Holidays, Chaos, and a bit of a Story

Merry Christmas, Happy Hearth's Warming, Season's Greetings, and whatever you say for Sanguinala I forget. Hope you all enjoy your holiday! My present to you is a story about holidays, winter, chaos, and what celebration means. Hope you enjoy! You should read it first before reading the rest of this blog. Come on, it's set in the Songs of the Spheres multiverse!

Read up? Good. Now a bit of a story about how this holiday special came about.

I write ahead. I have written VERY far ahead for Songs of the Spheres. If you look at the group's progress bar, you'll see I"m currently on 140. When I wrote this holiday special I was still post-chapter-100, so backing myself up and writing a chapter in the 70s was a little challenging. The characters change a LOT over that many chapters, some of them in ways you couldn't imagine. I won't spoil anything of course, but it was a curious little thought experiment to see if I could revert my writing of them. I think it worked, and the Tuners seem to agree.

The concept came about when I realized Christmas was coming up. I technically wrote a Valentine's special and Halloween special into the normal SotS chapter lineup (you already got Love is in Bloom but you'll have to wait for Our Little Horror Story). But there was no snow-day to be had here! None at all aside from the mention in the first arc! I was disappointed by this, so I decided to figure out where the best point would be to insert a random Christmas Special according to the update schedule. Lo and behold, it was here, today, at 073.5.

And I had been watching 'if the Emperor had a Text-To-Speech device' around the time of writing, so of course it had to involve the Emperor of Mankind. You'll find that the Emperor and the Imperium are mentioned more often in upcoming chapters. Most of those references were added after the fact because this special didn't exist when those chapters were first drafted, so look out for that in the future! (Might be a while...).

Another thing I got to do was explore some character dynamics I never got to, or things I glossed over in the actual story. Flutterfree and Eve originally healed over their friendship offscreen. This was kind of a gaping hole in the story, so I decided to touch on it here. Is the story ruined with them doing it mostly offscreen? No. Is it better with them dealing with things in plain view? Yes.

Rev also got to show a side of herself rarely seen: her weaknesses. Her point in Songs of the Spheres is to completely buck the trend of the 'evil priest' stereotype, as well as provide a thematic voice that I rarely see portrayed seriously in books these days. Because of this, she often seems perfect - calm, understanding, level-headed - in order to detract from the negative bias generally surrounding her archetype. But she's just a person, like all of us, and this means she has all the flaws. Specifically the flaws of a Starlight, which are on full display here.

Also sporks. I love sporks. I can't believe I hadn't used the sporks before this. Sporks are amazing.

And that's the story of the holiday special! Above all else, I hope you enjoyed it! Now get out there and enjoy YOUR holidays.

-GM, master of holly.