New story inbound: Lower Class · 8:30am January 5th
I'm posting a new story on Monday morning!
I've been working on it continuously since August. It's only 12,000 words.
(Rant follows.)
I am not, I should specify, proud of this. It should have been done four months ago. It only exists because I attended a writer's retreat this summer and wanted something to show for it aside from fond memories of awesome non-literary activities. (Horseback riding! River rafting! A ropes/zipline course! A week of fantastic conversations and shared meals and board games!) So I took a random prompt -- Admiral Biscuit's Not A Contest, to write about ponies performing a job in the human world -- and threw together something which was, by Horizon standards, not terribly ambitious. A changeling finding creative ways to earn money while putting themselves through college, until things started going catastrophically wrong.
Apparently, I need to stop writing about things going catastrophically wrong.
Back in 2023, when I wrote the scene in Even Changelings Get The Blues where the protagonist gets lost by himself in the forest, the novel got lost too. I hit a wall trying to rip that chapter apart and get it to work the way I wanted, and it took me the better part of a year to pick the story back up and figure out where it had to go next. That synchronicity became an amusing anecdote for me to tell people about the novel-writing process. But the same paralysis happened again with the short story, and the second time around, it was a whole lot less amusing.
Five days into the one-week retreat, I had what I thought was a finished draft, and I decided I'd post it so I could join the other attendees on the metaphorical scoreboard. But because I was in a room with a lot of talented authors, I asked a few to take an early look. And the consensus was unanimous: The ending stunk. The twist didn't land, and when it did it detracted from the story. I was worried about which of the characters came across as more sympathetic and I was asking entirely the wrong question.
Which, fair. When you get good advice from smart people, it's good to take it seriously. So I figured I'd hammer it into rough shape, polish the dents a bit, and still post it by the end of the weekend. But every angle I fixed exposed deeper problems, and by the end of the event the final chapter was completely torn apart and I had a few days of rewriting left to go before it was postable.
That was still fine! I'd just be a few days late getting it posted.
I can't tell you the number of weekends I went into thinking that I just had one more day of work to clean it up. I can't count the number of coffee-shop days I spent staring at the screen with fingers off the keyboard and a little bead of sweat trickling down my brow. What I can tell you is that this has been bleeding me like an open wound. I cleaned up everything but the ending and then, again, asked for feedback, because after the rewrite I just didn't know how to bring it to a close. The feedback didn't help with that, but did expose further problems in the early story which required another round of surgery.
I finally, finally, last week pushed the ending sufficiently far forward that I was able to see a route through. I'm back to having a finished draft. And you know what? That, four months later, is going to have to be good enough. I am declaring that it is finished because I'm scared to ask for prereading round 3.
And I should have been done with it long before now. I should have just declared it a mistake and moved on, but at some point my brain locked on to "surely, after years of ponyfic, after years of Writeoffs and doing this shit on a deadline with no margin for error, I can do the cleanup necessary to push a single fucking short story out the door", and firmly informed me that I was going to finish this and prove myself better than this.
This story, in other words, is the living embodiment of sunk cost fallacy.
And I probably still haven't fixed the problems. It's better than it used to be, but I have no confidence that people will read it and see what I was trying to do and appreciate it. (It's still worth publishing, because at least I can recognize that that's the view from the bottom of the pit I've been digging for four months, and at this point I'll never be able to see this objectively.) Even now, I still don't know the basic theme of the piece. (That is at least a topic on which I'll soon have more, and more productive, things to say, because my fight with this story helped crystallize some interesting realizations in a discussion earlier this week.)
Anyway. I hate that it has reduced me to this, especially so soon after the high of having gotten an entire goddamn novel into print. It has repeatedly caused me to question my basic competence at the art of fiction.
At least Hard Reset 2 will be easier to come back to than this. I'm looking forward to it more, I know where it's going and what it's saying, and I'll jump back in with fresh eyes. First, though, I've got to finish the editing commitments I made to a couple of other folks who have been waiting very patiently for my schedule to develop some openings.
Anyway!
New story's called Lower Class, and it's about a changeling coming up with an interesting way to put themself through college. And then about things exploding messily.
Mostly about the explosion. And about what it means to be a changeling who didn't follow Thorax into redemption. And why the latter of those topics led to the former.
And if it still sucks, well, I guess we'll find out in story comments.
Yay, new story!
--Sweetie Belle
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That you can still say so, for this story in particular, after that blog post in particular, cheers me. Let's just hope that's not premature.
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Well, after everything that's gone on with this story, it sounds like posting it on Monday and being done with it, regardless of how it goes, will be a victory...
Besides, a changeling working their way through college sounds fun.
--Sweetie Belle
Yes, it sounds like just getting this done and published is a kind of win on its own.
And non-reformed, but not Chrysalis-aligned either, changelings have all kinds of story potential. I imagine the explosions will be messy!
done is better than perfect! looking forward to reading it and seeing how u bring it to a close :D
We’ll look forward to it!
So stoked to see this finally get its day in the sun!!!
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"Done is better than perfect" is the slogan that keeps me sane. The sticker saying so is front and center on my writing laptop for a reason. It's something I find very easy to deny unless I remind myself of it constantly.
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Non-reformed, non-evil changelings is the part I'm most excited about publishing. It's such a juicy topic, and what gives the story most of its weight. Hope it gets readers' minds going in the same way.
Am curious to see how this has evolved <3
Oof, been there! Congratulations on pushing this one across the finish line!
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Thank you both!