The Story

The writer, John Passfield, contemplates writing a novel about Cassandra. Suddenly, he finds himself in the presence of her tormentor, Apollo, the god who – seemingly as a whim – has brought a catastrophic curse down on the head of an innocent human. John sees Cassandra as a mythical creature whose helpless situation contains the dynamics of all that is wrong on the planet Earth. What a chance to confront a representative of the gods and ask him to explain such actions and to demand an immediate end to all the agony in the world.

The Making of Fair Is Fair

This journal records the author’s reflections on the process of the crafting of the novel as it evolved through the stages of planning, writing, editing and polishing. It constitutes an effort to be as conscious as possible of the process whereby the single idea that suggested the topic of the novel was expanded into a complex work of art. Topics range from the nuts and bolts of novel-building to the nature of the novel as an art-form.

Planning Fair Is Fair

During the writing of the novel, the author kept a hand-written notebook which records the day-by-day development of the novel as it found its shape and style. The notebook – now in print form – reveals how a vast cluster of thoughts was sifted, selected, structured and polished into novel-form.

The Project

Together, this novel, journal and notebook comprise the thirty-first installment in an on-going novel-writing project in which the author is exploring the concept of form and meaning in the novel, and of the novel as a form of expression in the 21st Century. All of the published journals and notebooks are available for free download.