Continuing Notes on The Wall
I am not remotely committed to that name
ATTENTION: INSOFAR AS YOU CARE, SORTA SPOILERS ABOUT THE PRIOR POST YOU MAY NOT HAVE READ YET
I want to add some explanatory notes about Chapter 1, partially for any readers/reviewers/commenters, and partially so I can think this through as I go. (This is basically a continuance of this post.)
First, my original plan had been to have the choral opening/framing text at the start of each chapter, but as I’ve edited it, I’ve concluded it fits best when it’s more spare, so I’ll probably stretch it to every other chapter.
Second, I’d planned on having each chapter be two story-pieces, but after this got underway, I realized I had too many stories to tell to fit things that way without kinda ruining the twists halfway through and/or making this a truly epic-length (in a bad way) story.
I’m struggling with the middle chapters a bit because I know how the framing story goes — it was the first thing I wrote on this — and I know how the story of the lady in Medium’s snippet goes, but I’m trying to decide how much I want the framing to leak into the middle. I get that one should slaughter one’s darlings, but the entire point of this thing is to have narrative commonality, even if broken by sequence and time; and while the specific elements I’m thinking about aren’t strictly necessary to (and absolutely won’t show in) a lot of these stories, I think they’d significantly enhance and tie together some of the more disparate ones.
Not gonna lie, there are some parts of this I absolutely loved writing.
I really hate the formatting on this site. There are lots of cutesy little tools but man alive, some of the basics are really missing. This takes away my ability to consistently do things I’d take as basic in a novel — centering, right-justifying, block-quoting without looking artsy, etc. — and is gonna look weird either mobile or desktop.
I’m probably gonna mess with graphic AI a bit more because I want to save my own art for when I bring this to a conclusion and also I don’t want to spend money on scanning my own stuff just yet, other than maybe getting another large-plate scanner from another yard sale.
Finally, as you may have inferred from the subtitle on this post, I can’t decide if “Wall” or “The Wall” depending on the day is a title I like. I’ve got nothing better for right now.