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fipindustries · 7 years

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THERE IS A CRACK IN THE WORLD: afterthought.

So there we go, my first, full novel, entirely written in English. I did it.

There is a crack in the world originated from three or four very basic seeds, eventually many others were incorporated, so many so granular that I wouldn’t be able to keep track of them all, but the basic ideas and characters have easy to track roots.

The three sisters were the first thing I came up with, way, way back in 2012/2013 and from the sisters the first one I came up with was Telescopica. Yes, that’s right, Telescopica was the first character from this story I invented and she was based on the design of the main character from the tv show Fringe, if you want to know how she would look IRL, she is basically a hardcore version of Anna Torv. Later came Harmonica and she was based on Martha Wayne in the short batman story made for the flashpoint event where Martha was the joker. The common thread between both of them (and what ultimately decided they would be together in the same story) was the fact that they both were female characters I didn’t often see back then and that I thus wanted to tackle. One, the stoic professional hero, the badass, not in the rough and tough Michelle Rodriguez kind of way, but more of the slick professional John Wick kind, I basically wanted to write r63!agent-47. The other was female joker, which is a far different beast than Harley Quinn, I didn’t want the cutesy, quirky, lol I’m so evil that can be redeemed by the right dick, or worse, misconstrued as an anti-hero. I wanted a truly detestable and threatening maniac, I wanted someone off-putting, someone people could truly hate. I’m not entirely sure I succeeded in this last regard.

I had these designs and ideas for characters yet nothing concrete at the time, but then I read one book: the gunslinger, the first book in the dark tower saga, and boom. I had my idea for a premise. One chases the other on a dystopian world, simple, effective powerful. They are batman and the joker, they are Javert and Valjean, they are Tom and Jerry, but more than all of that, they were sisters. I think this vision I had of them (and of the world they inhabited) really solidified itself when I saw for the first time the trailer for Bioshock infinite, the one with the “Beast” song from Nico Vega. The thing about that song is that it came in two versions, an acoustic one and an electric one, and the relation between both versions reflects pretty well the relation between both sisters. One is calm and introspective, the other is chaotic and loud, yet they are both the same degree of fucked up. They are about the beast of America and how we are not going down like this. Give them a listen and pretend they are both sung by their respective characters.

But that was not enough; I had a layout for the basic premise, right? One chases the other in a dystopian world, but what happens during the chase? Why is one chasing the other? How did the chase start, and more importantly, how will it end? I didn’t have answers for this, all I had was a shitty, unfinished comic (that would later be cannibalized and turned into chapter one of this story) that I couldn’t finish because back then I hadn’t figured out yet what kind of paper to use for proper inking. Hell, I didn’t even have names for them! And then, as always, math was the answer.

I was doing Calculus II in college (and failing at it pretty hard) and we were studying numerical series, about their formulas and about how to tell when they diverged and when they converged. And so I came across a few really cool words: the telescopic series, the harmonic series and the geometric series. OBVIOUSLY I had to use them as names. But see, these are three words, and I only had two characters, so the next logical step was to come up with a third one. And this character was going to be even cooler than the other two because this one was going to be the mysterious one, this was going to be the white ranger, as it where, this was going to be Jacob from LOST, this was going to be that one character that was constantly going to be alluded to but always kept in the shadows until the very end, and once revealed the character was going to remain aloof and strange. And her name was going to be Geometrica, the oldest sister.

Originally Geometrica was supposed to be “good”, in as much as she wasn’t going to be a psychopathic manipulator. She was supposed to be the Zen one, not evil like Harmonica, nor as obsessed as Telescopica. She was the middle ground. The calm one, the one who was supposed to be above it all. But then I started watching Hannibal.

Now my big problem with Hannibal is that season two, and SPECIALLY any scene with Gillian Anderson, is a fucking slog, they are slow and dull and boring, so much so that whenever her scenes came I would have to create my own gore since the show wasn’t giving me none at the time and so I drew, because of course. This is a thing I’m not sure if other artist do, that is drawing while watching tv because what is on the screen is just so goddamn boring (I would do this as well with doctor who, daredevil and true detective) but the thing is that while watching Hannibal I would draw, and particularly I drew Geometrica. First she was cutting her own arm, and then using it to beat someone to death. Once I finished this particular drawing I asked myself who could she be beating and the answer came instantly: Harmonica, because obviously the most Zen character in reality turned out to be the most fucked up one! That’s just a no brainer. And then my imagination fired up and chapter 17 was created. And that was when I knew for sure that someday, somehow, I would have to write the whole story.

To this day, chapter 17, and particularly it’s final scene, is my favourite thing I have ever came up with, as a scene, as a concept, as a story beat and a reveal and the only reason I made it this far was because of how desperate I was to make that scene real. I came up with it in 2014 and three years later here we are, the dream came true.

Now this is all fine and good, but none of this is what actually made me sit down and put the actual words on the paper, I had chapter one and chapter seventeen, but what about everything that was supposed to happen in the middle? All of this was simmering in my head but it wasn’t actually boiling. The steam pressure, as it were, was not moving any locomotives as of yet. And I could tell you a thousand more stories about how The Foremost was originally supposed to be a female version of the nazi guy in inglorious bastards, or how his and Karachay’s current design came from the character Shades in Luke Cage, or about how once I came up with the names Chernobyl, Karachay and Tzar I realized they were a perfect reflection of Harmonica, Telescopica and Geometrica and thus they had to exist in the same universe, or how I’m not sure where the character of the emperor came from but I’m convinced Warhammer 40K and Twig had something to do with it. I could tell you all this and more but instead I’m going to tell you about the story that finally made me take stock of my life, of my choices, and decide it was time, that the ideas had been stewing in my head for long enough and it was time for execution. Weirdly enough, the story that did that was The Northern Caves. Even more weird was that it was the second read of the northern caves what did it.

I’ll say it right here, There is a crack in the world was me reacting to the psychological horror that TNC, and indeed many other stories like it such as cordyceps or the hell sections in Unsong, caused in me. A horror intensified by the mental problems I had been dealing with during most of 2016. But the thing was that ever since I moved to a new city and started looking for a job most of that horror had been replaced with much more grounded concerns. Instead of having the shakes because of existential, metaphysical uncertainty, I was getting the shakes due to economic and housing struggles. I realized that normal, everyday problems were the perfect antidote to counteract existentialism, and so those were the problems I decided to plague my story with. Lack of food, poor shelter, contaminated water, rampant crime, earthly, lower class concerns, those are the horrors within There is a crack in the world, as opposed to a children’s book writer making some book that apparently made people go insane. And then I decided not to stop there, another common thread in many of these stories was that there would be this mystery to the world, this unfathomable puzzle, filled with complicated plots, intricate lore and abstruse complexities which were begging for a plucky protagonist to be smart enough to solve it all. So I decided to make the lore in my story absurdly simple and yet completely impossible to solve no matter how clever or intelligent or rational you were: There is a crack in the world. That’s it, nothing can be done about it.

And then came the final touch, the characters. The final thing that I saw in a lot of what for lack of a better word I’m going to call “rational fiction”, an umbrella term under which I liberally group works such as HPMOR, Worm, After the hero, Unsong, The northern caves, etc was that in every instance the protagonist would be some form of bleeding heart. Someone who would be painfully hyperaware of the pain and suffering that happened all around the world and would desperately try to find the way to fix it all, to understand it, to make sense of it all. So my story would have none of that. I made Telescopica and Chernobyl to be as indifferent and callous as I could and as the story advances they slowly start to consider that maybe they can do something to help, that maybe they can try and make the world a better place, and then I prove how incredibly foolish they were for ever thinking that.

Not gonna lie, the story is filled with self indulgent bitterness and misery, and a lot of it is me getting carried away and probably venting some of the negative emotions I had accumulated all throughout 2016. If I want to be uncharitable with myself I would say that some of that bitterness came from me reading those stories I just mentioned and feeling inadequate knowing that I would never be smart enough to write anything like it (I’m a deeply insecure person, in case you haven’t noticed). But also, for whatever reason, halfway through the story I decided “fuck it, I’m just going to write some misery porn”, I started challenging myself to see how horrid I could go, what horrors I could concoct if I well and truly tried. Yet the thing is that I feel I never really went all out on it. I like to think that, as dreadful as the story could get at times, it was never truly absurd, never profane, I could be wrong though. There is an essay talking about this in way better detail than I ever could so just go read it.

I published there is a crack in the world as I wrote it, which means I challenged myself not to go back and edit something in the previous chapter for the sake of convenience or to establish something I might need for later chapters. I forced my self to compromise and work only with what I had previously established in the story. This fostered an interesting practice where I would start to throw foreshadowing and small meaningless data all over the place which could be easily ignored or forgotten but that I could also go back to and expand into something more on the long run if I needed to pull something out of thin air for the plot. That is the way characters like Hector or Maurice or things like commando living on an abandoned military base ended up becoming a thing in the story, grown from just throwaway characters and trivia that I thought nothing of when I first put them in the page. The biggest example would be the kosmonavt, I had no idea what I was going to do with him by the end of the story but I knew an astronaut was a useful thing to have so I put him there in his own chapter, just in case.

Another consequence of this was that, as the story progressed and I got a better grasp of the world, of the actual real consequences of having a crack in the world, of the actual sociopolitical organization the empire would have I realized I fucked up. A lot of the lore doesn’t really add up, there are details which are poorly thought out or scientifically incorrect. And if I decided to start introducing all of that it wouldn’t just interfere with what had been previously established in the chapters that I had already published but it would also interfere with where I wanted the story to go, with what I wanted to do with the characters and with my dear, precious chapter 17. All of this meant I had to foregone a lot of neat realism and worldbuilding that could have made it into the story if I had taken some time to think things through before starting putting chapters online, but the thing is that if I hadn’t put those chapters online then chances are I would have never been motivated to write the rest of the story. Hopefully I’ll allow myself to develop whatever new story I come up with next in more organic ways, not being afraid to kill my darlings in order to let it grow naturally. We’ll see.

Final thoughts: I’m actually really proud of this story, whatever its origins or the emotional fuel was behind it, whatever gross scientific mistakes I made in there, whatever edits I would like to perform to make it a stronger, more coherent whole, I truly believe is the best story I have written thus far and that is achievement enough for me, I know people had been reading it and even enjoying it according to AO3, not sure how many but more than zero is enough, I hope you guys enjoyed it and I hope you have thoughts and comments about it that you might want to share with me.

Whatever the case might be, it’s been three months and a little more that I worked on this and it’s been a great learning experience. See you in my next work.

#there is a crack in the world #and the world is over #writing

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