The Spiralling

Bonus Feature: Writer Commentary Part 11

Before I begin, let's get this out of the way first. After rereading my own work, I realised that my grammar was horrible, HORRIBLE back then. While I don't think that I was that bad in the past, I believe it's the result of poor practice in the trade of writing. I don't believe I have revised my work – it was just straight to the website once it was done. Anyway… (Note: As I can't remember everything I was thinking 3 years ago in the making of this fan fiction, I'll just try to do what I can, and include my own retrospective interpretations.)

Chapter 11: Mindset

In this chapter, we begin with a scene in a police station, with Aldan or 'Grandmaster', being held for questioning. The first act of this chapter was simply to give Aldan some screen time. Some might call it filler, but I believe I was aiming for character development. By juxtaposing the Grandmaster with an average city detective, we accentuate Grandmaster's personality. He is calm, and he is patient, where most people would either be nervous or having a full-blown freak out in a police interrogation, especially some of the lower-ranking criminals. Even those who are innocent would find it hard to keep calm, not the Grandmaster though. He's confident, and it gave him his ticket back home when his previous efforts to find it failed.

Upon encountering his home, he seems to have entered into some kind of a surreal scene with white light and spectres, with the house appearing to be fine. As a regular reader might be aware by now, a recurring theme I seem to be going for back then was to delve deep into a character's mind, and this is one of those scenes. He was remembering things, and most of what happened as he was 'Opening a door that no longer exists,' and seeing his wife took place in his head. He was getting distracted up until a junkie rushed him with a cleaver.

The junkie is an interesting minor character. I can't remember, for the life of me, what I was thinking with her, but I believe it has the effect of making the readers (or at least some) believe that the junkie was the Grandmaster's daughter. Otherwise, the junkie's just a plot device to break him out of his trance, and introduce Michael.

That said, with Michael, I believe I was going with the concept that every character's got their use and purpose. Here, Michael makes up for the Grandmaster's vulnerability. Michael's young and street-smart in the new world, and he doesn't have a lost family. He's a big help to the Grandmaster, and yet, it is clear that he needs Grandmaster for his own development, as my old self have seen it fit to make him an apprentice-type character. Combat-wise, he's no match for the Grandmaster, and he's certainly a cakewalk to the Demoness, as the readers would certainly discover in later chapters.

The last act of the chapter with Mindy, Dave and Marcus is an interesting one. It actually has more than the singular function of being a tearjerker (and I really hope it didn't fail in this function either). It is meant to show that Mindy cares about Marcus, and is genuinely broken by his mortal injuries. At the same time, I believe I was going for something else, something more insidious. By putting Mindy in this scene, in the scene that ended the last chapter with her screaming and waking up the neighbourhood, I was actually trying to push suspicions of Mindy being the assailant away, hoping that the intense drama (I hope) would dissuade readers from suspecting Mindy as the one who gunned down Marcus, when in the end it was in fact her, except it was her dark side, the shadow created by her Dissociative Identity Disorder. This sets the reader up to believe that Mindy was just about entering the fray against the Demoness.

It also has the added bonus of making Mindy a greater victim, as she was unwittingly the pawn of her own damaged mind, and it was causing major distress at this point. Well, at least I hope it works.

Chapter 12: Connections

The first half deals with the character development of Aldan. The second half leads up to the next chapter. There is nothing much to say about this, except that the second half wasn't very well written. I feel that Mindy could have been better written and characterised. I believe what I was going for was to show that she was a little out-of-character due to grief, but as it turns out, it seems a little weird.

If I ever revise this story again, I would have them plan their search there and then, as the way it is now just seems to revert the readers' suspicions back to Mindy (or at least I think so). As it is though, my main beef with this chapter so far is Mindy's characterisation. Some of the descriptions aren't great, and her dialogue could use a little more work. Mindy, as a character, was supposed to be the laconic wisecracker who had some of the best lines, but here, it's clearly not the case.

Perhaps a revision in Mindyology is in order.