I started Wake-up Call on September 2020.
That’s also when I finished it.
No, this isn’t a metaphorical thing. No pseudo-Zen, mind-bending statement about the end containing the beginning and viceversa: this was a silly one-shot that I wrote with no intention at all of following up on it. It was quickly followed by a Dragonlance, Kitiara-focused, one-shot, of all things, thus proving once and for all just how good I am at the business side of being a writer. At that point, I mostly meant to pad out my main thread over on QQ with a few short stories that I had running around in my head, maybe get a couple of series started that I would use to train myself in the skills I thought I was lacking the most in, and…
Well…
I definitely did that, didn’t I?
The history of Wake-up Call and how it took me two years and a half to get to the end of a story that had been finished from the start is very much my history as a writer from that point on. I was by no means new to the craft; I’ve both a piece of paper saying I’m qualified to write for television (lies—filthy, filthy lies) and around a decade of experience writing sex games for somebody else’s business.
That meant that, at that point in time, I knew dialogue. I lived and breathed it.
I just lacked about everything else.
Most of those erotic games came with a pre-built plot that I had to write around. The graphics were already rendered, and my creative freedom was mostly about how to phrase things to get those pictures to become characters. There was no room for dialogue tags or even too much description, and I wasn’t allowed to plot the actual story beyond having the characters allude to things that weren’t in the graphics so that I could feel like I was fleshing the world out.
This was… frustrating, to say the least, but also very valuable training. It means that, whenever Lisa or Taylor drop a line that hints at things not shown, I am very much leaning on those lessons. Lessons that I’m grateful to have learned, but that ended up burning me out due to the sheer feeling of constant constraining.
As it turns out, that was another lesson, just one that I hadn’t learned well enough—but I’m jumping a bit ahead.
(That’s called foreshadowing, guys. It’s a trick we pros do.)
The actual impetus to turn Wake-up Call into a series came from a whim: I put up a poll to decide what story I should continue for my birthday, July 19th of 2021, close to a year after I first sat down to write about a girl with a voice in her head that was very much definitely not insane at all, neither the girl nor the voice, thank you very much. There were just two votes on the winning option, and, well…
Do you remember Wordsworth? That chapter where she shows a room full of people who had fallen aside that there was another path? And that taking that second path could have made all the difference?
It definitely has.
Two votes. Two random votes. Just two people dropping by and clicking on a poll on a pretty much deserted thread.
It makes you think, doesn’t it?
Because those two votes meant that I had to sit down and consider all the possible ramifications of this pair of useless lesbians bypassing early Worm’s focus on gaslighting Taylor. This was about Lisa being collaborative, protective, and sincere. This was…
Me trying to be what I wasn’t.
I’ve got a document filled with my ramblings from that time. I was consuming videos on writing craft constantly, some writer or editor talking in my ear as I went about my daily life. I had to consider things about my chosen craft that I had rarely thought about because my focus had always been on short stories, and do you want to know how I planned those?
I didn’t.
A short story, to me, had always been something that brewed up in the back of my mind until it was suddenly done. I knew absolutely nothing about planning things because I had never had to do so for anything other than torturing my Shadowrun players. I just sat down in front of a keyboard and wrote what I had already inside of me.
As it turns out, that’s not a sustainable way of going at things whenever you write something past the 8k words mark. Not without a lot of preparation and available mental space—which I guess is also jumping ahead.
(Foreshadowing! It’s a thing I do!)
Anyway, those videos on writing? Those articles? Those books? They constantly talked about arcs, story structure, and, most of all, themes. What was the theme of a story? How did you bend character and setting to better convey it? How did you turn a sequence of events into a cohesive, impactful whole?
In my case? Entirely by accident.
Because what neither of those sources told me until much, much later into the game was that it’s very much okay for a writer to be a very different kind of guy from the one who meticulously plots things. That there are the pantsers of the world, the people who get carried away by the story and characters, who let things flow. That sitting down and thinking in the abstract about theme and setting is only helpful up to a point, and that point is quite different from person to person.
So, you wanna hear something embarrassing? Something utterly mortifying?
My theme-discovering process and the plot I came up with at the time?
Secrets hurt.
Lisa’s brother and the things left unsaid; Taylor, her bullying, and the reasons why it continued; the Unwritten Rules and the allowances made to villains. Worm was full of things that were hidden and hurtful. Of secrets.
And Lisa was someone with a power made to ferret out secrets.
So, that would be the theme: how truth frees us. How revealing that a careless remark about sex being icky was just a well-meaning lie could turn an entire life around. How a girl motivated to find out the truth and bring it to light could change the lives she touched.
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
What may not sound as good was how that turned into a brief outline about Lisa systematically dismantling Brockton Bay’s web of secrets, tearing apart New Wave (for obvious reasons), the Protectorate, outing every single villain in the city, discovering just how corrupt a government infiltrated by the likes of Alexandria was, and recruiting her team of capes to set Brockton Bay as a sovereign city-state under parahuman protection.
Yeah.
I wish I could smack Past Me’s head as well.
To be fair, the edgy moron had a few points, and I could, theoretically, make this whole mess work.
To be objective, there’s absolutely no need for me to do so.
Thankfully.
Because, by the time I got to the first plot beat that would lead things down this path—Bakuda’s rampage—I was finally letting myself learn my own lessons. The story was growing, the characters were becoming themselves, and a little silly gag that had had just the very inklings of character growth was making itself felt.
Yeah, that’s Power I’m talking about.
(Or Sherlock, if we look at a timeline before a certain Halloween special.)
The little bastard kept growing, becoming more of a character with every snarky aside and suspiciously specific denial about anthropomorphizing of parahuman abilities interfaces. He kept nudging Lisa around, and me by proxy.
Then came Colin and a redemption journey that I hadn’t planned—or, at least, not in the way that it happened.
And… well, that was mostly due to the other lesson that I found out along the way, one so trivially self-evident that it’s even embarrassing to type about:
That I love you guys.
Sentimentality aside, in all my previous writing endeavors, I had gotten almost no feedback at all. I wrote my assignments, sent them, and collected my pay (or grades). There would occasionally be some mention of my writing on the games’ reviews, but, really, those were far and between. This was my first time getting an actual conversation around my work, and I engaged in it with a hunger I hadn’t realized was there. I got to learn how others understood my writing and characters, came along unsuspected insights into both the story and my process, and, well…
I got kinda carried away.
Which was a very good thing.
Those little jokes and asides about Armsie? They were very much the seed planted in my head for me to allow him to grow into who he later became. Not because I was copying anything somebody posted, but because I got engaged in the conversation, and that got me thinking. Every time one of you asked a little ‘what if?’ I came up with an answer to that question. I kept fleshing things out, filling in the details, letting the world breathe.
G.R.R. Martin calls this ‘gardening;’ the process by which you sow down your mind with ideas that grow out semi-organically as you go around, pruning unsightly hedges and watering wilted flowers until the garden’s ready to be walked around, ready for you to breathe in the mélange of aromas and contemplate the spread of colors of a story about to unfold over the written page.
I don’t have my own word for it. Not yet.
I often call myself a ‘method writer’ because I’ve been roleplaying since I was first able to read (even if not quite understand) a now barely held-together handbook of The Lord of the Rings RPG. I often just… dive into a character and write from their unique perspective, finding out more about them as every word flows and their personalities grow.
Lisa had a lot of growing to do.
And so did I.
Here I was, getting my work actually discussed for the first time in my life. I had won writing and debating awards and not gotten any kind of feedback at this point, and somehow, it hadn’t even occurred to me what difference it would make not to write in a vacuum, trudging alone to put out words that I would never know what others thought about.
It didn’t occur to me that a story is not a story until it’s been read.
So.
Thank you.
For reading this story. For talking about it. For sharing with me how it made you feel, what things you learned, what did you like and dislike.
For letting me grow.
Like Lisa did.
Because that’s a good part of what ended up replacing that whole “theme” about secrets: the journey of a young girl turning into a woman who would grow to impact those around her and the world she crafted. Of a family found and made, of looking at past wounds and salvaging what could be healed. Of finding herself through love—romantic and otherwise.
There was sweetness and bitterness, happiness and sorrow.
I was there for all of it.
A few things of my original outline grew into plot beats that fit around this new theme, the one that I didn’t set out to look for, but the one that grew around the story. Some others, I decided on during the rare occasions in which I wasn’t rushing to meet a deadline for any of the multiple projects I kept taking on as I discovered my new limits and struggled to overcome them. I was writing at speeds I never thought I could even aim for, and the quality wasn’t suffering for it.
And then I got to one of those planned beats.
It’s… okay, that was definitely one of the bitter points. At the very start of this, I aimed to be as professional as I could be about releasing chapters. Both this and All Right! Fine! I Will Take You! were consistently released on their due date, but, while that was manageable when I was only writing two weekly series and the occasional commission or passion project, it turned out not to be as feasible when I started posting my crazy goals over on Patreon which aimed for five to six chapters per week.
This started a bit of a spiral, with me deciding that Tuesday wouldn’t become Wednesday until I went to sleep, and with the chapters being posted a couple of hours after the sun went up and right before I crashed from sheer exhaustion.
It wasn’t ideal. Still isn’t.
This was compounded by a few other difficulties that I hadn’t anticipated. As it turns out, while writing on a chapter-by-chapter basis is a fantastic motivator in getting me to push past my toxic perfectionism so that I can post things when they are done rather than when they are perfect… I stress out about endings. I see them as the very last chance to get things right. To give the characters the conclusion they deserve after living in my head for however long it’s taken to get to that point.
So, when it turned out that Ginosko, my first original novel that came about thanks to a very generous supporter, was reaching its conclusion, I did stress out further.
I kept juggling too many projects—I had about twenty stories going on at the same time that I was trying to be fair to, and my mind felt like it was fraying with all the things I kept struggling with (Side note: one of the lessons I still haven’t learned? It’s how to keep proper notes. Which explains some of that ‘fraying.’), I was also keeping a close eye on the number of my subscribers and blaming myself for every single dropped subscription, trying not to do the math about precisely for how long I could keep going if things didn’t improve, reposting all over the Internet to try and get a bit more visibility, failing to engage with all the comments that came at me from the different pages…
I was very much finding out that some limits I couldn’t push past.
And that I had already committed to going over them.
Then, that particular plot beat? That thing that was oh so clever and that would be the turning point for the fic?
That came along.
Colin being killed by Behemoth.
It… hurt to write. I knew how that would be solved. Had known for more than a year, and was both elated and baffled that nobody guessed it, but, well, it was something that had been planned rather than a spur-of-the-moment thing. I was committed to letting tragedy play itself out so that we could reach a proper, earned, happy ending.
But, at this point, this wasn’t just Lisa’s story.
This was mine.
Because, right when Colin fell to a monster’s blow, my father almost died.
One of the few times I put a stop to my writing marathons had been a few months before, when things were a bit more manageable. I remember waiting outside a hospital at night, COVID restrictions still in place, as a donor’s lungs were tested for compatibility, and I took out my phone to apologize to my subscribers for the likely delay on the chapters to come as I waited to see whether or not the transplant would take place. That was a stressful night, and I got ready for the long haul of visiting somebody who wouldn’t be able to answer for weeks on end.
This was almost a year before Colin’s fall.
This had a happy ending.
My father took to his new lungs miraculously well; it was unprecedented how quickly he got out of deep sedation, and, while we had a few scares, that turned out much better than anybody expected.
I went back to writing.
To juggling and struggling.
Prepared to start the fight against Behemoth.
And got a call.
He was losing lung function, and the doctors didn’t know why. I learned a lot about organ transplants at that time, and none of it was reassuring.
I kept writing.
He got tests done.
It wasn’t rejection.
I remember feeling so relieved that my muscles lost all strength, almost dropping over my keyboard before I managed to catch myself when I got the call with the results in the middle of the night as I was writing this very story.
But there still was the loss of respiratory function to worry about, and undiagnosed causes aren’t that reassuring.
So I kept writing and worrying, and then I reached the Behemoth fight, and…
And I got another call.
My father’s alive. He’s doing as well as can be expected with how things stand at the moment.
That call didn’t tell me this.
He had gone in for a test, and then my mother saw the doctors rushing him out of the room as fast as they could, her husband pale and unable to tell her anything. Next thing she knew, a deaf woman in a hospital was struggling to understand how her husband was now in an induced coma with uncertain prospects.
And it was rejection.
But also a nearly collapsed lung and very uncertain prospects. The doctor told me over the phone to prepare for the absolute worst, and any and all of my questions were met with a firm, unyielding admonition to do so.
As Lisa was losing her father.
I remember crying when I wrote certain passages, but now I couldn’t tell you which. I remember not stopping and taking a breath, just pushing past all the hurt, fear, and uncertainty as a girl grieved and refused to accept the tragedy in front of her.
I remember describing her holding Colin’s cold and too-thin hand like I had held my father’s hand.
I remember relief when, yet again, things unexpectedly turned around, and my father survived his death sentence.
I remember keeping that in mind. Treasuring it as I prepared to let Lisa feel as I had felt.
I remember… a lot of things.
This has been a journey filled with unexpected detours. With treasures found along the way. A journey that I never meant to set on, that I found myself in after I thought it had ended.
Because of two votes.
Two meager, random votes.
Whoever you are? Thank you. With all my heart, thank you.
And this could be the Aesop for this whole thing, couldn’t it? How random kindness or even passing interest can end up shaping an entire life for two years. How a random happenstance can become so much more down the line. How plans mean so very little when life happens.
It could also be an Aesop about taking what life gives you and giving it meaning. About treasuring the little things until they grow big enough.
About being a mess of a human being giving to the world whatever he can offer.
Ultimately?
It’s not about secrets.
It never was.
So, rather than an Aesop, let me leave you with this: with my heartfelt gratitude. With my hope that, whatever spark of joy I managed to capture with my words, you were touched by it. With the earnest wish that your lives were at all brightened by reading this.
Just as mine was by you reading it.
It’s been a long journey. This is now longer than The Lord of The Rings I kept measuring myself up to (only in length, of course). But I’ve finally accepted that journeys start and continue with single steps. That I don’t have to go the whole distance before I run out of breath. That it’s all right to meander, wander, and stop to look around the unexpected findings that you come across along the way.
And that there’s always another journey.
I’ve been readying the new story that will take Wake-up Call’s place for quite a while. I will get to it as soon as Wordsworth’s finished, and… well…
If you ever feel like it?
I would love for us to travel together again.
See you soon, everyone. May your wanderings be ever fruitful.
And now, for the very last time:
Anthropomorphizing of audiences—
