Introduction
I started writing A Day of Faces in April 2015. It seemed like a good idea to experiment with online serialisation of a novel. Although I’d been publishing videos professionally online for years, I’d never embraced it for my fiction writing. That seemed like something of a mistake.
It’s no coincidence that I attended SXSW in Austin the month prior. A festival of creativity and innovation, being there for a week inevitably reconfigures your mind into one that needs to make stuff.
The handful of short stories I’d put online, first on my blog and then on Wattpad, hadn’t found any kind of readership. That’s to be expected, given I had no notable presence online as a fiction writer. One-off stories were never going to attract much attention. Serialisation was an experiment worth conducting; not just for the potential of building an audience but also as a means of generating my own momentum.
As with most unpublished writers, I’ve got a couple of half-finished novels floating around on my hard drive. The challenge as a writer, I find, is staying firm on a project, especially once the first draft is down and you need to go back and edit. The excitement of the story’s initial birth rapidly dissipates, turning it into more of a job than a joy.
I’ve realised since writing A Day of Faces that this is in large part because nobody knows the work exists. Stories are supposed to be read, or watched, or listened to. The longer a story stays in gestation, caged on a lone computer, the more disgruntled it becomes. Serialisation gets the work out there immediately, and starts building an audience from the first day. As the project progresses it gains momentum rather than loses it, as more and more readers become engaged. As a writer, suddenly, you’re not alone.
A Day of Faces publishes weekly on Wattpad. As of right now I’m over halfway through Arc 2 of the story - what you have in this ebook is Arc 1, collected into a convenient format and bundled with a ton of additional material. You’ll find behind-the-scenes notes as well as in-universe lore stuff, if that’s your bag. I’ve tried to pack the ebook with as much extra gubbins as possible, to make it worth that purchase price.
Thank you, by the way.
Finally, I should say thanks to Erin Patel and Kirstie Tostevin. The original spark for the ADoF idea came from a conversation with them one lunchtime while working at FXHOME. Daft conversations can take you to unexpected places.
Another massive benefit of publishing online is the feedback loop. Just because this is an ebook doesn’t change that - so let me know what you think, good or bad, by finding me on Twitter. You can also sign up to the ADoF mailing list so that you don’t miss out on anything cool, like the publication of Arc 2.
Simon K Jones
04/10/2015