Goodies General Notes and Table of Contents (read this first!)

Chapter Twenty

This is where things start to get good.

I chose the subway for the first real action scene because it’s so iconic. It brings to mind a vast number of classic movie sequences, not the least of which is Charade (also in Paris).

Here’s how I write action: I don’t plan any of it out. I generally just get my characters into tricky situations, and then force them to dig their way out—in other words, I force myself to find solutions out of the problem, rather than find a problem that would fit a particular, pre-planned solution.

Consequently, with this chapter I ended up getting Rebekah into a lot more trouble than I had originally expected. They’re on the train, they know they need to get away, and Rebekah acts how Rebekah would act. In this case, that means that she’d push herself too hard, more willing to make a desperate, yet committed move, rather than a cautious, less-definitive one. And she ended up getting pretty severely fatigued, which plagues them through the rest of the book.

Also, I didn’t think about this until yesterday, but what’s my obsession with mass transit? In Wake Me When It’s Over, Eric escapes once on a bus and once on a train. In The Counterfeit, they try to flee on both the Metro and the ferry.

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