Until July this year, progress on my second Voidpunk novel had been rather uneven—I’d been struggling with several chapters supposed to lead to the midpoint since, what!, September 2023. Sure, I was still recovering from my burnout, and I came back to my happy self in full only this year in June/July. But there was also a technical side to it.

The challenge is to make the midpoint beefy enough and pivotal enough to push everything plausibly and necessarily in a new direction. And even though I had figured out how to accomplish that for this novel a long time ago in my scene sketches, it still didn’t work. Why? It took me a good while to find out—it was beefy and pivotal all right, but the pacing was terrible. Everything took way too long because too many things happened on the way and too many things had to be explained on the way. For an important event like this, you have to build up a lot of tension, sure. But then you have to know when it’s time to rush forward and fulfill the implicit promise you made to the reader.

That insight didn’t come along by itself. In Tōkyō, where I spent most of June and a good part of July this year, I had to put my draft on the back burner for a full week to write something completely different, a “sudden fiction” short story as a submission for a writers’ conference in October. It was capped at three minutes reading time, and should contain a surprise twist around the midpoint that puts everything that happened before in a substantially different light. Hell, I love constraints like that! So I put a lot of work into it. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that everything had to be stripped down to the bone to work, but that wasn’t all—everything that happened had to be perfectly self-explanatory and “flat” as if there were no narrator at all. (A parlor trick, naturally; there’s always a narrator.) Also, right before the sudden switch that functionally works as the story’s midpoint, everything had to accelerate and happen incredibly fast, so that there was enough time left to subsequently bring everything home in a manner that didn’t feel rushed.

And then it dawned on me that I had to go back to my novel, rip out several thousand words from what I’d already written, and rewrite and streamline the rest. And then go for the kill.

And that was that.

When I left Tōkyō in mid-July, the midpoint was in the bag and I was finally ready to start writing the second half of my novel. Yay!

Header image: “Game Over!” midpoint in James Cameron’s 1986 Aliens