and amusing to read.

 

Soundtrack: I listened to Star 6 & 7 8 9 by The Orb while writing this. Ambient electronica is good for writing.

 

Morphology

Cal was originally going to be entirely delirious, and remain injured for a long while. The idea of having the injury fall off along with the wings came about during the writing.

That also, typically, put a spanner in the works for the following episode, which then required a bit of shuffling. That’s something which got a bit hairy with this episode: juggling the long-term story while in the middle of publishing it. It’s an interesting feeling, being locked into a certain path due to the chapters already released, while still being open to alternatives down the line - but not having much time to iterate or test things out.

This chapter was fun to write because it’s all about setting up genre tropes, then subverting. It’s a little mini-joke, with the punchline being Kay’s general attitude.18 It’s also pretty much a line in the sand, given the potential for dubious furry fan fiction within this world. That ain’t gonna happen.

 

Soundtrack: Wolfstack Lights (Sunless Sea score) by Mickymar Productions, and Epsilon Indi (Starbound score) by Curtis Schweitzer

 

Nature

Interesting thing here is that it’s the first time that I changed something after publishing.

The mention of ‘slushy romance novels’ was originally about kids’ adventure books. It felt wrong when I first wrote it, so I tweaked it, and it still didn’t quite seem right. I published it anyway. First comment I got back was that the juxtaposition of Kay’s thoughts at the window with the books she read as a kid was a bit weird. Obviously, in hindsight.

Now, if that had been the intention, I’d have left it. Done deliberately, that would introduce all kinds of interesting aspects to Kay’s personality. But that wasn’t what the scene was supposed to be about, so it got yanked and replaced with the slushy romance novels, which brings it back to the point I was originally trying to make.

It’s an example of the Wattpad publishing process being embraced, with post-release patches to published material. Subsequent readers will only ever see the patched version. Wattpad and its ilk bring the publishing of fiction much closer, from a distribution perspective, to that of software. Even in ebook format, I can still update the ebook for readers at any time.

I mean, sure, print books are often tweaked or corrected in subsequent printings. But the initial run containing the errors will always be out there. With Wattpad, nobody would ever know, if I hadn’t written these notes.

It’s great and awful. Great because it lets the writer finesse the work ad infinitum. And awful because it obfuscates the writing process, and makes the cultural timeline really blurred. That’s probably a bigger topic for another time.

 

Soundtrack: The Witcher 3 soundtrack. Mainly because the game had just come out and I was entirely obsessed. Though it did add a certain sense of pace to the writing.

 

Nurture

The specifics of the fight in this chapter remained fluid even as I wrote it. Originally the actual fighting was going to be more protracted and ‘actiony’, rather than a mostly accidental flailing about with lots of accidental injury. But, really, ADoF isn’t about cool, heavily orchestrated fighting. It’s more about stumbling around and trying not to get hit.

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.