Announcing Falling Part II (not really)

** SPOILERS **

Did you know Falling, after all the decades of work, already has a sequel?

Not written, of course, just in planning. I’ll write it when the original becomes a global entertainment phenomenon.

I actually thought I’d written some of it, but having just had a quick look on my system, I can’t find it. Maybe I only dreamed I did but I’ve been thinking about it so long I’ve come to believe I did.

As you’ll know from reading the novel, the final scene sees Tim Hacker walk back into downtown Sydney as the original Sydney Harbour Bridge collapse tragedy happens behind him, transported 30 years into the past and stranded after he and Dale’s desperate flight onto the 2037 bridge to try to finally put a stop to the entity haunting it.

As we meet Tim in the new story, he’s living in a dingy flat in Glebe Point Rd, Leichhardt. It’s not clear yet how much time has passed or how much of his predicament he’s investigated, but he of course already exists in the new world he’s found himself in, as a teenager at school, so he knows he has to remain anonymous.

And having come from the future, he knows what trouble is brewing – the neural activity of thousands of people who died and witnessed the tragedy has created a firestorm of electromagnetism, only waiting to be be tapped like the electronic brace reconnecting Dale’s spine did – does – in Tim’s past (the actual future) …if that makes sense.

Figuring it’s only a matter of time before something else comes along that unleashes hell on Sydney the way the device did (does), Tim resolves to do something about it, by creating or finding something that can detect it and – if possible – deflect or contain it.

In fact it’s the only thing he really can do. He has no life left to live where he finds himself because his younger self already exists, and he’s not about to steal the life of an innocent young boy.

But for reasons I never got as far as figuring out in the version I started/thought about, he realises he needs an ally in Vicki Holt.

That means his first quest is to make contact with her and convince her to team up with him. He knows when he meets Vicki in this world she’s 14, so before anything else he has the not inconsiderable hurdle of being a thirtysomething man trying to befriend a teenage girl – something she’d certainly find creepy and anyone else who noticed would probably consider legally actionable.

Then, when he does find her, the barrier to getting through to her is even higher. Vicki isn’t the refined, intelligent women we know from Falling. She’s a belligerent, rebellious girl who dyes her hair crazy colours, tears holes in her stockings, vapes, wags school with boys and her friends and isn’t the least bit interested in a grown man telling her she needs to come with him to help stop a haunting.

I knew Tim as a character, but I was really curious to learn what kind of kid Vicki would be, especially through her interactions with him. I had no idea what they were going to do about the forthcoming paranormal event, how they were going to stop it or whether Tim was somehow going to get back to his own time, but I’m still kind of curious about that too.

In a parallel universe where I didn’t have a mortgage to pay and a family to look after, I might know by now. If you’re curious too, you can help make it happen by buying Falling right here.