Now, I want to make it clear that this is a personal bugbear of mine – namely, “The Hook” at the end of a chapter.

I’m not anti-Hook, but chapters in recent memory are shorter and often used to break up shifts in perspective – and sometimes can be just a couple of pages long – this, for me, is too short of a line to attach a hook onto. My heart just can’t take it.

I’m not going to pretend my chapters don’t end with a hook, but I am currently sitting 17 chapters, start to finish. With some breaking the 10k word limit I set myself per chapter – and that feels manageable. But, giving me three pages of quick exposition with a hook sends me into a spiral of “just put it down” and “one more chapter”, yet the latter is done bitterly as I feel I have been coerced into it by a strong arm, rather than enticed.

Rant over. Off-topic, no, actually ON-topic, it’s my website after all: Nolan’s Odyssey looks fantastic but I fear I may have Holland / Bernthal burnout after Spider-Man: Brand New Day and then Odyssey. Ah, who am I kidding, I’ll take them both in spades – fantastic people and a credit to their professions, both!

May have to add them to the man-crush list…which is getting long enough to warrant long judgemental looks and leading questions from my therapist.

S