The Buttery Snake Show: The Broken Story · 1:58am May 21st
A tippity-tappity of hooves against metal filled the air, echoing off the dusty and rusting walls. The ship creaked in the silence, a response to some unseen tide far outside or innumerable nameless waves. Buttery Snake, finding the description ostentatious, ignored it and whistled to himself.
Ahead, lit by beams of dim sunlight through thick dust, sat the top of a rusting metal well—labeled with a small plaque reading “ideas”. Approaching the hatch, he pushed it open, staring down into a vast and inky pit. Igniting a light, he shined a small beam around the inky surface below before settling the thin glow of light on a small raft.
Unwhole Hole looked up, covering his eyes, blinded even by the dim light.
“Good morning!” he called. “Or night. Whichever the case may be.”
“How’s the depth down there?”
Unwhole Hole checked his checking stick, then looked back up. “Lower than it was. By a lot.”
“How much?”
“It’s a metaphor, I don’t think quantifying it really matters.”
“Well, it was your idea to start this with a Waterworld reference. Seriously? Waterworld?”
“I think it’s appropriate. And I like it down here. I find comfort in the fumes.”
“Well, at least you’re not dead.”
“Ostensibly.”
Buttery Snake sighed. “How bad is the situation?”
Unwhole Hole shrugged. “Like I said. Not ideal. But not totally imperfect.”
“You’re not working on stories anymore.”
Unwhole Hole paused. He had an urge to either sigh or turn, a common spacer he used in writing to create pause in dialogue. He ignored it. “That’s not entirely true.”
“Okay. Rephrase. You don’t write fanfiction anymore.”
Unwhole Hole once again resisted the urge to sigh or turn. “Well...”
Buttery Snake brought his hoof to his face and groaned. “It’s another fake Mass-Core, isn’t it?”
“Weirdly, it’s my most well-developed universe. Although it would hardly be recognizable within the Mass-Core reality anymore. But yes. That’s the one I’ve been developing.” He shook his head. “When I try other things...it’s weird. I wrote a surprising number of stories last year. I don’t remember most of them. They just sort of...exist. Weird, weird things, like well-documented fever dreams saved on my computer.”
“But not fanfictions.”
Unwhole Hole paused.
“You didn’t write a fanfiction. Did you?”
Unwhole Hole continued to pause.
“DID YOU? Don’t make me come down there and emulsify your oil!”
“It’s metaphorical oil—”
“I will metaphorically emulsify your oils!”
“I do like oils,” sighed Unwhole Hole. He looked up and pulled off his goggles. “Yes. There is a story.”
“Then where is it? Work harder, mortal! DO IT!”
“It’s complete, but...” Unwhole Hole looked down at the inky soup of his ideas surrounding his dark raft. The fumes were escaping from the hole above. “It’s...broken.”
“You wrote—”
“Do NOT reference that story,” snapped Unwhole Hole, running his fingers through his oils over the edge of the raft. “But yeah. It falls into the same situation. It’s bad. It almost physically hurt to write it. I...don’t like it.”
“But you still finished it.”
“I am a bit of a completionist.”
“And yet you aren’t taking the last step.”
“Because it...didn’t work. The whole thing is a failure. A giant, twenty-something chapter failure.”
Buttery Snake stared into the hole. “Why?”
“It was a Gen-5 story.”
“Oh. Okay.” Buttery Snake reached for the hatch cover, intending to close it.
“It’s so much harder to write them.”
Buttery snake sighed, then groaned. He left a small gap open, staring through a crescent of dusty light that led down to the pit. “Why?”
“They’re characters are a lot harder to get ahold of. They don’t have strong secondary implications like the Gen-4 characters. They’re too...I don’t know, they’re like children. There’s no darkness in them to exploit.”
“So?”
“So I tried to write a kind of horror story. And it started out working...but then it got too long.”
“When does whatever you write not get too long?”
“Never. But it...” Unwhole Hole shook his head. “So. To summarize the problem. It started out as a kind of semi-competent horror story. But then I did that thing I did.”
“Where you try to preemptively mess with preconceived notions and end up undermining your own audience cutting off your own narrative feet?”
“Yes. That. Exactly that. And the story devolved. The tension collapsed and was replaced with needless magic battles, action, and airy sci-fi. Except the Gen-5 characters are almost absurdly poorly optimized for it. Except Misty for some reason. For some reason Misty is fun to write.”
“And?”
“And the story goes on way too long...and then just sort of ends. Because I never really planned out the ending and reached for one that I think came off as way to anticlimactic. So...yeah. It’s bad.”
“Conspiracy bad?”
“Sort of? Conspiracy failed partly because it was too over-the-top in characterizations, which I think this story also falls into a little bit. Because I have to make them over-the-top. The Gen-5 characters are not especially entertaining otherwise. At least in my narrative voice.”
“That story mostly failed because you were making fun of Star Trek.”
“Because Star Trek is very silly, even if it is one of my favorite franchises of all time. It’s supposed to be. But Trekkies take it very seriously. You know, I actually planned a Next Generation era sequel for it. But now I’m afraid to touch it.”
“That and half the characters and concepts you wanted to use were Mass-Core ones. Which you are...you know...”
“Yes. I have literally taken Babylon from a conniving, all-seeing god-empress to a quirky high-school girl. Yes. I’m very self destructive. I make poor choices.”
“But you have to send it out. You know that. Even if it’s bad.”
“I know, but...” Unwhole Hole sighed, finally. “I had two options of which one I wanted to write. And I chose the wrong one.”
“So there’s another?”
Unwhole Hole pointed to the oil. “I have one idea left. One more plan for a Daring Do story. I don’t expect to start it until at least the fall. This story I’m writing now is actually fun and probably will be long, and I also am dedicating a lot of time to...other projects.”
“But the story you have written.”
“I don’t know. But I think...” Unwhole Hole shook his head. “Yeah. I think I’ll have to start posting it. Soon, hopefully. As much as I don’t want to. It would be a shame not to. My readers will not like it as much as the others...but again. I’m a completionist.”
Buttery Snake nodded. Then, without a further word, he closed the hatch, leaving Unwhole Hole to breath the last remaining wafts of his own oily fumes.
I know the feeling. While I don't write, I have other stuff I do, where I have no idea how the ending should be.
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Maybe you could get feedback on it to improve?
It's still probably better than anything in the feature box right now.
Glad to hear you’ll be putting out new stuff.
Heh. Bad or not I have always enjoyed reading your stories and world building.
Even if the story doesn't live up to your expectations, or isn't as good as your others (which is a really high bar to set), I'm certain it'll still be great! Don't be so hard on yourself! You're an excellent writer, and even your "worst" story is still more compelling than just about anything else someone could read.
I've gone back and checked a number of times because I was hoping to see you were writing that story. Having read through Mass Core since Conspiracy was published, I was a little excited that I'd get everything happening this time while also keeping an eye out for Xyuka's machinations. Given the reception that Conspiracy received at the end, I can't blame you for not wanting to step into Star Trek territory again.
I do hope you saw our responses the way they mostly seemed to me, however. While there was certainly confusion about the story's tie-in with Mass Core, I also saw a lot of respect for you as a writer in spite of that (and in my case, because of that as well).
That being said, I also hope that your last fanfic won't be set in g%, as I've not found the setting or characters to be engaging. With the way it has tried to cannabilize g4 in order to forge some kind of arbitrary continuity, I think I actively hate it, but that's just me.
Edit: and there was something you wrote at the end of the epilogue for Conspiracy;