I’ve just published chapter 12 of Survival of the Fittest. It’s here and on my LinkedIn site. According to my mapping out of the story (which I did in full before I started writing), this is the halfway point. There are 24 chapters, and they tend to be of similar length.

The actual events on which this work is based are becoming more and more distant in time and, probably, clouded in my memory. I am becoming increasingly thankful for the notes I made earlier in the year, when the idea first came to me, and even more increasingly wary of making any changes to the initially laid out structure or the underlying details. I feel I’ve reached a tipping point between reality and imagination and the question arises: do I approach the second half of the story faithfully (relatively speaking), much like I have done the opening half, or do I twist it to my own requirements? Literal or literary?

You could argue, of course, that I’ve already departed from the literal by fictionalising the tale: the situation has been transported to what is quite obviously a fantasy; readers are only allowed to see its reflection in a distorted mirror; the characters are just that – characters and not people. But the fact remains: all of this actually happened. And yes, I could barely believe it at the time. Some of the passages are written in the present tense, too. Those observations are less affected by the onward march of time. And just because I’ve chosen to turn it into the sort of sprawling metaphor that people mostly advise me to avoid, it doesn’t make the reality of it any less genuine.

The biggest difficulty I fight with, daily, is the worry that what I am writing is of no interest to anyone apart from myself. That, rather than the protection of the less-than-innocent, was my motivation behind initially deciding to fictionalise the whole thing. And it is that, once more, which gives me my present quandary. Must I tell it like it happened, or should I throw in a few more dramatic touches to suck in readers who might be finding the whole thing a little bit pointless?

I’ve not actually decided yet, and I’m not convinced I will, either. I know that the next chapter, as far as I’ve laid it out, tells yet another truthful episode within a fictitious setting. How things pan out after that is another matter entirely. I expect I won’t know until it happens. Life isn’t constantly engaging and worthwhile – must literature be? I think the answer to that is, probably, yes.