The book is roughly divided into small wholes (a significant moment in someone’s life) that help to tell a larger story, a story that is centered around Alex or Alice’s journey (which one you choose as the primary focus changes the novel completely).
Within the stories I use black circles to further divide the flow of the story.
Why did I do this?
1) Sometimes the breaks are pauses between and within the stories.
2) I may have used my black circles to give the reader a feel, maybe just a hint, that Alex is telling this story. He is a recruiter for a cult after all, and he tells stories to people to get them to leave their lives. He may be telling you a story to get you to change your life. If you read it from that perspective, the novel is completely different.
3) Sometimes the breaks are meant as time shifts.
4) It is also because the book should read as a song flows. I set the book to Bach’s cellos suites, so the pace, the tone, the story’s movement, they are all reflected in how and where the circles are placed. (Find YoYo Ma’s performance of the Suites at The Royal Albert Hall. It’s magnificent in a way you want something to be magnificent. Listen to it as you read.) It should also be understood that Bach divided each suite into movements centered in dance, which led me to divide the book as he did his suites (Allemande, Courante…), and those divisions go beyond the name. The sections mimic the dances Bach took inspiration from. The “Chapters” aren’t chapters. They are the ebbs and flows, the movement of lives as if they were a composition. If I was to write a book about someone choosing to change their life and become something absolute, there had to be a dance, a negotiation with one’s self. And it couldn’t just be the story that tried to convey that to the reader. It had to be found in the experience of reading.
The book is written as it is, its black circles and all, to make you, the reader, feel and move as the characters do.