Winter is upon me - along with sufficient time to play with Tuesday 🖋️ so at last I can bring the little darling to completion! Here’s the plan:
soon there will be a BOOK called Tuesday’s Child {a novel in three paths}
digital and softcover print copy options
release date February 2027
I’ll keep updating further between now and then but I’m excited to share this story after so long working on it! And because this stuff is fun for me I have, of course, taken some notes on the adaptation process.
Currently my text doc of Tuesday's Child contains not a novel but a script. It leaned heavily upon the intended visuals for description, for atmosphere, and for dramatic irony: very often Sinclair would observe something that was very clearly different from what was happening on-screen. Without accompanying illustrations these bits will need to be expanded and clarified.
The VN outline had three paths, each with several possible endings. In terms of plot, though, there’s really only one main ending for each path - the others branched for entertainment purposes, to exhaust certain possibilities, but they are not (so to speak) entirely canon. They can be be dropped from the book version without loss, leaving each path with its one true and inevitable ending.
Apart from these adaptations, I don’t think anything significant will change about the story or scenes.
For the cover and fonts, as for any of the interior developments, I'm returning to things that caught my eye when I first began the research phase: the Surrealist works of Bataille and Minotaure magazine; Jungian spiritualism; 1940s noir films; toying with structure and metatextual shape; and the usual Amanitus indulgence in faerytales, philosophy, and the erotic.
I’m also inspired at the moment by Borges’ extraordinary short works, such as his concept of the Garden of Forking Paths - very much the precursor of multi-stranded storytelling. And of course I’m never not inspired by Nabokov. (If you haven’t read his short story “Symbols and Signs” please do. Not relevant, it’s just cool.)
And lastly. You may ask How will the book version of Tuesday’s Child physically organise three separate story paths? Good question! You’ll soon see 🖋️
Thanks so much for your patience and support - I'm really looking forward to opening the Tuesdayworld that's been teased for so long.
[photograph: 1840s calotype of Edinburgh by Hill & Adamson]
I'm still in the numb to everything and unable to feel everything stage of my life, do you have any advice for learning how to feel your feelings again since you've done that work? Not to treat you like a therapist of course, feel free to ignore!
The honest truth is it's hard to change and start opening up to the world while you're horribly overworked/underpaid, or living with your parents, or stuck in a bad relationship. It wasn't until I was finally (frighteningly) living alone that I was able to make notable progress and even then it's been eight years of effort (so far). Not to demotivate you - just a reminder that we're often swimming against a brutal tide of much more than our own interior challenges and MUST be gentle with ourselves!!
It's worth starting, though. Despite the discomfort of existence it gets so much better.
My main advice is to start small. For me that meant facing my avoidant habits by taking responsibility for my tiny stupid mistakes & getting better at taking criticism (also losing my anxiety of disappointing other people - that's their issue, not mine) so that eventually I could learn to take responsibility for large life choices. Then I found I could actually MAKE large life choices, because my instincts weren't clouded by others' judgements and I wasn't paralysed by fear of messing up. Now it actually feels like living instead of just drifting along!!
Weirdly enough, at no point did I decide to start feeling more. I just learned to get used to being wrong/silly. I could be aware of others' feelings without bearing the burden of fixing their mood, and then I could pay attention to my own feelings instead! And just feel them without having to react to them!! Amazing. But it seems to be a side effect of all the other necessary work - it's all connected, even if your personal challenges are something other than avoidance. (Although tbh it does seem to be avoidance for a large number of people.)
The other advice is - don't be afraid of feeling bad or incorrect or rejected. I mean it's really painful but you can't have FEAR. Discomfort and gross feelings won't kill you, and they don't automatically mean something is wrong. After a while your body will learn that embarassment is not the same as being eaten alive by a wild dog (though it feels that way) & it will stop panicking.
This is all making the assumption that your issues were similar to mine, but I hope it will at least suggest a doorway in to your own life 🤝
I've been trying to decide on subtitle names for Tuesday's Child in order to differentiate the three volumes but in the VN they would not have been named. My original working titles were just straight up spoilers. Currently they're labelled Inversus, Contrapunctus, and Canon alla Ottava, which is thematic for reasons that will be clear by the final volume (or immediately, for Bach enjoyers. Which Sinclair is). They're also the three musical works I would have used as the chapter intro/outro for each story route!! However it's also wanky and pretentious 🤔 HOWEVER I opened a YA book by Diana Wynne Jones this morning and
If the queen can be a dramatic bitch than who am I to hold back
The telephone depicted as the father of television, an infant in a crib. Natural History. April 1945. Bell Telephone promotes its role in making new technology feasible.
