New Story!

Only, Only, Only You
[Romance] [Sad]

Come closer here—my heart, my host.
Come closer. Hear my heart, my host,

Is only staid with presence close.
If love’s a potion, ample dose.

My night-ful bride, I need your boon.
My baleful bride, I need you soon:

For what’s eclipsed by half a moon?

My first Write-off in almost a year, and my first short story Write-off in almost four. Wow, talk about being out of the loop.

But anyway, a Write-off fic! And this marks a milestone in my writing: this is my first published [Romance] story. Granted, I’ve been working on Into the Dark now for almost a year, but this is the first one to actually hit the Fimfiction slate. So that’s cool. You can all stone me to death now.

Go read it now, as I have a few things to say about it below. Don’t worry, it’s only 1600 words.

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You’re back! Or you never left, in which case you’re a jerk. Anyway.

I’m not sure what inspired me to write it in a poem format, but I had always imagined the Nightmare as a separate entity of Luna, a parasite of sorts that found her in the dreamworld and from there they became one, yaddah yaddah canon stuff.

But what if Lima Syndrome happened? What if Nightmare falls in love with Luna and seeks to affirm that love by seeking Luna’s deepest desires to be acknowledged, but by her very nature cannot see that what she does is wrong? She is merely a spirit in love and would do anything to sate her inner yearnings for companionship. It’s one of the most deeply ingrained emotions in human nature—to belong. How I ever expected to actually pull it off (but somehow did!) in a poem is still beyond me. Guess I was just feeling ballsy.

But that ballsiness paid off in the form of the most commented-on and most polarizing fic in the contest. Double Most Controversial (widest vote spread in both the prelim and the final round) is a thing that has never happened in the history of the Write-off ever (I checked!). And then to have scored seventh place after being the literal 15th man just scraping through the prelim vote? That in and of itself is a medal in my mind.

But now that I’ve had my moment of giddiness and self-preening, I have to kick myself in the teeth for a few things. There were significant errors throughout the story. Minimum wordcounts being a thing, I had to bloat this story with a lot of fluff couplets just to get it over the bar. I could blame the time frame (I have to say, it was the most fun post-all-nighter twelve-hour writing marathon I’ve had), but really it was a knowledge thing. I’ve only ever written anapestic tetrameter (my poem “One Full Day” within Reading Rainbow, or, for a mainstream example, The Cat in the Hat).

Anapests have the good fortune of being able to trim that first unstressed syllable off at the start of the line and not lose the rhythm, something I thought was doable with iambic just by some vague transitive factor, and as author-blindness is a thing, came to feel that way as I was writing it. Turns out that’s not the case quite at all, as people were tripping up left and right on the ellised(?) lines. Whoops.

Anyway, I fixed those and added a whole bunch of juicy dialogue, trimmed out the unnecessary second scene, defluffed what was left (it’s almost 25% shorter than it was), and added some opening imagery to help set the mood. So to any Write-off peeps reading this, you will be glad to know this story is worth the reread, as it isn’t quite the same story it was in the contest.

I’ve learned a lot about poetry from this, and I’m happy about that. That means the Write-off did exactly what it was supposed to do: force a shoddy work in order to pick apart weaknesses in my writing. And to that end, all I have to say is:

Onward and Upward!

P.S. Enjambment is so much fun.