New story alert: In Our Nature, or: How To Dump A Dead Body And Be SO Brave About It, by PatchworkPoltergeist

I'm almost certainly too late to help this get featured, and too tired to write much tonight, but this is another fine story from PatchworkPoltergeist. It has a lot of simultaneous storylines in 9100 words:

• Tirek's attempt to read an ancient book that's protected by an obfuscating spell
• the mystery of what happened in Cloudsdale and why Cozy Glow is so upset
• the revelation of Cozy Glow's underlying motivation for being a villain
• the difficulty of holding the alliance of villains together
• Tirek's complex and changing attitude towards Cozy Glow
• oh, and disposing of a dead body

The strongest of these is the nascent villain friendship storyline, as Tirek seems to be developing a paternal or mentor sense of interest in Cozy Glow. But as a writer, what I admire most, besides how well she captures the characters' voices, is how Patchwork keeps all these storylines continuously in the air. It looks easy when she does it. It would be more usual to string some of these storylines together in a sequence and call it a "plot", but I think it works better the way she did it.

(I wrote a story in which Tirek develops the same sort of feelings toward Cozy, "Think Inside the Box." It's not on fimfiction because it's a script. I was about to link to the Google doc, then realized the latest revision, done this July, is in Scrivener; and also that I haven't merged the latest scrivener version with the latest gdoc version. Sigh.)

In Our Nature, or: How To Dump A Dead Body And Be SO Brave About It

Comments

[PatchworkPoltergeist]

The professional way to describe this way of juggling several plotlines at once would be layering. Several things are going on at once because several people are involved with multiple issues going on and they're all emotionally constipated. You add a multipart emotional conflict (the Cloudsdale adventure, complex emotions about Cozy) with an external physical problem (the bat, the book, going to bed) and the fact that these can and do feed into each other and there's your layers and story.

The practical way of describing this is that I need something else for these guys to do because I can't abide talking heads. That and I don't like the idea of characters just aimlessly doing nothing, and need goals of their own even those goals aren't the actual "plot". Whenever I get lost or stuck for a story, I come back to three questions for each character in the scene:
What do you want?
Why what's stopping you from getting it?
What will you do about it?

The more characters involved, and the more they personally have going on, the more layers we get.
It's also something I don't think I know how to do consciously, unless I actually ran into a problem and lost the plot.

(Also, as of now In Your Nature made it to the Safe Box, so I guess it wasn't too late after all!)

[Lurks-no-More]

It's a very good story. So glad to see Patchwork doing more horsewords again!