Final Chapter

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After Ward, I stated my general plan to do shorter serials, and one big reason I was doing that was the lower level of investment on my part.  So soon after Ward, I didn’t want to commit to something epic length and experience the same issues that had plagued Ward from start to finish.  Then Pale ended up being really nice to write, and I decided to go with it.

Claw, as it happened, ended up being a chance to try that shorter serial experiment.  Things with the artist fell through but I also didn’t feel like my ideas for Project S were quite there.  Plus I was just really busy, having just moved & had it been a disaster on arrival.  I had a few goals going in.  One was to show myself I could write something shorter.  I’ve had discussions with agents who’ve floated the idea of pitching something at a publishing company, and knowing I can write something more compact is nice, if it comes down to it.

For much the same reason I didn’t want to write Worm and Wormverse stuff forever, despite its initial success, I felt like I should also shake off other habits and tendencies, besides length.  It felt like I should, and a short serial made sense as a time to do it.  It gave me a chance to examine why I write certain things, and see my writing naked.

It’s for this reason, I think, that a lot of writing teachers and professors ask students not to write fantasy or sci-fi.  It strips things bare.  There’s merit in that; it’s rare I’ve had as visceral a reaction to a chapter as I’ve had to Ripley’s.  It lands harder than fates worse than death, because it’s more real.  Something people can empathize with.

The drawback, however, is that it was harder to write.  I was the kid who, sitting at the dinner table, drawing on the back of used printer paper, drew endless monsters.  I’m, as a middle aged guy, still very fond of monsters.  I like magic, powers, and magic systems.  I definitely hit some walls with certain chapters (especially near the end) where I normally would have given my characters a chance to pull out little-used tools, be inventive with what they had, and let loose, and those tools weren’t there.  There were several chapters I wrote from scratch three or four times.  They tended to get pretty good receptions once I got there, but getting there was painful.  I can see a world where I could go back to edit some confrontations, to make them more interesting.

While I was shaking that stuff off and seeing how it felt to work without the powers and monsters, I was also shaking off, for lack of a better word, idealism.  Writing Ward, with a heroic main character, and then Pale, with three young characters trying to do good, it adds a pressure.  That pressure mounts when, honestly, even trying to write morally good characters will see a chunk of the readership deeply dissatisfied.  Little things get a lot of attention.  Especially when stakes are high and characters have power, and my stories tend to deal with broken worlds that need people with power and opportunity to fix them, the audience puts a lot of expectations on those characters and care a lot when those characters have any failings at all.

Sidenote: MDFification wrote an interesting treatise on Canadian Politics and how my own (often unwitting) Canadian attitudes toward government, politics, and power shaped Pale, here. Obvious Pale spoilers.  But ties into what I talk about above.  We all have blind spots.  I didn’t consider how my Canadianness might’ve impacted some things.

Writing Mia (and various other elements of the main cast) was a chance to go back to what I did in Worm, and write someone with strong views, while shucking off certain expectations about being good and doing good in favor of a character who creates her own standard for ‘good’ (as most do).  Similarly, I wrote the setting as one that was unforgiving on its own, one that doesn’t try for a standard of ‘good’.  More on setting shortly.

And, while I was experimenting, it was interesting getting to write some adult characters.  I think it’s my tendency to write adults as people who have ‘locked in’ certain views, attitudes, and roles, where it’s a lot of work to change course, especially as life gets in the way.  Maybe this isn’t wholly fair, and, in retrospect, a short serial gives very little room for characters to have full arcs when they’re naturally stubborn.  But, on the other hand, it’s nice to write different kinds of character, where competence doesn’t have people piping up to say “But remember, this character is eleven”, and where characters can be openly sexual and interested in sex without that ‘squick’ sentiment running in the background.

Overall, talking about it purely as an experiment, I’m glad I wrote Claw and especially glad I wrote it as something short.  Had it run long, I think the grimness of it would have worn on the audience, and I would have struggled more with the mundane elements of it.  Maybe characters could’ve had fuller arcs, as I said, or some plotlines could’ve been expanded, but still.  Shaking myself like a muddy dog and feeling lighter afterward.

So.

Setting-wise, what I really wanted here was something comfortably dark (by my personal standard of comfort, mind).  I wanted a setting with its own feel, and I think in setting the mountains on fire to start with, then introducing other elements, I got there.  On a level, it’s hell.  Fire, smoke, riot, bodies, blood, the Fall, the descent into the personalized hell Mia has made for herself.

But it’s a hell we’ve created, collectively, that, as many readers noted, was a very short distance from the real world.  Some details changed, a few things went a little worse, a few elections tilted the other way.

The tricky thing is when we bring kids into such a world.  Ripley, Tyr, and Sterling don’t deserve to have to deal with what they deal with.  Valentina vacillates between adult and child, and finds herself in the final chapter.  How do our characters deal with that?

I also wanted this to be a setting where all the action movies are implied to have happened, but that’s more for fun.  As much as it’s a setting where you can have Beekeepers and bioweapon attacks on the superbowl in the background, I thought it was very important to have someone that wasn’t one of the porn actors or porn actresses of the competency porn (what Mia would call the 10%) be the one to decide the final confrontation.

I must have rewritten that chapter ten times, trying to strike the right notes.

This ended up being a serial where I cornered myself, a lot, and that might be the aspect that sticks with me most, over the long run.  While writing Worm I mentioned a few times that I’d written situations with no idea how characters would get out of them.  That was a thing I did a lot here, and do a lot by habit, but with no magic or powers to give characters a natural toolbox, it became really tricky.  But I also cornered myself with setting constraints, and by having certain moving parts.

How do you write a story with the Mia-Natalie debate happening, without being horribly insensitive to the victims of residential schools, adopted kids, or a half dozen other people?  While being true to the characters?

How do you write someone like Natalie finding the ‘mama bear’ strength to decide the final confrontation, without it being too much of an anticlimax?

How do you thread the needle in a resolution, when different factions of the readerbase will heavily empathize with different characters, or hate their guts?

There are probably a dozen other questions that are escaping me, but it’s late and I want to release this sooner than later.  That feeling of cornering myself and feeling cornered has been something that’s been on my mind for a few years.  The morality stuff above and how people get very invested (which is good) and very upset (which is bad) at the failings of the character/story is part of it.

I’ve said this before, but when you write, everything you write earns.  Write a lot, and you’ll eventually, hopefully, end up with enough new audience finding you that it replaces or exceeds the people who drop away.  But by that same token, you create a growing list of things that pay in negativity.  Write one problematic thing in 2012 and you may well hear about it 52 weeks a year from 2012 all the way to 2024.  It creates that pressure, that feeling of being cornered.  Are you accounting for every variable?  Are you watching everything you write?  Are you being inclusive?  Are you being fair?  Considering implications?  Are you minding your typos?

But quick, while you’re considering all of that, write well.  Write something different enough than what you’ve written before, write something fun, that sparks discussion.  Write fast enough.

Eventually you hit a point where you have to sacrifice something on some front.  Part of why I slowed down some.

Writing Ward, I think I felt like I had dogs chasing me and nipping at my heels throughout, and made decisions that affected the story for the worse.  I was weary at the end.

Pale was freeing because I was writing something I loved.

With Claw I was writing something where I said ‘fuck it’ and threw myself to the dogs, knowing it was a shorter serial and mistakes wouldn’t count as much.  It’s a dark setting that’s mean as hell to everyone involved.  There’s a freedom to that too.

As an experiment and a palate cleanser (at least for myself), I’m okay with that.

Speaking of experiments…  my next serial will also be a bit of an experiment.

Despite our best efforts, few survived faster than light travel.  None survived the trip back.  So we took a different approach altogether.  We started bringing the universe to us.

There’s no point.  We’ve solved it.  Everything humanity needs, it has.  We’ve reached the finish line.

There’s no point.  What hasn’t changed in the last four hundred years won’t change in our lifetimes.

There’s no point.  Turn off the lights, close your eyes, and cover your ears, nightmares come manifest.

Three storylines from three individuals, worlds and eras apart.

Placeholder banner.  I’ve commissioned header art from Syd, who won a Pale fanart contest and who did the snowdrop sweatshirts for the All Pact Up 2 livestream.

It starts in two weeks, and announcements will go up on all story sites, this one included.