Afterword

This book is the longest thing I’ve ever written! Some thanks are in order:

Thanks to the readers for their votes, comments and reviews.

Thanks to Vaiaphraim for being a sounding board and helping me to get unstuck.

Thanks to my wife for her work as a first reader and editor, and for always wanting to know what happens next.

Now for some reflections about the book and season 2. They might be useful for anyone who wants to write something similar. They might just be self-indulgent rambling.

Characters

Nine is a lot of main characters! Actually, I’m happy with how distinct they all ended up. I based them on the enneagram, the idea that everyone is driven by one of nine core fears. It made them easy to write and easy to develop conflict organically. Was there a character you particularly related to? You might be that type!

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my own type, four, won. It’s easiest to write about and explore your own weaknesses. Faust basically begun as an exaggerated self-insert, like a parody of myself, until he turned into a critique of depression meme culture. So, authors, if you want to make an interesting character, don’t be afraid to bare the darkest parts of yourself, the flaws you’ve grappled with all your life. That kind of honesty makes a character feel real.

But, inevitably, nine characters is too many, and I think it threw a lot of prospective readers off. The POV swaps in the first 10,000 words are just begging to frustrate readers. You start with Haralda and some people nope out when it switches to Tarquin, cause it’s not a straightforward narrative. Others stick around and grow to love Team Shame, want to see them fight the ostrich when suddenly it switches and there’s three more motherfuckers to introduce in one paragraph!

It basically filters out people who can’t tolerate weird shit in their fiction… but I still feel like it’s asking too much of readers. So maybe in season 2 we won’t have the Democratisation of Reality, and the characters might not know they need to be interesting per se. A straightforward adventure.

Eight characters in one room also made it pretty difficult to write. I ended up with thousands of words of them just standing around and talking before I could get into the point of the story – which was to explore their relationships with the people behind the phone calls.

For season two, then: six/seven characters. Three teams of two plus a lone antihero, all working against each other to achieve a concrete objective. And while they might cross paths occasionally, I don’t ever want to have them all in the same room at once!

Voting

It was great fun to read everybody’s votes, and it’s taught me a lot of lessons about character writing (the aim of this was just to practise getting better at characters, hence setting and plot kinda fell by the wayside). I can identify two main issues with the system.

Issue one: characters who still had their story to go were favoured over characters whose arc was complete. It makes total sense, of course – readers don’t want to feel like they’ve missed out on something. The problem, then, was the structure of the story. Because Saheel had to wait for Eirlys to finish her story, Eirlys died before Saheel (I hated Saheel).

The obvious solution is to have character arcs run in parallel, and this means story beats need to tightly adhere to the 10,000 word cut-off. I’m thinking that writing an adventure story rather than a mystery story will help out in that respect. This means no dark pasts (kinda) and shared backstories for each team. Rather than letting the narrative roll on and on, each chapter needs to end with a good resolution, like an episode of a TV show. I’m thinking that will bring the emphasis back to voting for characters rather than plot.

Issue two: reader tears. I didn’t realise I was writing a tragedy until the readers got attached to the characters! Definitely towards the end the majority didn’t want to vote, even though they knew what they were getting into when they clicked on the story title. I couldn’t go back on the original premise or it would seem cheap, and I think the story is all the better for it, BUT it only makes sense for season 2 to add the option not to kill anybody.

Season 2

I’ll be posting it under the title ‘A straightforward adventure but every 10,000 words the audience kills the least interesting hero.’ I want to build up a backlog for the first 9,000 so I can post it all at once and get some traction, as well as polish the first chapter to perfection (really insecure about dat attrition rate). Basically, it’ll be out within 1-2 weeks.

On scribblehub, you can ‘follow’ me as an author to get a bell when I post it. I don’t think this is possible on RR or reddit, and I can’t be arsed to build a mailing list or anything, so maybe just post a comment underneath and I’ll PM you when it’s up? Seems the easiest solution.

What do you think?

To help me write better books, I’d love to hear your thoughts or answer any of your questions. Even if it’s just something you liked!

With that, I leave you with this teaser: