Before Mike and I start on the next Col­labowrite story I fig­ured I’d revisit the first one and not down what worked, what didn’t work and give you a look at what went on behind the scenes.

I’m not a huge fan of nam­ing sto­ries before they’ve been fin­ished, but I guess because chap­ters of the story were deliv­ered “live” every two days it had to be done. Going back and renam­ing every chap­ter once the last one had been deliv­ered would’ve been a colos­sal pain in the ass anyway.

Just one more thing before we begin, I’ve designed these anno­ta­tions to be read along with each chap­ter. It’s purely ‘stream of con­scious­ness’ writ­ing, but I’ll try to have my notes at least appear in the order they hap­pen in the story.

Each chap­ter head­ing links to the respec­tive chap­ter on our sites, or you can just print out the whole story and have it sit­ting in front of you.

Chap­ter 1: You’re Late

I’ve men­tioned Mike’s pro­gram­mer mind before and it’s fun to see it at work in the first para­graph, which I’ve hand­ily summarised:

set Vari­able: Yakov
set Yakov.description: dark hair, tall, lanky, doesn’t bathe

Hans, Yakov’s father, is men­tioned a full para­graph before he in intro­duced. I liked that a lot and based my whole inter­pre­ta­tion of Hans — the emo­tional ball of fum­ing, unfo­cused energy — on that one sentence.

Mike was very gen­er­ous with how he left the story open and made it easy for me to pick up the threads and run with them. I don’t think I was ever that nice in my chapters.

Chap­ter 2: A Flaw­less Argument

My first shot at the story.
About halfway through I realised I was chan­nel­ing Mark Twain. Where Yakov and Pietra slot into the roles played by Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

In the first draft I wrote the fat man was Yakov’s uncle. He and Hans also had a far longer argu­ment that ended in fisticuffs, how­ever due to the dreaded 500 word limit I had to scale it right back. There are some small of their “extended per­sonas” remain­ing. Both men are extremely stub­born — to the point where they’ve fash­ioned this blink­ered view of real­ity around them­selves. At the end of this chap­ter I tried to have Yakov fol­low that tra­di­tion of stub­born­ness. I’m not sure how well it worked.

I just had to end the chap­ter with some­thing a bit pulpy. Hav­ing light­ning punc­tu­ate Yakov’s dec­la­ra­tion was more for my enter­tain­ment than any­one else’s.

Chap­ter 3: A New Home

Before we’d started writ­ing, Mike and I had sketched out a rough out­line of the story includ­ing where all the story beats were to occur. This frame­work was loose enough that we weren’t just fill­ing in blanks like a home­made Mad Libs. It gave us both a chance to impro­vise a lot. How­ever, I wasn’t a big fan of his deci­sion to include mul­ti­ple teenagers prepar­ing to embark on The Rite. After read­ing sec­tion I knew I’d be killing them off as soon as possible.

In the 15 odd years I’ve known Mike I’ve never heard him use the phrase “gas being passed”. I just though you should know that.

By Mike’s admis­sion the last half of this part was incred­i­bly rushed. He’d missed out on hit­ting a beat in his first chap­ter and didn’t want to miss out again. I can’t fault him that.

I do like how Mike wrote Yakov in this chap­ter. A kid who finds new and inter­est­ing things and just can’t keep his hands to him­self. Be it machine or milkmaid.

Chap­ter 4: Yakov Makes a Case

A few weeks after pub­lish­ing this chap­ter I over­heard a St Kilda res­i­dent refer to the sub­urb as ‘Kilda’. I didn’t feel so clever after that.

I should reit­er­ate that the fat man is not related to Yakov. He would’ve called him ‘Uncle’ if he was. Obviously.

Towards the end of this chap­ter all the teenagers who’d ven­tured out with Yakov are now “miss­ing”. I sup­pose you could imag­ine they’d found sim­i­lar farm­ing com­mu­ni­ties to what Yakov had been exposed to, but decided against cop­ping a feel off the comely milk­maid, and there­fore ended up liv­ing hap­pily ever after.

In my imag­i­na­tion though their fates involved ban­dits. Lots and lots of bandits.

Chap­ter 5: Eden

I do won­der who the “non essen­tial peo­ple” in Kilda were. We, being Mike and I,  never laid out the town’s social hier­ar­chy past the elected-on-a-platform-of-panting-and-sweating fat man.

Mike sure loves his semi-colons. Doesn’t he?

The Yakov that appears in Mike’s chap­ters is very sim­i­lar to how I see him in my head. His Pietra seems a lit­tle older than I’m writ­ing her. The Pietra I’m writ­ing about is five to six 5 years old.

Chap­ter 6: Yakov Leads! (Sort of)

Again I’m par­ing down the bulk of Yakov’s co-adventurers. Except this time I don’t har­bour a deep, burn­ing hatred for them, so they off-page death.

Hav­ing Yakov luck upon the nearly fully func­tional farm does seem like a huge cop out at this point, but rest assured the uni­verse will reassert itself shortly.

When I was grow­ing up in Frankston there was a hedge of wild black­ber­ries that sep­a­rated two foot­ball ovals near my house. These black­ber­ries never died off despite never being tended to (that I could tell) so it made sense to me that still thrive in a post-apocalyptic landscape.

Chap­ter 7: Trac­tor Pull

I was won­der­ing if Mike would reveal that the farm the kids ended up at wasn’t Yakov’s orig­i­nal destination.

Per­son­ally I would’ve writ­ten this chap­ter a lit­tle dif­fer­ently. Yakov seem a lit­tle too reluc­tant to explore the barn. He seems ot have lost the that curios­ity that drove him at the begin­ning of the story.

Abdul sur­vives the ban­dits. Go Abdul!

I won­der what sort of cel­e­bra­tions a group of starv­ing kids with no food or party dec­o­ra­tions could hold. Hide and Seek maybe?

If I’m not mis­taken the tip­ping trac­tor is straight out of an episode of The Simp­sons called E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt).

Again Mike seems to be writ­ing Pietra a lot older than how she appears in my chap­ters. How else to explain how she knows basic First Aid?

Chap­ter 8: We’re Not Fighters

In this chap­ter I started play­ing around with nar­ra­tive styles a bit.

I made a con­scious effort to keep Pietra young in this chap­ter. She really only has two states of mind: Hun­gry and Scared.

Sally is the name of the female char­ac­ter in 3rd Rock From the Sun. In that TV show she acts as the group’s mus­cle and  mil­i­tary know-it-all. So I thought hav­ing her appear at this point would make for a cool Easter egg.

One thing I think we didn’t do very well in this story was indi­cate time pro­gres­sion. At this point in the story the kids have been sep­a­rated from the adults for around three weeks.

This is another chap­ter that I had to cut back to fit within the 500 word limit. The orig­i­nal bat­tle far more bloody and vio­lent. But reread­ing it now it seems a lot more nat­ural just hav­ing just one per­son fall and every­one react­ing to that.

Chap­ter 9: Aftermath

Mike’s final chap­ter. Will he wrap things up nicely or will he leave dan­gling plot threads?

As nice as the woman and the dark man are they don’t seem all that remorse­ful for the death of Sean. They’re either deliri­ous from hunger or Sean was just some expend­able orphan. At least Yakov seems to be har­bour­ing some feel­ings of revenge for Sean’s death.

In my idea for this chap­ter I had every adult mirac­u­lously swing­ing to the kid’s way of think­ing after Sean’s death. Mike’s ver­sion is far supe­rior. I like that there’s this splin­ter group within the adult fac­tion that sym­pa­thises with the kids.

Chap­ter 10: Epilogue

Just before we started writ­ing this story I’d fin­ished read­ing The Road by Cor­mac McCarthy. This chap­ter is my homage to that novel. The style doesn’really t fit in with the pre­ced­ing chap­ters at all, but I do like the pac­ing of it.

There’s one thing I should’ve done in this chap­ter and thats name the two char­ac­ters. It’s not that clear, in the nar­ra­tive but the man is an aged Yakov.

In our orig­i­nal plan this epi­logue was sup­posed to be set about 20 years after the last chap­ter. It’s prob­a­bly more like 10 years later.

I’m not sure if any­one picked up on this, but the court­yard they end up at is the same one from Chap­ter 4.

Don’t ask about the cows.

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