Ramblings: On Writing Chapter Four (Patreon)

After this ramble I'll share Chapter Four. I'm calling this a "sneak peek" rather than a "publish" because I'm not quite happy with it. Or rather, I am happy with it, except for the ending. I considering ways of tweaking the end of the chapter, or possibly adding in another short scene - possibly a jump to another character (unlikely, as it breaks the 1st person narrative) or another flashback - possibly Tom, as he's been too absent from the the story so far. At the moment, I don't like the abrupt was it ends.

Chapter Four was my return to writing Constant after over a decade away. I can remember starting to write again, very hesitantly, at my desk one day after work. I had David in a cafe waiting to meet Julia. I got caught up in descriptions of the cafe, of the mirrors. I was reaching for something about identity and how we perceive ourselves embedded in the setting, and I think at this point Constant was becoming something different than what it started as.

(That cafe, originally named Sporus after Nero's forced cross-dressing Empress, is now cafe d'Eon, after the better-known cross-dressing spy. Sporus gets used elsewhere, in the Interlude, as the code-name for the fungus-based prosthetics science project. I couldn't resist the "spore" pun.)

For one thing, the world had changed--a lot--between stopping at the end of chapter 3 (around 2008 or so) and starting chapter 4 (around 2022 or so). We'd just (sort of) come out of a global pandemic. Mobile and smart technology was everywhere. AI was (and is) on the rise. Climate change went from a background awareness to front page news. The language and discourse around trans-ness had moved along considerably. And the "near-future world" I'd imagined in book one was... now.

So I pushed the "near future" back a few more decades, and I think this is where the world building started for Constant. The first hints of it are here: the oppressive temperature outside, and the first hints of a more patriarchal, oppressive political and working culture, alongside a few future-tech references.

I apologise for the... arrogance? but I'm pretty proud of chapter 4. I think it's fairly well written, especially considering the 14-year-or-so gap between chapters. It was terrifying putting fingers to keyboard after such a long break, and the initial writing was excrutiatingly slow (probably best I didn't keep a word count log back then!) and I had serious doubts about what I was doing, whether I ought to bother and whether anyone would want to read it after such a long break.

We're two years and about 100k words beyond that now. Chapter six is half done, and (nearly) the entire run of Constant's been revised and brought up to date and republished. I've also been able to launch this Patreon, which has played, I think, a major part in keeping the stort going.

As for chapter four itself? When I first introduced Julia in 2008, I didn't think she'd end up playing such a big part. She was intended as a foil for David, someone to enhance the perceived humiliation of his predicament by knowing who he used to be. I didn't quite expect her to become a major character, a sort of book two replacement for K; the deepening relationship between David and her has been fun to explore and develop.

And while there's a shift in the style of writing, I feel as though the first signs of that were apparent as far back as chapter 2, grew in the third chapter and matured somewhat in chapter 4. Pacing has suffered a bit--the growing word count of each chapter is a pretty clear indication that I've grown more verbose--probably too much so--but I also feel it's added to the depth of character and setting. And rereading all this as part of the edit, I was pleased that it didn't read like a different story; despite the time gap, David's voice feels fairly consistent, allowing for the evolution in character after months of living as Cindy. If he's more introspective and aware of his surroundings in the later chapters, it's as much to do with changes to the character as it is to changes in the writer.

Well, speaking of being verbos, this ramble's long enough. Thanks for indulging me; revised chapter 4 incoming imminently.