Thoughts about the future · 11:33pm Oct 27th, 2017
I have at least another chapter before I get to the first scene I wrote for the story, but part of my mind is on the ending and as I examine the tangled mass of changed causality that A New Path Forward follows it becomes more and more clear that it's eventually going to end up in a place where I'll probably need synonyms for "apocalypse"*, and I don't mean that in the original revelationesque sense of the word.
The short version is that while the friendship games aren't necessary for the catastrophe at the end of the movie The Friendship Games, they are necessary for the resolution that appears in the movie. Without the games imposing their own constraints of time and place upon the characters, there's no real reason for the problem and solution to be anywhere near each other when everything goes boom.
(It's not inevitable that things will go boom, but Cinch is dangerously unwise and Twilight is easy to manipulate.)
Once you have the problem going on unchecked while the solution scrambles to hitch a ride to it, things get way worse than a statue and a courtyard.
The real life problem in all of this is that A New Path Forward isn't a story that calls for an epic high-budget finale. It's not that kind of story. So, obviously, I'll have to split the planned story in two. The first being the character story I set out to write, the second being the magical action story that the first story inevitably leads to.
That, however, doesn't so much solve the problem as it transforms it. So, then, the problem in all of this is the question of where one story ends and the next story begins.
I've been thinking about that a fair bit today.
In other news, this line:
[...] how would you like to come back to my lab and science the crap out of some magic for thirty six hours straight, pass out, do more science, and eventually split a couple Nobel prizes?
is a thing of beauty. If you, like me, didn't read that when the story came out (two years and a month ago) I assure you that it is not too late.
-
* Armageddon, Ragnarok, Judgement Day, The Reckoning, Mors Mundi, Heat Death, Big Crunch, Big Rip, Applied Eschatology, [insert thing here]
