Christmas Flashfic & Progress · 6:38pm Dec 25th, 2015
In the space after my last blog, things have continued to order themselves in a very positive manner. I say that in a passive way because quite a bit of it is genuinely stuff that is happening to, but I also say so in the knowledge that it is only because of my choices that they fall within my sphere of influence, and getting the most out of them is a very conscious process.
And I think that's really how most of life is supposed to be. It sure as hell smacks the crap out of struggling to get by every day.
After my initial sessions of volunteering went well, I got invited to go and spend Christmas with the boss lady's family. This came up because she's just generally switched on and emotionally open like few are, so we did the no-holds-barred story of my life in fairly short order, and one of the details is having stayed the hell away from my folks for the last two years. It was a pleasant surprise that I was out most of yesterday evening and was absolutely fine with it.
Turns out that being round people is easy when you don't think they're assholes. Who'd have thought?
Anyway, I chose to wind it down and spend the day quietly, today. I feel good – charged but not antsy. I was going to sit down and work on In the Kingdom of the Blind some more, but then a different idea hit me, so I wrote that instead. It's in the submission queue now, but given what day it is I expect it's be a good while before it clears. It's nothing staggering, just a 1000 word bit of daaaaw, but I'm sure plenty of folks will get something out of it. Personally, it's nice to just sit down and bang out a vignette in a couple of hours.
As for work on the abomination that is 'Kingdom, it's been coming together slowly. I did that whole remapping the entire cosmology of FiM thing so that I could draft a finale, which is now close to done, but then I'll be drafting a second variation of the finale to see which works better. Once I've settled on the details, I can go back and start writing properly.
Do I think it will end up being a genuinely good story? Well, sort of. I'm not really sure exactly how engaging it'll be, but I'm damned sure it will be conceptually interesting. What I really want to do, though, is take a hammer to the idea that some plot points are unworkable. Not only am I taking the basic requirements of the challenge and embracing them, but I'm turning some of them all the way up to 11 and introducing some other wish-fulfilment and power-fantasy tropes to boot, just to show that it is the implementation of the concept that is problematic, not the concept itself. A good story can show a character winning every battle and still losing the war; you just have to carefully orchestrate your story so that 'winning' isn't entirely in line with what your characters actually want.
Anyway, give it a few more days and I can throw something out for Present Perfect to giggle at, then I'll report in again.
Have a good one,
-M
THE GIGGLES WILL BE DOUBLED! 8V
Glad you are feeling a bit better :)