Motherf*cking Locked

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Rocking the Second Act is a live, evolving draft — I tweak, polish, and occasionally rewrite chaos in real time. If you’ve just arrived, the Chapter Index will get you up to speed.

And here is a little bonus.

Rather than my usual solo audio, Daryl joined me to bring Chapter 55 to life.

I hope you enjoy watching it.

*

“Well.” Alasdair rubbed a hand over his face. “That’s Season One locked.”

The last frame of Second Verse still filled the screen, bathing the room in soft blue light. We’d meant to finish hours ago. Instead, we’d watched the whole bloody season one last time, eight episodes, all the way through. Nobody moved. We just... sat there, looking at it.

None of us wanted to be the first to break the moment.

“Really? That’s all I get?”

A few people looked over.

“I forget sometimes how aggressively New Zealand you all are.”

Hannah frowned.

“Meaning?”

“You’ve just finished making something extraordinary. And you’re all pretending it isn’t a big deal.”

We all rolled our eyes in kiwi solidarity before Rebecca, apparently deciding we’d wallowed for long enough, closed her notebook with a decisive snap.

“Right. Marketing get the masters first thing. Publicity can start locking in interviews. Distribution will have everything by lunchtime.”

She looked around the room, and the producer disappeared just long enough for the smile to return.

“Congratulations, everyone.”

Around me, the spell finally began to break. The core team who’d been sitting rapt for hours stood and stretched, joints cracking in sympathetic chorus. Hannah laughed. Jasmine reached for her mug before remembering the tea inside had gone cold. Jules was already making a note of something, because of course he was.

Kahu, who’d somehow managed to wangle his way in for this moment, looked across at Zack, a slow grin spreading across his face.

Zack didn’t even turn his head. “Fucking don’t even start.”

Kahu looked like Christmas had come early.

“What? I’ve been sitting on this for eight bloody hours, Salinger. You can’t stop this.”

A collective chuckle rippled around the room. Zack joined in despite himself.

“Imagine getting cast as a bloke who peaked twenty years ago.” Kahu continued.

“Get fucked,” Zack shot back.

“I’m just saying. Must’ve been nice not having to do any research.”

Groans rolled around the room, followed by laughter. Zack lobbed an empty takeaway coffee cup at him, which Kahu caught one-handed with a shit-eating grin.

Alasdair’s eyes landed on me next, wearing the kind of thoughtful expression that should never be trusted. I’d seen that look often enough to know he was about to point out one of my many, many character flaws.

“I’m just relieved I don’t have to media-train Lark.”

Rebecca laughed. “Unfortunately for me, that’s my problem.”

“Oh, fuck you both. I don’t need media training.”

“See?” Rebecca said.

Zack barked out a laugh.

The conversation rolled on without me, drifting effortlessly from rock-star misdemeanours to launch plans, half the room talking over the other half in the easy shorthand of people who’d spent the last few months living in each other’s pockets.

I… barely noticed any of it, because my eyes were stuck on the screen.

Season One, locked.

Motherfucking locked.

We’d had every argument, tried every version and chased every tiny improvement we could find. If there was still a mistake hiding somewhere in those eight episodes, it was just going to have to become part of television history.

In a few weeks, the strange little story I’d started writing because four fictional women in a rock band refused to leave me alone wouldn’t belong to us anymore.

It would belong to everyone else.

*

Zack

A week after we’d locked Season One, I found myself wondering where Veronica had disappeared to.

Nobody else seemed especially concerned, which probably should’ve told me something. Around Whetū, Veronica disappearing generally meant she’d wandered into whatever strange little universe existed inside her own head, and experience had taught the rest of us it was usually best to leave her there until she resurfaced.

I went looking anyway. Her office door was half open.

I knocked once before pushing it wider.

Jesus Christ.

It looked as though someone had attempted to storyboard a conspiracy.

The desk had surrendered days ago. The floor had become command central. Sheets of A4 covered the carpet in untidy little islands, some taped together, some abandoned halfway through whatever system had briefly existed before she’d clearly thought of something better. The whiteboard was a battlefield of coloured arrows and increasingly frantic handwriting. Three corkboards were buried beneath character arcs. Empty coffee cups had started gathering in little family groups, and somewhere under the chaos there was probably an actual carpet.

Veronica, meanwhile, was on her hands and knees in the middle of it all, moving the same handful of pages between three different piles with the absolute concentration of someone trying to defuse a bomb.

I stood there for a moment, taking it all in.

“Don’t,” she said.

She hadn’t even looked up. I decided to ignore what was clearly a very reasonable request.

“Leave the coffee and fuck off. I have to concentrate.”

“But I brought you a brownie.”

That finally earned me a look.

“You brought yourself a brownie.”

“Did I?”

I wandered over, crouched beside her and pulled the brownie out of the bag. I broke it neatly in half and held one piece out until she sighed, leaned forward and took a bite.

“See?” I said. “I brought us a brownie.”

There. Crisis temporarily averted.

I left her coffee where she could reach it and retreated to the sofa before she decided to throw a Sharpie at my head instead.

From there I watched her work.

Or... whatever this qualified as.

Every few seconds she’d move another page, stare at it for a moment, then shift it somewhere else entirely. She was muttering under her breath now, occasionally arguing with herself before scribbling something in the margin and immediately deciding that wasn’t right either.

Objectively, the whole thing looked ridiculous. It probably should have stressed me out. Instead, I found myself smiling.

There was something oddly comforting about it. Veronica’s brain had escaped into the room and was wandering around where everyone could see it. She wasn’t pretending to have her shit together in here. This was just... her.

I watched her relocate the same three pages again, mutter something entirely unrepeatable under her breath and immediately change her mind.

Yeah...

I’d probably left her alone long enough.

“What’s with the spiral, Lark? We only just finished post on One.”

“I have to get organised.”

“For what? We’ve not been properly greenlit yet. It’s months away from breaking scripts.”

She let out a laugh that didn’t contain a trace of humour.

“Have you only just fucking met me? Do you genuinely think my brain gives a flying fuck about that?”

I considered pointing out that we’d finished one season less than a week ago.

Then I looked around her office again and decided life was too short.

“Okay.” I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees. “You’re going to have to walk me through it, Lark.”

Apparently, from her perspective, the answer should already have been self-evident.

Right. I’d interrupted a conversation she’d apparently been having entirely inside her own head.

“They’re giving me a writers’ room, Zack.”

I waited for the problem.

“That’s... good?”

She stared at me.

“Zack. They’re all millennials.”

I waited for the part where that became a problem.

“And?”

“Well, they’re going to be organised, aren’t they? Aggressively so.” She swept an arm towards the paper-strewn floor. “They’ll have proper systems. Colour-coded notebooks. Shared motherfucking drives.”

I couldn’t help laughing. It wasn’t really about the colour-coded notebooks or the shared drives. It was the way she’d somehow managed to invent an entire room full of people, decide exactly what they’d think of her, then lose the argument before any of them had even walked through the door.

“They’ll know whatever app everybody under forty apparently communicates exclusively through now.” Her hands had taken on a life of their own by this point. “They’ll be so unfailingly fucking savvy. None of them will need to sit in front of a fan while sweat pours off them like a fucking human waterfall, and none of them”—she pointed accusingly at me as though I’d personally invented menopause—”will suddenly forget what they were saying halfway through a sentence because their ovaries have declared war on civilisation.”

“Christ on a bike, Lark.”

She threw both hands helplessly at the room.

“I have to get organised before I walk into that room.”

I let my eyes drift around the office again. On the surface it looked like complete chaos; paper everywhere, whiteboards covered in arrows, coffee cups breeding in the corners. But the longer I looked, the less random it seemed. It wasn’t a mess so much as a language I didn’t speak yet, and Veronica appeared to be completely fluent.

Everything in here had a reason for existing. I just wasn’t convinced anyone else’s brain could’ve followed the map.

“Lark...”

“What?”

“I’m not sure ‘organised’ is the first word that springs to mind.”

“Oh, piss off.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

I took another look around the room.

“I’d call it... post-apocalyptic with administrative ambitions.”

She groaned, dropped her forehead onto the nearest pile of paper and closed her eyes.

“They’re going to think I’m somebody’s exhausted aunt who wandered in from 1998.”

I almost told her the truth.

Nobody was walking into that writers’ room wondering whether Veronica Lark belonged there. They were walking in because she’d created the show that got them there in the first place. Somehow, I didn’t think she’d believe me.

Instead I wandered across the room. A single page had caught my eye.

Hollow Ground.

The title stopped me before I even realised I’d picked it up.

“It’s only notes,” she said behind me as I started reading. “I haven’t figured it all out yet. They’re mostly just me thinking out loud.”

I barely heard her. I’d only meant to skim the first page before making some smart-arse comment to wind her up, but halfway through I realised I wasn’t reading notes anymore. Somewhere in these pages she’d found the thing I’d been trying to say when I wrote Hollow Ground all those years ago. Not just the lyrics, but the ache underneath them. I’d spent twenty years quietly assuming nobody else had really seen it.

I looked up at her.

She was standing there waiting for my verdict, looking as though she was bracing for me to tell her she’d got it completely wrong.

Instead, all I could think was this:

She understood me.

Better than I’d ever realised.

Which made the conversation I’d come in here to have suddenly make a hell of a lot less sense.

If she’d seen all of that... if she’d understood me well enough to build an entire season around it... then how the fuck had she decided I was the one person she couldn’t talk to?

“Jesus...” I murmured before I could stop myself. “How long have you been working on this?”

“On and off since I heard it, really. At the Tuning Fork.”

She gave a small shrug.

“It’s... actually the only bit of Season Two I’ve properly written so far. Well, not written written.”

She frowned, trying to find words for something she clearly hadn’t explained before.

“Everything else sort of... folds around it. The whole season, really. I keep thinking I’ve got another storyline sorted and somehow it ends up leading back here.”

She stopped talking abruptly, suddenly looking as though she’d said far more than she’d intended.

“Which probably sounds completely unhinged.”

“No,” I said quietly. “Not unhinged.”

I looked back down at the notes for one last moment before laying them carefully on the floor between us.

“Can I ask you something?”

She nodded.

I stood there, turning the words over in my head, trying to find a way into the conversation that didn’t sound like an accusation. I’d gone through this a hundred bloody times since Jasmine had mentioned the meeting. Every version I’d rehearsed had ended with me sounding hurt, or angry, or like I was trying to keep score. None of those things were true.

The meeting wasn’t really the point. The point was that she’d been scared enough to ask everyone else for help... and somehow I’d become the last person she’d thought she could come to.

I took a slow breath.

“Jasmine told me there was a meeting.”

She just stood there looking at me, completely blindsided, like the possibility had genuinely never crossed her mind that Jasmine might tell me. Her mouth opened, closed again, and for a second I almost let her off the hook. She looked so utterly lost that every instinct I had was telling me to walk across the room, wrap my arms around her and tell her it didn’t matter.

Except it did. It mattered far more than I’d let myself admit.

“Why didn’t you talk to me first?”

She still couldn’t answer.

I recognised the look. She was trying to think her way out of it. Whatever she’d told herself over the last few weeks had probably made perfect sense when she’d been alone with it. Standing here with me, though... it didn’t.

I slipped my hands into my pockets because they suddenly didn’t know what else to do.

“Come on, Lark.” My voice stayed quiet, but I couldn’t quite keep the hurt out of it. “You seemed to have plenty to say to Jasmine, Rebecca and Alasdair. Let’s hear it.”

“I wasn’t trying to undermine you.”

I believed she believed that, and it somehow made it worse.

“Really?” I asked softly. “Because it fucking feels like it.”

She looked away.

“If you were so concerned... why didn’t you talk to me?”

“I didn’t know how.”

I let out a short, disbelieving laugh and shook my head.

“Oh, fuck me, V... you didn’t even fucking try.”

The words landed harder than I’d meant them to. I saw it happen. Her whole face just... fell. Christ. I hated seeing that expression… but I couldn’t stop now.

“You made a decision about something that affected both of us, then had that conversation with everybody except me.”

“I was trying to help.”

She sounded so small saying it that for a heartbeat I almost apologised.

Instead I found myself asking the question that had been chewing at me ever since Jasmine opened her mouth.

“Help who, exactly? Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you’re just scared.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it?”

I rubbed the back of my neck. I’d turned this conversation over in my head so many times that I’d started believing there wasn’t a version of it that didn’t hurt.

“All those nights we’ve talked, V. The mornings we woke up in each other’s arms. The times we’ve laughed, shared... just been together.” I shook my head, trying to find the words to make her understand. “You act like this thing between us is something we can just drift through. Like none of it really matters.”

She opened her mouth, but I wasn’t finished.

“You let me in right up until the point where it actually matters. You don’t even see it, do you? The way you keep your distance. The way you won’t let this...” I gestured helplessly between us. “...us... become anything more than whatever it is now.”

“What are you saying, Zack?”

I met her eyes, suddenly realising we’d been having two completely different relationships.

“I’m saying I want more.” The words came more easily now that they were finally out in the open. “More than guessing what you’re thinking. More than finding out from somebody else when you’re frightened. More than standing outside decisions that affect both of us because you’ve decided you’ll carry them alone.”

She just stared at me.

“I didn’t think you wanted more than...” She looked down, unable to finish the sentence. “...whatever this is.”

I felt something inside me sink.

“That’s exactly the problem.” I took another slow breath. “You don’t ask, and you don’t let me tell you. Every time I think you’ve finally let me in, you find somewhere else to hide.”

She swallowed hard, and I could see she was trying. God, I knew she was trying. But I also knew I couldn’t keep pretending trying was enough.

“And I can’t keep doing this halfway,” I said quietly. “Not with you.”

The silence that followed was almost unbearable. I’d handed her the truth I’d been carrying around for weeks, maybe months, and she just stood there looking at me like she didn’t know what to do with it.

I waited, wanting her to stop me. To tell me I’d got it wrong. That she’d been frightened, not indifferent. That there was still room for me after all.

She fucking didn’t.

I let out a slow breath and gave her the only honest answer I had left.

“I know what I want. I just don’t know if there’s room for it in your life.”

I held her eyes for one last second before I turned and walked out. Because another minute and I wouldn’t have been walking away.

I’d have crossed the room instead.

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