Off the Deep End and Chasing Waterfalls

Before I get into the chapter discussions, I just want to say that it feels crazy to have reached this point. 103.5K words published to this story so far on Inkitt. Two (planned) chapters left to revise and release. It’s almost finished.

I have some things I want to go back and update, no major changes, mainly just a few inconsistent details I want to tidy up. So I won’t be marking the book “Completed” until I do that. But the next pass should go fairly quickly, and then… what? I have a vague idea of what the next steps are, but I haven’t come up with a plan yet. I’ve put too much work into this for it to simply languish on Inkitt. I am so grateful for the five readers I have there who have been the cheerleaders I’ve needed to keep going. Without them, I’m not sure I would have gotten to this point.

But my metrics are not anything to brag out. I don’t know what I can do about that, given I have no interest in writing to market or pumping out volume in a series format.

Anyway. These are things for another day, another time.

Chapter 45 and 46 were a lot of work to get into release-ready shape. In my last blog post, I talked about resolving a POV problem, and how happy I am with how I was able to handle that (the Being John Malkovich style “fly on the wall” device, I’m still loving it). But that was kind of a one-shot deal, and my POV problem filtered into these chapters as well.

In Chapter 45: Off the Deep End, originally I had that third-person omniscient perspective following Styles’ as he begins to unravel in public view via his podcast, the public reaction to it, and inevitably, Willow’s reaction to it. But how can Cara tell us all about it if she’s not there to witness it? Fortunately, Styles having a public meltdown is something she would indubitably be watching herself, but I couldn’t just go directly there. It needed a bit of set up.

Hence her pub date with Griffin, where we learn that she’s really trying to focus on righting their ship, making him the priority, while finding moments to keep up with her secret life online and try to get ahead of any fallout that might be happening in the background.

The irony is, her tactics to deal with her secret identity mayhem are starting to look a lot like she’s cheating, with running to the bathroom to check messages and feeds and trying to hide her text messages. Zinnia Sherwood has basically become her side piece. Unfortunately, Zinnia Sherwood is also Styles’ side piece, so there is a direct link back to him that just doesn’t look good.

Griffin notices, of course, but thankfully he doesn’t try to dig too deep. After all, Styles Chilton is everywhere now. His podcast series about Zinnia Sherwood and Maladaptive has become super popular and he’s getting all kinds of accolades for it in the media. The book has gone mainstream, with Zinnia Sherwood becoming a household name, and Griffin actually gives Cara a copy of the book on the strength of its widespread popularity. For Cara, it’s a bit too close for comfort though.

Styles’ podcast coverage of the Zinnia Sherwood phenomenon is going well, until it isn’t. Obviously, Cara is going to spend her non-Griffin time taking it all in, such as when she’s in her office at her warehouse job. And that’s how we get to see him start to slip over the edge from a literary analysis standpoint to an obsession with the book’s content and reshaping the narrative into something that doesn’t make the character he has identified as himself look like the villain of the piece.

He’s proactively trying to get his audience to see that character in a different light, as well as cast the book’s narrator as unreliable, just in case someone out there on the case of the Zinnia Sherwood mystery does manage to solve it and reveal Cara as the true author of the book. He’s afraid that people will make the connection between himself and the podcaster/web series co-creator character in the novel, and that he’ll be ruined.

But he’s doing a good job of ruining himself in the process, by coming off as obsessed and in a parasocial relationship with Zinnia Sherwood. Public opinion of his series begins to sour and he starts to lose sponsorships while incurring censorships and warnings on his podcast platforms. He’s being cancelled – the exact thing he was trying to prevent.

With his reputation and livelihood suffering, Willow is going to be impact and have strong reactions to what happening as well. This was a scene with that same POV problem that needed intervention, since how would Cara know Willow’s reaction to all of this? One idea was to have Willow make some kind of public statement, but I decided against that. It would be out of character for her to do such a thing. She would handle this privately. And so my solution was to have Cara imagine it, naturally.

Cara makes it clear that she still has empathy for Styles. Publishing her book was not meant to be some kind of expose of his character, or revenge for his actions. She didn’t intend for anyone to get hurt. So when she imagines the confrontation between Willow and Styles about his career-killing fixation on the book and its author, she takes no pleasure in it, apart from, well, picturing Willow naked during the entirety of the scene.

Look, I know that seems kind of random, but I strongly felt that some comedic relief was needed. Styles is having a bad time. And yeah, some readers might hate him at this point (though if the opinion of my few readers on Inkitt is any indication, he has managed to maintain a certain amount of likeability, which was my goal, so yay!) But the idea of Willow, who Cara has pretty much described as being the hottest woman on the planet, being unclothed for this conversation just felt like the right move. It also injects a touch of some much-needed sex to keep things interesting, even if it’s just a bit of female nudity.

Cara’s daydream is interrupted by an email notification, but it’s not work related, it’s Styles, informing her that he has read her book and that he knows she’s Zinnia Sherwood, and that he has wrecked his life trying to prevent his life from being wrecked by it. At this point, he has gone so far with this fixation that to stop now seems ludicrous. It won’t have been worth it. He needs to go even further to try and get his questions answered, to make it all worthwhile. And that means going to Niagara Falls.

Chapter 46: Chasing Waterfalls opens with Cara in a therapy session with Paige, where she finally reveals that she wrote a book under a pen name, and what that book and pen name are. She’s so overburdened by the lies and obfuscation and secret double life that she has to tell someone, hoping that telling Paige will help alleviate that burden. 

It feels like she’s admitting to a crime, but Paige is naturally supportive and praises Cara for her bravery, encouraging her to share the news with Griffin. The session basically functions as a practice-run for telling him, and I’m sure that subconsciously that was Cara’s plan. If nothing bad happens to her upon telling Paige, then maybe it’s safe to tell Griffin, too. At least, she’ll have the ability to get the words out, even if she can’t control his reaction.

During a low-stakes video game play session with Griffin, the pressure actually becomes overwhelming when Cara receives a message from Styles that he is in Niagara Falls. She’s been ignoring his attempts to get a hold of her, but this message is too urgent for her to ignore in that moment.

Now, I have to say, of all of the POV switches I needed to do, this one was the most difficult. I really liked the way I had written the scene of Styles wandering around Niagara Falls, imagining himself walking in the same footsteps that Cara might have, looking at things through her eyes, trying to connect to her by moving through the wake of her vibrations. It’s kind of romantic and wistful, and I thought I did a really nice job with evocative language. But yet again, Cara would not be there to witness this for her retelling of it, so I had to find a way to put it into her POV.

It didn’t feel right to have her imagine this herself. There is another daydream coming up in the next chapter and it felt like it was going to be a bit overkill to have her daydream this scene as well. I considered having him vlog it on a new channel not related to his podcast, but that didn’t sit right either. I also considered having someone recognize him and post about it.

Ultimately, I went with him telling her about it in an email. And honestly, I’m not that thrilled with it. A lot of the magic kind of got sucked out of it, I think. I didn’t want the email to be overly long, so I abbreviated it quite a bit as well. The main purpose of his email is to tell her the name of the motel he’s staying at and his room number, but he includes his impressions of the city in it as a way to keep what I was trying to do with that scene. Otherwise, I was going to have to just cut it entirely, and I didn’t want to do that.

Anyway, reading Styles’ email and finding out that he’s in her town pushes her to the brink. She needs vent some of the pressure, but telling Griffin this is likely to result in him driving over to the motel and beating down Styles’ room door himself (I didn’t put that in to the chapter, but maybe I should). To stop herself from exploding, Cara finally tells Griffin about the book.

And he’s so lovely about it. He’s beaming with pride. He is the living embodiment of a heart-eyes emoji about it. He wants to shout about it from the rooftops. But Cara makes him promise he won’t tell anyone, and he promises, and it basically feels like a renewal of their commitment to each other. A new promise being made between them that they will hold between themselves, with no room for anyone else.

The chapter ends with Griffin asking if he can read it, and what it’s about. Originally I had Cara responding “It’s about a snow globe” but that actually made it feel like the end. There are still two chapters to go before the official resolution, so it’s a bit too soon for that feeling.