Bonus: Zdan's diary

Considerations of an adolescent

This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: London is under martial law. Non-humans have been rounded up. Everyone is trying to survive.

A transcript for today’s chapter can be found below the images.

Transcript:

Oi oi. Lalala. What even is this?

Found this notepad in a bin. Full of someone else’s shit. Weird drawings and poetry or whatever. Dunno who it belonged to.

Anyway. Mine now! Haha

I think I used to keep a diary back in the day. Like, before Dad went to prison. Back when I was still a kid.

Don’t even know what I put in it. What would a 9 year old write about? I was just a little boy.

Oh, yeah. Supposed to put the date in, when you’re writing a diary. So, er:

MAY 9, 1980 < ta-da

How is it 1980? Mental

It’s always harder in the summer. I can feel it getting warmer already. In the winter, nobody thinks twice about someone with a hat over their ears, or a scarf all wrapped up around their head.

Nothin to see here, right?

Pointy ears are such a pain in the arse.

Sammy actually said I should cut the tips off. I pointed out I’d just look like an aen’fa who had cut their fuckin ears off. Sammy was all like “…oh yeah.”

The boys, though, they’re good.

We look after each other. Which is good luck, because nobody else is going to.

I realised the other day that Dad should have been out by now. But he’s still in prison. I mean, probably. Maybe? He’s from Palinor, so it’s not like they’re gonna let him out.

Move him into the ghetto, perhaps.

At least he’d be with Mum.

Some days I think about tearing it all down. Like back when I was a kid and they took Dad away. That’s when it started, and then Earth First and Prime Twatter Maxwell, and then Mum sent me to stay with the Thompsons. It’s like she knew what was coming.

They rounded up the whole street a week later. All the Palinese, anyway. Even the humans. Me and the boys, we actually hang out in the old gym. The boxing place. Yeah, the one with the portal tear.

It’s all boxed up now, the portal. They built this hardcore metal case around it, so nobody can get o it. But you know it’s still there, inside the box, lurking.

Imagine if it just started growing one day, and swallowed the box, and kept going , and ate London, then the whole planet. That’d show them.

Anyway. I’m booooooooOOOORED

You know what I’d really really like to do?

I want to march over the bridge to Westminster and bash down the doors. I want to drag Maxwell and all of his lot out onto the streets and beat the living shit out of them. A punch for every aen’fa they’ve imprisoned. A kick for every koth they’ve shot down on the streets.

I’d just go at it, over and over, me and the boys, and then we’d storm into the House of Commons and burn it all down.

Not just us, though. Every one! Get them all out on the streets, get them away from their TVs and stupid newspapers, and make them actually DO SOMETHING

Then I’d tear down the walls and get my mum out, and all the others.

Then I’d take my hat off and show all the Mid-Earthers my ears, and they’d know.

And they’d have to thank me. A half-human, half-aen’fa, giving them back their freedom, that they just gave away.

I mean…it’s that or we carry on thieving, until we’re caught. Whatever it takes to eat in London, am I right?

I’m not stupid, though. I know it would never work. They’d just shoot us all dead.

We need somethin else. I dunno what. A SIGN. There’s got to be others thinking this too…RIGHT???

RIGHT?

…

---

References

• Zdan was introduced in ‘Backdoors’, way back in December 2021. One of the very first Triverse stories!

Meanwhile.

Ah, it’s been a while since I did a proper bonus chapter. It’s always fun to break out of the usual routine and structure and do something a little different.

Live chat thing!

As long as the tech works, I’ll be having a chat with

Neill Cameron

, creator of MEGA ROBO BROS and DONUT SQUAD, later today at 6pm UK time. It’ll be through the Substack app. Stick it in your calendar:

Pubstack!

This week I was down in London for Pubstack, a pub quiz gathering at The Ship with none other than Substack CEO

Chris Best

in attendance. They’d taken over the entire pub and put on a 100% authentic British pub quiz, complete with music and picture rounds — and entire mountains of pizza.

Highlight of the evening was meeting

Eleanor Anstruther

in person, having chatted and livestreamed with her for a year-or-so. Being a rare fiction writer among a gathering of hotshot political journalists, fashion and health writers and reps from non-Substack magazines was a curious experience that I’m still processing. It’s an odd feeling, being in the same room as writers who have tens of thousands of paying subscribers and do this for a living.

There aren’t many (any?) fiction writers managing that yet. But, then, traditionally published fiction writers don’t tend to make a living exclusively from their writing, either. That Substack can accommodate such a range of writers in one space is intriguing in itself, though.

No, I’m still not sure why I was on the invite list, either. But I did what I could to wave the fiction flag. Big thanks to

Arthur Meek

,

Farrah @Substack

and the team for putting together such a fun evening.

New features for fiction?

Talking of fiction on Substack, make sure you listen to this podcast in which Chris Best and

Hamish McKenzie

talk to

Mario Gabriele

in some detail about the latent potential for fiction on the platform:

The Substack Playbook: Inside The $650M Platform Rewriting Media, Trust, and Creator Economics | Chris Best & Hamish McKenzie (Co-Founders)

It sounds like there might be some exciting stuff coming our way at some point in the future. That fiction is on the radar of the Substack CEO is exciting.

Author notes

We’ve been away from London for a long while in Triverse. We’re also at a critical point in the story, following the conclusion of season 4. That’s why it made sense to do the one-shot Matheson story last week, and to focus in on a supporting character from waaaay back in today’s chapter. It brings Triverse’s overall arc full circle, right as we’re about to race to the finish.

These two chapters also serve as something of a breather and time break, much like Sally’s interlude between seasons 3 and 4. When we return properly, events will be in motion.

My original plan for today’s chapter was to do something more conventional, following Zdan and using his point of view to reveal what is going on in London. It was quite the last minute decision to switch to a diary format, and then an even more last minute idea to write by hand and scan the pages.

I wish I’d had more space to explore Zdan. We’ll probably come back to him in a future chapter. How does this young guy, 15 years old, get through the day? He’s been let down by the system, let down by his family, let down by history. He’s stuck in the middle of something much, much larger than him, with no real agency. Having recently watched Adolescence I couldn’t avoid having that in my brain while writing this piece.

The idea of Zdan hanging around the ruined, half-demolished gym, with this strange monument to his dad’s failure standing starkly in the rubble…a reminder and a beacon. Literally building walls around hope.

As for writing by hand: it’s something that

T K Hall

has written about very eloquently:

To Write Freely, Write Freehand (Revisited)

It’s not something I could do on a regular basis, as I’m simply too slow and clunky. I need to be able to live edit as I go, writing and rewriting sentences on the fly, and I find that easier in Scrivener on a computer. But for writing Zdan’s diary, which needed to have ae naturalistic feel, it made complete sense to switch to pen and paper.

Plus, that gave me the opportunity to incorporate sketches and comedy asides, in and around the grim main tale.

Right, that’s me for today. Thanks for reading!