A Day Of Faces (8 page)

We arced about, closing in on Marv. Cal reached out and grasped Marv firmly with his other arm, pulling us all in close. Air buffeted my eyes and nose and ears and I could feel my sinuses streaming. The floor was coming up real fast now.

Cal tilted his wings and we slowly moved out of freefall, slowing our speed and moving into a controlled descent. As we neared the ground, Cal flapped his wings, pushing down on the air and giving us some last minute lift.

We landed in a heap, rolling down a rocky outcrop for a while before coming, finally, to rest. I lay panting, face down, trying to get my breath back. I finally mustered the courage to push myself up into a seated position. The sky was red and dusty. Some of the geography seemed vaguely familiar but there was no city, no people, no nothing.

Just me, a shapeshifter and a one-armed Marv.

I gave Cal a look.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he began.

And he was right. I didn’t.

ARC 1 APPENDICES

Spoiler warning

The rest of this ebook contains a whole bunch of behind-the-scenes information about A Day of Faces. There shouldn’t be anything in here which spoils Arc 2 onwards, but you probably don’t want to read any of the following until you’ve read the preceding.

However, if you’ve just finished reading Arc 1 (did you like it?) and would like to know a bit about how it came to be, read on…

Arc 2 preview

Assuming you enjoyed reading Arc 1, you now have two choices.

The first is to head over to Wattpad, where you can start reading Arc 2 right away. Wattpad is a free platform for writing and reading - think of it a little like YouTube for literature (with all the positive and negative connotations that may suggest).
You can find A Day of Faces by clicking here.
Wattpad is free but you will need to sign up to read stuff.

Alternatively, Arc 2 should be completed and published in a similar collected form to this ebook before the end of 2015. Keep an eye on Amazon or
sign up to my mailing list thing
if you want me to let you know what’s going on.

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.