Did you know ‘Falling’ has special features?

Something you might not know about Falling is that after all the work I did on it over all those years of writing, rewriting and rewriting again, I ended up with a lot of background on all the changes I made.

Like a movie with scenes all over the cutting room floor, tidbits of trivia about how scenes came together, interviews with the cast and crew and a creative ethos/theme/call-it-what-you-will at its centre, not all of which is immediately obvious on the page but which props the whole intent aloft, I was left with a lot of stuff I personally found pretty interesting (but I’m biased, I wrote it).

So at some point I decided to take the revolutionary step (which plenty of people have undoubtedly already done without me realising) of including bonus features. You can read them right there in the manuscript after ‘The End’ – figuratively, I don’t actually say that. There are almost 100 pages of deleted scenes, including notes on where they used to fit in and why they had to go.

There’s an essay on how ghosts and the paranormal work. During the first major rewrite of Falling, the themes of the supernatural phenomena, human neurology and how they interact came together more in my mind. That led to the (mostly subconscious) construction of a methodology for the way electromagnetic fields interact with the human brain and cause changes in our consciousness.

And like I mention above, while it’s not necessarily laid out in so many words in the actual book, it’s all essential scaffolding upon which the human stories hang, so I put it all into words in a quick discourse which made the perfect extra feature.

Another is an artefact that came from Tim’s work. Once again, it’s critical background to what goes on but didn’t really have a place in situ. In fact I introduce one of the deleted scenes with the subhead ‘Tim talks too much’, because during rewriting I found way too many places where the story screeched to a halt while Tim explained in scientific terms what was going on.

As much as I could I took all those speeches and soliloquies and stitched them to action or gave them to other characters to impart or discover, but I extracted the really important stuff and put it into a fake peer review paper introduction just like one he’d submit to the relevant journals.

Finally I broke the fourth wall and told the story of how the book itself came about – from the initial inspiration the time I walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and got a sudden scare to the years of blood, sweat, tears, rewrites, soaring joys and crushing disappointments that come with the writing of any book.

In fact so much about it has changed over the ensuing years that if you buy Falling your purchase includes a link to access and read the overlong, unfocused, cliche-ridden first draft, transposed from the original handwritten version I began in way back in 1991.