… Or Is This How to Handle a Crucial Story Point?

‘My shit is pink, and my piece is the white of the fluids that support my brain. I don’t know how to get it back into my head. I open my mouth and eat it, hoping that this will sort the problem out, but no, my brain is re-digested by my stomach and the cycle starts again.’

It’s the Daniel’s Nemesis Podcast, reading XBook Episode 7 - Ginger Is Summoned

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, allowing me to return to a book after a decade and a half. But does this mean that proximity makes the heart darker? That’s what this podcast is out to explore. Appropriately, I’ve been absent from this here space for a number of years… How dark is my heart? Or am I fond of this book again? 

So, let’s get into it. 

XBook. My debut novel, if ‘novel’ is the term for dumping my post-teenage angst around the loose frame of aliens invading at the end of the First World War and calling that a story. 

In each episode, I read out a chapter and then dissect it as a slightly less awkward full-grown adult who’s existed in this world for a bit longer. I learned a new word for reading out recently, ‘bespout’. To recite in a pompous or affected manner. Seems appropriate for the level of arrogance I have for coming up with this podcast and expecting you to be interested in anything I have to say now, let alone the things I had to say back then. 

But, if you haven’t listened to any of the podcasts before, what have you missed? And what have I forgotten about? 

Ginger has taken a break after fighting for four years in the Greatest of Wars. 

William has told us why matter transporters don’t work in getting a civilisation from one dying planet to another, fresher planet across the galaxy. And, having got to Earth, is looking for ways to get his civilisation onto Earth. 

Please be warned: We have a plot point in this episode. Also, there are disgusting descriptions on a gory and masochistic level here. This one is not recommended for the faint of hearted. But, yeah, the plot point is definitely the bigger issue here.

And remember:

This is fiction, 

Always fiction. 

Logic is

As logic does. 

General Notes

That’s the chapter. Now the analysis, and I’m sure that this is where I lose a lot of you. 

So, I’ve never been good at setup. It feels like it’s dragged, but when I really look at it, it’s what seven chapters, including this one? That’s seven episodes? It felt like an eternity. Oh, and there was a five year gap that I took. But it did seem like the setup took forever. It got disheartening for me. And well, it’s the end. We are soon to leave the first act and go into the second act, but at least there is progression now. And, yeah, I never really understood how to ‘Establish the Normality’. I think I know more about it now, but it was something that just escaped my comprehension previously. 

I’ve been harsh on myself in the past. But in just a few short chapters time, we are going to get into the book that I was genuinely proud of - the part of the book that genuinely made me look back fondly as an accomplishment and writing that I feel is better than most stuff I read. So, bear with me. We are getting there folks, we are getting there. 

This is not my favourite chapter - certainly in terms of the visualisations, I feel that they are hack, not to be analysed much, and just crowbarred in for the sake of it. I thought all of this back then, I’m pretty sure. Maybe I didn't, I don’t remember. But we’ll look at those soon enough. 

First, I want to focus on structure. WARNING: All terms may not be familiar to you by what I call them. I have read multiple books, everybody has a different term like they’re all copyrighted or something. One person uses a term, someone else wants to talk about the same thing but has to coin a new term for the same thing. Even one of the main terms that I constantly use throughout this episode doesn’t appear in any of the books I am rechecking, but it got into my head somehow. 

Ladies and gentlemen, we have it! Our Call to Action. 

But what is the Call to Action? 

Essentially, this is where our protagonist becomes involved in the story. Often, but not exclusively, this happens when the Inciting Incident occurs. 

Our Inciting Incident is the attack on Earth. This was instigated by William, a chapter or two ago. The Inciting Incident is where a story begins. Anything before that being the Normality, in which the status quo of our characters’ universes is established before the Inciting Incident occurs to break that status quo, and then proceeds to turn everything that the protagonist knows upside down as the story enters into the second act. 

What we have with Ginger in this chapter is the Call to Action. And a more literal example could not have been provided. He was called by the Flight Lieutenant in order to take action. We have seen Ginger's normality, the status quo is breaking, and he is asked to take his part in the following events. Spoiler alert: he is one of the two main characters. There’s a likely chance he may become more than just one of thousands of grunts also called to face this invasion. 

So, yeah, Ginger has been called to action. A story is forming. What we don’t really have here is a Point of No Return. I think I relied on my sense of a military man’s duty to serve to keep him involved in the story. I’m honestly not sure if that’s actually strong enough here. Granted, he has made a decision, but is that enough to seal him in? The aliens are attacking, there’s no return from that. Ginger is a military man, and he’s not quitting, so there’s no return from that, either. But what stops him from fading into the background? Well, something does happen in a later chapter. Sorry for the spoiler, but it’s as if, not having a clue, I was still able to follow a sense of basic story structure. 

So, why bring this up? Well, I want to get into motivation in just a moment, but also to have a go at my old lecturer. You see, I was taught that Inciting Incidents, Calls to Action, Points of No Return should all happen at once, or very close together. A group of three narrative devices that go hand in hand to tell us what the protagonist intends on doing as we go into the story, even if we (and the protagonist) learn that that goal is maybe not the real goal that they need to achieve. 

In Film-writing terms, it makes for a neat screenplay that you want to market to Hollywood execs who just want to flog another story to China. After all, you’re cramming as much as you can into that first ten pages just so that you can get into the second act as quickly as possible. But it doesn’t need to be this way. Ginger’s Point Of No Return will come later. And remember, I had no idea of these concepts when I wrote this. I just accidentally happened to do these things, because, you know, osmosis from just watching and reading lots of stories. 

Minor Spoiler Alerts for Die Hard, Battle Royale and Back To The Future. 

Take John McClane in Die Hard. His family are kidnapped: Inciting Incident. John McClane decides to rescue them, slipping away as everyone else is taken hostage: Call to Action and Point of No Return. By being trapped, he is definitely unable to return to the outside world, so by making the best of it, and slipping away to rescue his family, this is his Call to Action. 

Let’s look at another movie/book. Battle Royale. Our protagonist, Shuya, with the rest of his class is effectively kidnapped and dumped on an island with an explosive around each of their necks. Here, our triforce is slightly more distanced in how they are presented to us. The Inciting Incident and Point of No Return are intrinsically linked. However, Shuya, as the rest of his class does, remains passive, stunned, in shock. They all have a clear future, kill or be killed. Only one can survive. They must kill each of their classmates in order to win the game and be the sole survivor. As the rules are explained, the class, as a whole, does nothing. A couple rebel only to be killed. Shuya’s Call to Action, what marks him out, is reaching out to another student with the goal of keeping her safe. The Call to Action is close to the other two devices, but a few story beats and plot points get in the way of those two key events. 

Back to the Future, well, everything kind of happens together here. The Libyans attack, causing Doc to get shot. In an attempt to run away, Marty gets into the DeLorean and forgets, understandably so, EVERYTHING the Doc has carefully explained. To this point, Marty has effectively been an audience surrogate, but with the Libyans arriving, this alters things. By accelerating in an attempt to escape, he is transported from his present to the past. The car dies, and he is left wondering how to get back to his present, or the future. The Point of No Return causes his Call to Action. 

So, what am I saying here? Effectively that the Call to Action is the character’s primary goal for the story. 

In Battle Royale and Back to the Future, we have a very major shock to each protagonist’s world. Whilst they would rather the initial domino that set them on this path didn’t fall, they are very willing to get back to the normality that they began in. Their Call to Action is from within themselves. They push themselves into action. They also have something to lose that is made quite clear from the start - their own life as well as their loved ones, or a way of life, effectively causing the loss of the ones they love. 

So, Okay. XBook - Aliens instigate an attack on Earth. Ginger is told to report to base as the humans prepare to counter. Characters that we have looked at have been pulled into a story against their will, but they have a clear goal ahead of them. 

However, a hero can be very reluctantly called to action. Their actual motivation here being to sit down in front of the telly instead of, you know, taking on an entire civilization single-handedly. But outside forces, like a Flight Lieutenant calling you up on your leave, is what drags you into the story. I would argue that a reluctant hero is one who is pulled into the story against their will, their primary goal being very different to that which they must achieve. A reluctant hero, if anything, fights becoming the protagonist. Their primary goal, if pulled into events, is just to get back to a state where they can flop down in front of the telly, hopefully, their loved ones being with them. 

Much like John McClane in the third Die Hard movie, or any of the good ones. McClane doesn’t want to be there. He’s an outsider each time, dragged into the business going on. Can’t you just let him get over his hangover in peace? No, the baddie is just going to keep making demands of McClane, else people will die. Meanwhile, McClane would rather complain than try to take on the baddie head-on. 

Let’s remember this is a podcast about a book, so let’s go literary for a moment. Rincewind from Discworld. Rincewind is a coward and does his best to run away from danger, from the story. So far, a perfect example of a reluctant hero, by my definition, at least. Therefore, it is his cowardice, ironically, that gets him more and more involved in the plot, dragging him reluctantly towards the final confrontation. It isn’t external factors dragging Rincewind into the story, it is Rincewind desiring to be external that pulls him into the mechanics. Ginger isn’t a character as cleverly designed as Rincewind, however, nor as cowardly. Rincewind equally has clear motivation - to hide away from trouble. Ginger just seems unaware. Rincewind is very active in his desire to not be an active protagonist. So, far, Ginger… has just floated through the story. There’s barely an awareness, let alone a motivation other than to take leave. 

Many characters are reluctant heroes. Action-genre wise, many are. It’s more dynamic to have their characters evolve into the being that will take on the Menace. John McClane overcoming his hangover to be the goodie once again. Rincewind trying to run away has to accept his fate that once again he has been chosen to save his world. Shuya, deliberately refusing to play the game he cannot escape, is forced to learn trust in a world where trust is against the rules. Even in rom-coms, the two lovers-to-be try to find ways to not be lovers until they accept their inevitable fate of togetherness at the end of the story.

Either way, whether a protagonist is reluctant or not, values the protagonist holds have been introduced and are now challenged at this stage of the story. 

Right now, Ginger’s hardly the most engaged he’s been in terms of being in service. He’s actively forced a vacation to take him away from the world he has known for the last four years and he’s exhausted from the war. Would being called back in be either what he wants or needs right now? He’s unmotivated, which sets up our next overarching question - how is this “reluctant” “hero” going to get himself involved? By the way, I put different sets of quotation marks around both the words RELUCTANT and HERO. And that’s what we have in Ginger. A reluctant hero. Don’t we? 

By accepting the call, he’s not fighting to stay out of the story. Nor has he been given motivation to enter into the story of his own will. The world as he knows it is being turned upside down just by the presence of an alien race, but right now, he’s apart from that, his own world is still in the same place that it was. There has been no major shock to his values or how he is living his life. Nor is he trapped in a situation he can’t get out of. 

Back to action, Ginger is kind of like Bruce Willis in Die Hard. John McClane was a reluctant hero. However, there, the analogy is not clean. He had a family to save. Everyone else he saved along the way was a bonus. Reluctant or not, he has motivation. This is where we get into Micro vs Meta-narratives. Sometimes it’s easier to relate to a character who saves the world when they really want to just save a couple of key people. Someone who sets out to save the world seems more distant. The Micro-narrative makes us care more as we can be more attached. The other seven billion-plus people the hero saves is just a nice extra. So, what is Ginger’s Micro-narrative? A shark? Okay, so there’s the issue with Dee. But the way that he talks about her, he’s distanced from her in some way that he can’t work out. Does he equate fighting the aliens with getting closer to Dee? No, he’s more worried about a shark. The world hasn’t turned upside down for Ginger yet. So, there’s no internal desire to go and kick alien backside. He needs to have an external force bring him back to base as he’s not going to do it himself. And this is where we have a dilemma. There’s no strong force acting on Ginger, either from within or without. Right now, he’s just a man following orders. There’s nothing at stake for Ginger, so, therefore there’s not much for Ginger to react to. At the moment, William has issued only a threat. There’s no real sense of what is to come. We can imagine devastation in our heads, but that comes from our own schema, our own anticipation based on films and books that we have read. Ginger doesn’t have that. He has sharks. 

Can we then trust Ginger to bring his A-game, that we’ve not really seen much of, or is he just going to cruise through this story? As a character who seems to base his actions on the things happening internally, it would seem that cruising through would be the answer. Chancing his way around the external situations that he is faced with. Well, let’s see. But, John McClane has something to lose by not becoming the protagonist. If he doesn’t save his family, he will lose them as no one else can, or is able to save them. Shuya risks his life and those he loves. Marty McFly risks never being born and altering the course of history. And even if he doesn’t know that immediately, he knows very clearly that he’s trapped in 1955. What does Ginger have to lose if he doesn’t want to join in the fight against the aliens? Again, no stake has been introduced. There has been no Point of No Return to seal in Ginger’s, at least, immediate values. 

However, this is still the early stages of the book. This is still a time to lay down questions, not to answer them. Ginger’s motivation isn’t clearly laid out yet? Fine. But I can lay down the question: What will his motivation be? Why is Ginger the person for this story? A well-told story can answer these questions at a later date. How does Dee relate to all of this? Is she the micro-narrative function of the story that is currently being underplayed? 

At this stage in the book, going into the chapter, before receiving the news, Ginger’s motivation right now, as established in earlier chapters, is rest. Recuperation. He’s still mentally exhausted after a four-year introduction into modern warfare. It’s taken its toll on Ginger. He’s not battle-ready. Of course, he doesn’t want to delve himself into new conflict, possibly more terrifying conflict. Here, the surrealism suggests this. His brain is tired. Hence the melting, and other issues in the first surrealist visualisation. 

In the second main surreal visualisation, as he is given his new mission, his mind is playing out an internal struggle to accept the mission or not. It’s going to be dangerous, it’s going to be out of his comfort zone. Current technology will not be enough. He’s going to be alone. But he is the one person left to take the job - the minnows are eaten. That bit of arrogance that was shown in Ginger’s first chapter? His arrogance is the thing that drives him forward. He might be worn down. His self-belief is still there, though it’s not pronounced. There’s even the suggestion that it’s his fault from an external character, El Flighty. If Ginger is the type to believe that the world revolves around him, this would play into that belief. 

To be fair, Ginger’s state of mind isn’t clear. His acceptance of the mission is more about his relationship with the Flight Lieutenant. Ginger has been proved wrong about something stupid El Flighty said in an earlier chapter. This seems to be the real motivator for the time being. Will we learn anything more about Ginger’s motivation in the coming chapters? I dunno. Don’t ask me. The fact I don’t remember may suggest something about how clearly defined Ginger’s motivation throughout is. 

Wow, I wished I’d thought about all this at the time of writing. As far as I was concerned, Ginger accepts the mission because Will Smith did in Independence Day. Taking a deep-dive into Ginger’s motivations like this makes me sound like I was competent back then, rather than just stringing a bunch of random ideas and hoping that they come together to form something, Kuleshov-experiment/Soviet Montage style, you know, getting the reader to do the hard work of constructing a narrative instead of doing it myself. However, this is all stuff that I have extrapolated from my own, much later, analysis. You may be thinking something very different. Which leads to the point: If it’s not on the page, it’s not there at all. I can’t hope for a reader to interpret things in the same way as I do. If I want a reader to think something, I basically need to tell them. Not much later, as happens in Death of the Author scenarios. 

We need to go further. There’s a whole major aspect of this chapter that I have not yet delved into. But it needs to be looked at. 

This is the 

Psycholgist’s Chair

Or a rather Meta chair, as I stand back to analyse the methods in which I attempted to put myself down on paper. This is less looking at me, but looking at the me that I was trying to be, whilst still being me, and highly editing it to not be me, and well, subjectivity, objectivity, who watches the watchers, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it’s just meta today. Basically, I ask the question of how anti-narrative devices can be used for narrative purposes, at least whether I can be capable of doing that. 

So, let’s begin with our opening visualisation. The one with the brains. 

Why is it there? Because I could, I suppose. However, this visualisation gives a sense of where Ginger is. A fractured sense of self. His mind just isn’t right. His brain is not acting the way that it’s supposed to. Yes, he’s on leave, but he definitely hasn’t recovered yet. He needs mending in order that he can go out and score a goal. Is that a metaphor for functioning normally? Perhaps. But let’s leave it at that. Ginger is telling us, if not himself, that he is not in a fit state right now. We may have worked that out, but Ginger doesn’t seem to have, despite his visualisation giving him that message. This may not have been the original intention, but as today we are doing structure more than my psyche, let’s leave it at that. Though I still admire the logic that gets employed and it works… were it to be completely isolated from anything else. 

Then there’s the shark circling as Ginger has his phone call with Flight Lieutenant Johnson. This is where I truly think things got a bit hack. Was I just peppering up a bland chapter with BS surrealism rather than working on a real beginning/middle/end for this chapter? This shark is a clear metaphor for both the Flight Lieutenant and the Trascons moving in, shaking up Ginger’s world. Oh, shit, did I accidentally do structure? If so, it doesn’t work. It may be a representation of the Inciting Incident, personalising it for Ginger, and foreshadowing some of the stakes, albeit in a confusing way, but is this it? Is this where Ginger gets his primary motivation? 

As someone interested in surrealism, using dreams, experimenting with automatic writing, was I making a poor attempt to hide a metaphor?

For the purposes of this podcast - when I talk about surrealism, I am referring to the film movement that grew out of France in the 1920’s (I mean, geez, are we really at a point in time where I now have to qualify which 20’s I am talking about?). Yet, I am not talking about the Surrealist Manifesto from that time. To qualify: Scrubs is surreal. It doesn’t follow the rules of the art form I am referring to. Ally McBeal was surreal. Same thing. 

With surrealism, should the author be aware of a metaphor, or be totally distanced from the abstract meaning of a piece? Is it the author’s intention to use exclusively metaphors in surrealism? If a metaphor is known, should large efforts be made to hide it? I don’t know. Everyone has their own different style. Everyone reads or views wanting something different. And Surrealism has shifted a lot in the last century from Dadaism to the Surrealist Manifesto to weird little daydreams that occurred in Scrubs and Ally McBeal. 

But I just feel this chapter is weak in its deployment of surrealism. For me, true surrealism was always a complete breakdown of traditional narrative story-telling with dream-like scene after dream-like scene, with the only connective tissue being the associations the viewer brought to it. The Kuleshov experiment wonderfully portrayed in Man With a Movie Camera, or the dream-inspired work that was Bunuel and Dali’s collaboration in Un Chien Andalou. I remember heavily critiquing Bunuel’s Viridiana for being “surreal-lite” and daring to have a reference to the Last Supper that was too easy to interpret. I was a piece of shit back then. However, there I was, also not hiding my own metaphors. But again, what surrealism is, and should be is open and something I’d like to explore more in an episode perhaps not focussing on this book. After all, I am doing Death of the Author here, 

OG DANIEL’S NEMESIS:

Fuck you, I’m still here. I live on in my writing. 

HOST:

Oh, hi. Nice of you to pop back in. I don’t notice you defending this chapter very much. 

OG DANIEL’S NEMESIS:

Fuck off... Erm, I’m actually interested in what you have to say. I like film studies, after all. 

HOST:

Anyway, I’m Death of the Author-ing my book by openly explaining how I interpret things, and well, you guys are welcome to bring your own interpretations to the table. 

But I think with both of these visualisations, I was more conscious of them in terms of using them as a frame. To me, they don’t blend very well. And by frame, I mean padding. They come at the beginning and the end of the chapter. The first is disconnected, which isn’t actually that unusual for me, and the second is perhaps too neatly woven in. Just re-reading it now, I actually think it works better than I suggested in my criticism earlier. 

OG DANIEL’S NEMESIS:

See? Just enjoy. Get carried away. Don’t tear it apart!  

HOST:

People like the tearing apart process. More so than the original text. It’s what the Internet does these days. 

The second visualisation seems too neatly woven in. Like it’s crafted, not … arted…??? Or is it more like street drugs, a con, white detergent powders mixed in with the coke because it looks similar, even if it’s disastrous to the mix and the person who takes it? 

The second main visualisation, particularly, feels contrived to me. If there’s something that I do believe, even if I can’t tie what I’m doing to any particular genre or style, I do -

OG DANIEL’S NEMESIS:

And let’s be proud of that!

HOST:

I do feel that what I wrote should have come from the heart, if not the unconscious. The second visualisation feels contrived because it wasn’t me. It wasn’t Ginger. It wasn’t X. It was storytelling. 

Conclusion

Whether I knew the structural terms discussed earlier or not, I needed Ginger to accept the mission. There’s a lot of consequences should he not accept the mission even if they don’t affect Ginger directly. Back in Independence Day, Will Smith has clear motivation. He’s stood at his doorstep with a giant spaceship hovering above. That’s pretty personal, right? The coordinated attack on each of the cities is just a topper. However, Ginger is isolated out in the countryside. There aren’t the huge spaceships above him. There’s just a piece of paper and a buffoon at the other end of a phone line. How do you make something real to a character who is just too far away to grasp what is going on? What is at stake to Ginger, personally? As far as we know, everyone he loves is with him. Everything he needs is with him. What’s to stop him just shrugging his shoulders and saying it’s not his problem, or thinking that it’s just a prank? So, I painted this scene where he seems surrounded by death and destruction - foreshadowing what would happen if he doesn’t act. But Ginger also believes that there are consequences for those he feels responsible for if he does take this mission. Honestly, it’s a bit of a confused mess. If what’s happening in the external world isn’t enough to slap Ginger into action, whatever is going on in his head is a mess. I think this is where my effort at stylised storytelling begins to fall to pieces. A real, credible stake is necessary at a crucial stage in a story like this. Whatever he might lose, or whatever he might gain by responding to the Call to Action might become trivial when going into the final push of conflict and resolution, but it needs to matter to Ginger right now. I tried to use surrealism to push him in that direction. I knew it had to have an effect, so I moulded the visualisation. But it’s not a real stake. Even in his head, it’s not a real stake. The shark is done for. The squad he is flying with is forgotten about. Other non-stakes are death metaphors around Dee, and him emotionally distancing himself from her. 

It’s a clash. Anti-narrative ideals to push Ginger at a crucial moment of narrative structure. There is too much narrative in the surrealism, and the surrealism weakens a keystone narrative moment. I guess that I can’t have my cake and eat it, even if it’s a brain-cake. 

OG DANIEL’S NEMESIS:

Yeah, and you can’t ask people to like your writing as you explain why it’s so bad.  

HOST:

The point is that I made the decision to have a more typical narrative. Whilst there are many occasions where I do blend the anti-narrative in with the narrative, what we have here is a keystone moment. 

So, the problem is that narrative storytelling has rules and I didn’t know enough about the rules to break the rules. In other words, I didn’t know enough about what I was doing to know how to fix this. It’s moments like this in the book that made me go to university to learn more. Not knowing enough about how the Call to Action worked, I didn’t know how to fix it. Likewise, if I had wanted to pursue more of the anti-narrative route, I didn’t know how to smash the rules and create something from the rubble. What we have in this chapter is just perfunctory, a rickety shack. It can support itself and the following chapters, but the slightest breeze, and it’s going to have problems if not collapse completely. 

Now, we can talk about three-act structure, two-act structure, five-act structure, seven-act structures, whether they even exist or are just variations of what is ultimately a three-act structure. We can talk about midpoints, should they be a false high or low. Act turning points. Climax and resolution. Are these devices required, or do they just help market a story? But what gets someone into a story is important. If we are constantly asking “Why doesn’t X just walk away”, then that breaks the story. I see why the Point of No Return is often hand-in-hand with the Call to Action. But, we just need to accept that Ginger is a military man, and he is doing his duty. He isn’t aware of the gravitas of the situation, so does he need a reason to back out? Dee clearly isn’t enough of a reason for him to not join the action. Maybe he’s so institutionalised that having his leave removed from him is not a biggy, though I only just thought of that, so that was definitely never in the book - if it ain’t on the paper, it ain’t there at all. This moment of Ginger getting into the story is serviceable. It isn’t strong, one can argue that it’s not functional, but it’s serviceable. 

Things start getting better very soon. Story structure may never be a strength of this book, but it does get better. 

All this means is that we have to continue the story with the acceptance that Ginger, at this stage, can’t back out. Why doesn’t he? ‘Cos the bloody author tells him he can’t. How about that for motivation and primary goals?

So, here we are. We are at a point when, traditionally, a protagonist has their first primary goal. Granted, I did say that some of these elements would come later. Well, Ginger does have a primary goal of stopping the aliens, but it’s assumed rather than made clear. With a hero with no (clear) primary goal, can I sustain the rest of the story? Or is it doomed to fail? 

Are these the new overarching questions that I am imposing on you the listener in a retrospective Death of the Author style way? After all, what am I doing in this podcast other than creating a narrative around the narrative, asking you to look at a text in a way one does not normally look at a text, with analysis after each chapter rather than giving you the chance to look at the text as a whole first before getting analysis from someone not the author. 

Or, am I looking at this the wrong way round? I did, after all, think strongly about removing Ginger from the story, at least as a narrator, and focussing the whole book on William. William instigates the Inciting Incident, but at the will of the rest of his civilization. Isn’t that a character being reluctantly pulled into the story? Or at least, turning the story in that direction as he clearly has doubts that it’s the right thing to do. It’s just the only thing he thinks he can do. A primary goal of trying to keep the Trascons safe. And as for a Point of No Return, I think an 850 year journey with dwindling resources and nowhere left to go might account for that. But that’s something we will definitely look at in a later episode. 

Fuck me, do you see why I went away for a long time? This is a difficult project to tackle, and it’s doing my head in. I’ve begun analysing my own analysis on top of dragging in a former version of myself to argue with. It’s very, very meta. 

Next week’s episode needs to be an easy one. I don’t know if I can keep up with myself. What do we have to look forward to? Oh, er… William is watching videos. Well, fuck. There’s foreshadowing for you. Reluctant hero getting their desire early, or willing hero denied the ability to do something in the story? Tune in and find out. 

TTFN. 

And just in case you were wondering, all text was written by me, Daniel’s Nemesis and XBook is purely a work of fiction and is not meant to be based on anyone or any events at all. 

The music was also by me, Daniel’s Nemesis as was the image that accompanies this podcast. 

It sucks, doesn’t it? 

But there we go.