(Mas­sive spoil­ers on May 5 & The Assas­sin fol­low — also, if you haven’t read the ser­ial, some details men­tioned will allude you.)

Fif­teen weeks of writ­ing a 1 — 2k a week web ser­ial, of try­ing to fol­low a sto­ry­line laid out months in advance, of try­ing to begin and end each episode with some­thing new, and yet, resolved. It wasn’t easy, that’s my review in three words.

I’ve writ­ten a book, and I’ve writ­ten short sto­ries and flash fic­tion. But writ­ing a web ser­ial — some­thing episodic — is com­pletely dif­fer­ent to any of those things, and was a com­pletely new expe­ri­ence for me. From the begin­ning to the very end, there were things I knew would hap­pen, things I wanted to change, and things I never saw com­ing, but seemed to mutate out of the story itself… let me be more in-depth.

The Plot

When I first thought up May and her world, I knew it would be about clones, for which she would be the fifth. I don’t know why, but May 5 was a con­stant that came in at he begin­ning and never changed. Orig­i­nally she was to be the best of five, the other four coun­ter­parts fail­ing in this way or another. Obvi­ously in the end, it turned out she was the first suc­cess­ful clone and just so hap­pened to be the fifth. The plot itself was built around this secret, and I had to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment and set of cir­cum­stances that would unravel to explain the odd name, the cloning and so on. As such, May became a pros­ti­tute, seem­ingly aban­doned at birth, who finds out she is the secret clone of the cur­rent King’s dead daugh­ter. It’s a big secret, but not alto­gether that hard to tell.

This is why I brought in the Nightingale’s, I needed a heavy weight that could be used to cover up a secret, pro­tect it, and be used against the King in the finale — it’s one thing to take away some­ones life, it’s another to make sure they can never get it back. I cre­ated the NTC to act as a pow­er­house, and the heart of how the infor­ma­tion gets out. Once the secret is revealed, the Nightingale’s use what­ever resources they have to keep it quiet — act­ing as the King’s right hand. The plot obvi­ously brings in the oppor­tu­nity for hired thugs and pro­fes­sional killers, and so But­ler was intro­duced. I needed some­one to pro­tect May, I needed some­one con­flicted, and a def­i­nite anti-hero. Just as May was being taken out of her world, I needed some­one equally as impor­tant to be taken out of their com­fort zone.

Lord Mal­colm was always a set char­ac­ter, as I wanted a pres­ence that offered wis­dom, and con­nected some dots — and I wanted some­one But­ler could know, respect and lis­ten to, oth­er­wise why would he ever have stopped killing May? Mal­colm was a man with some­thing to lose, but also a man with deep rela­tions to May’s entire life, and a man who wanted her to suc­ceed. Tanaz Bloom on the other hand, and the EPA were not expected. Ini­tially May and But­ler were to go to the USA to find Kreuger, but that was it. Then I real­ized that really, May was never going to abdi­cate the King with But­ler sim­ply black­mail­ing the monar­chy with infor­ma­tion on Pir-Axis, I need a weight to equal the Nightingale’s, that turned out to be the Patri­otic Army of Eng­land — in a way, it worked out quite log­i­cally, in another, I’m not sure they were given enough depth — a prob­lem, I have found, with the ‘short burst’ formula.

The end of the ser­ial was as expected, but obvi­ously with­out all of the explod­ing build­ings in Lon­don — dah well. Not that I’d watched V for Vendetta for years, but it reminded me of that. Must have been a latent mem­ory that snuck in.

Was I happy with the plot? Yes and no… I am glad that, for the most part, it stuck together and made it through in one piece. On the other hand, I know ten­sion dropped and it mean­dered in places, suck­ing the excite­ment out and tak­ing a lit­tle too long to breath it back in again. I liked the ‘on the run’ flow, and the way the plot needed to go to keep up the intrigue, allow­ing for answers every now and then before all was revealed and the fin­ish approached.

The Story

Was sup­posed to be about some­body find­ing the truth in their life, some­one who had very lit­tle and although a lifestyle that suited, one that was in no way con­tented or reward­ing enough to ignore the mys­tery sur­round­ing a past. May needed her answers, but she hadn’t really thought about find­ing them out until it was brought down on her sud­denly. With But­ler, I wanted a char­ac­ter that was happy in their pro­fes­so­r­ial occu­pa­tion, but had no real social idea — the antithe­sis of May.

Through their jour­ney, I would bring them together, cement­ing a con­nec­tion through the death of Mal­colm, and push­ing towards some­thing new that they both needed to rely on each other for. Butler’s res­o­lu­tion came with the death of The Wolf, May’s sup­pos­edly with the near-death of the King. Really though, I think May had a break­through with her answers when she met Tanaz — he per­cep­tions chang­ing May’s approach to the end game.

Again, like the plot, I know the story needed to be fleshed out more. But­ler and May needed more time and oppor­tu­nity to grow towards one-another. This wasn’t in the ser­ial enough, and left me wan­der­ing how close they really were by the end.

The Char­ac­ters

May to me, was the most devel­oped before­hand, but I feel in the process of the story, But­ler actu­ally become the more ‘well-rounded’ char­ac­ter. His motives, actions and atti­tude were set in stone through­out, and explained by the way he was. I think But­ler was the one piece that never moved — adjust­ing for growth obvi­ously. May grew in her own way, but I think the plot had a lot to do with that; her changes occur­ring at set times, as opposed to nat­u­rally. You could say May was a vic­tim of the story, whereas But­ler was organic.

I loved Mal­colm as the loose canon aris­to­crat who knew a bunch of answers, but def­i­nitely didn’t just write them down and walk off. He was deep in the back story, and no amount of being eclec­tic was going to change that — he needed to be rooted still, and ulti­mately be the cat­a­lyst for Butler’s sin­gu­lar focus at the mid-point, of get­ting revenge on Freda Wolf (oh, and sorry I didn’t detail her interrogation/torture scene. I decided to play it sub­tle, let­ting your imag­i­na­tion won­der what dam­age that did, kinda).

Frank Pierce, Freda Wolf, Tanaz Bloom, Hugo — these char­ac­ters were sec­ondary, and not at all pol­ished enough to carry any par­tic­u­lar part of the story alone. Bloom was, as said, a new per­son added as a mech­a­nism to May’s change in view, Hugo to be the Malcolm-that-was-no-more, Pierce was the King’s right hand, Freda Wolf… well she should have been devel­oped more, admit­tedly. For one of the two assas­sins in the story, she was not at all grown enough.

The King was shown through the eyes of the media for the most part, which I thought rather reflec­tive of our cur­rent rela­tion­ship with peo­ple in power. Not until the end did we really see what he was like, and yes, he was under­de­vel­oped too. I’m not sure why, but I seemed to have fewer details than I thought when I reached cer­tain parts in the story, characters were becom­ing a lit­tle two-dimensional and the King was one of them. I’d spent so much energy on cre­at­ing his ‘world’ per­sona, I had not thought about the man him­self, and how he may relate to May or this secret of his.

The Nightingale’s also, suf­fered from that hol­low feel­ing. I liked the idea of this super-power fam­ily, but had no real chance to show any of them beyond a name. In the non-narrative frame, they were to con­trol the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity in oppo­si­tion to MI5/6, and give the King power in mil­i­tary prowess, thus oppos­ing the Eng­lish armed forces. I wanted the King to be crushed by the legit­i­mate forces in Eng­land, and the Nightingale’s were sup­posed to be that unwanted pres­ence. Alas, bar the NTC, they were not shown to be such a dark force — their end prob­a­bly suf­fer­ing from that lack of ‘weight’ in the story.

The World

I needed a monar­chy for the story — I wanted one. To do this, I wanted to cre­ate a dif­fer­ent world alto­gether, one with royal courts, dif­fer­ent nations vying for eco­nom­i­cal power, and the world reel­ing from a western-world war. I might as well have cre­ated a slightly futur­is­tic world, why not? If I was cre­at­ing Kings of Eng­land, Queens of France, Courts of Europe, and Atlantic wars where Man­hat­tan and Wales were destroyed, I might as well throw in some snazzy tech­nol­ogy too. Kind of mir­rored our own global polit­i­cal cli­mate too, weird that…

So, Was I Happy?

90%, yes. Damn straight. I wrote a fif­teen week ser­ial, with one sto­ry­line that arched over the whole thing. I got a char­ac­ter from one place to another, via a huge leap, with lots of rev­e­la­tions and hope­fully, decent action in-between. I also wrote and edited at least one episode per week, got it online and cre­ated a nifty site to show­case it all. For that, I’m well happy. 2010 was a bit of a shit year for my writ­ing, so to bounce into 2011 with a feel­ing of accom­plish­ment, and a chunky amount of prac­tice, is great.

The other 10% is sim­ply because I know the ser­ial was under­de­vel­oped, and it was reflected in some of the story. In the end, I’d put it off for so long I was sick of my own bull­shit, and had to get it out. So, yes, it may have been rushed and had I thought about it more, spent more than a few weeks putting it alto­gether, I might have had a more pol­ished ser­ial to show. But in the end, it’s done and I’m proud of doing it, of being active and never late to issue. Also, had I got it all in hand, I may have ended the last episode on May 5th, which is only two weeks away! Maybe I’ll put out some­thing spe­cial for that date? I’m also think­ing of putting the episodes into a sin­gle pub­li­ca­tion, send it out there, pol­ished, as one entire series.

So, to all that read my hum­ble ser­ial, and to those who gave it more than five min­utes thought, thank you. Who knows, maybe in time I will be able to for­mu­late a new weekly pub­li­ca­tion? Got to fin­ish that sec­ond book though, and edit the first one, too…

…never ends.