A Hidden Message

Did you know Falling has an easter egg?

I probably shouldn’t tell you what it is, because one day years in the future if it becomes really popular – maybe after I’m dead like Stieg Larsson – whoever’s in charge of my estate can run a competition for people to win a T shirt or something if they find it.

Or maybe it’s an opportunity, and if I tell enough people about it now it’ll prompt everyone to rush out and buy a copy. If this doesn’t work, maybe I’ll publish a second edition with a full frontal nude photo of myself in a centrefold, a printed copy of Falling draped demurely but suggestively across my rude bits. No, might just stick to the easter egg.

Anyway, if you hadn’t noticed, Falling is a story in eight parts. Like all the great commercial novellists from the Gen X era (okay, Stephen King), it naturally divided itself not just into chapters but larger sections I called ‘Books’ during the actual writing.

Each Book is in turn is divided up into chapters – usually no more than 15 or 16, as I wanted each book to be around the same length (Book 1 in the exception as it’s supposed to be a short, sharp shock to set everything up).

And when I realised in about 1995-1996, according to the timeline I remember, that Falling was going to be comprised of eight Books, for some reason it seemed a perfect number to spell something out.

Hence, the first letters of each Book spell out a two-word phrase that serves both as a statement about the genre aesthetic I’m going for and also a bit of a cryptic spoiler about where the whole thing ends up.

Want to know what it is? Just click here to buy Falling from Amazon, Apple or Smashwords.