Behind the Story: Forgotten Memories · 4:05pm Sep 25th, 2022
This story isn’t one of my greatest works, and in fact might need a little more added to it, just some minor context, it didn’t even come from all too interesting a place, but this is my duty and my blog views are tanking because my music blogs don’t really have an audience. So… I’m prepared to talk about Forgotten Memories.
This story came about in August, on the weekend of my 18th birthday. For that weekend, my family went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the city known as hell, or Cleveland, Ohio.
It’s a 4-hour drive to Cleveland from my house, so naturally, there had to be a rest stop or two.
Now on our way to Cleveland, we took a toll road and got access to super fancy rest stops (likely to actually encourage you to drive deeper into Ohio), and those didn’t inspire this story.
What did, however, was a rest stop on the way back.
We didn’t take a toll road on the way back. Instead, we were stuck with the bog standard country road/highway that had maybe 10 rest stops along its construction. One rest stop I particularly remember, however, was I believe our last rest stop.
The rest stop was almost frighteningly liminal, all it was was a vending machine outside, and on the inside, a road map and two restrooms. This was the entire rest stop. Nobody was there.
As I got back into the car, I told my parents that there was something unnerving about the rest stop, not that it was horror scary, but liminal unnerving, it just felt like no one was there or had been there for ages.
This would plant a seed in my mind which would gain a mind of its own eventually.
Fast forward into September, where I’m busy trying to figure out this whole Empire-influenced art project about how immortals see time, and then realized that I had no clue how that was going to work. That’s when I remembered the rest stop.
That’s when I decided to make something a little less art project-y, instead just writing a story with a simple moral: everything has a story.
I turned the rest stop’s energy into a hut in the middle of nowhere, only to be stumbled on by an explorer, who pokes around and learns some things.
I started writing it, and then asked myself, “Well, what will she learn?”
If the hut was just a place in the middle of nowhere, sure I was giving a setting some character, but that was it.
In fact, the “what will she learn” changed several times throughout the writing. First, I wanted to make it very clear that a pony had died and hadn’t been moved, but then didn’t want a horror story. So, I decided in making the hut set up in such a way as to serve as a sort of momento for a lost relationship, but with no indication of what exactly happened (this entire story never tells you exactly what happened; that’s sort of the point) and I liked that idea.
Then I wrote the story, and my stupid brain was like, “Let’s link the setting and Cloverleaf!” so, then I added the picture, but Cloverleaf didn’t pick it up at first, it fell out of the scrapbook and she didn’t notice it. Then I realized she read the thing cover-to-cover so she’d have to seen the picture somewhere. So, I decided to have Cloverleaf discover the picture and have some sort of reaction to it, and when that reaction was written as sadness and hoofing it, and not nostalgia or happiness, I needed to give her some sort of rocky past.
Now, I rewrote this particular bit of the story several times, and eventually deciding on giving a framework and having the audience fill in the rest. However, I brought up an argument at the end and now the story needs context… oops. That will be written at some point, given that part of it was written in before my final revision, and I can easily expand that.
I actually removed it because I made the mother aggressively Scottish (as opposed to Cloverleaf’s ‘vague’ Scottish), and Scottish accents are a little harder to write and read. Yes, actually. Also, I thought it might add a little too much explicitness, and this story runs on subtlety.
Now why is Cloverleaf Scottish? I donno. I’m guessing talking with Arachne has something to do with it, as they are Scottish and are also awesome, so that might have a subconscious effect. Also, Sunny said I should give Cloverleaf a Scottish accent when I pitched it in a Discord server, so I listened to them as well. It’s not really that deep, she just kinda got the accent.
The scrapbook was originally conceived as a way to add even more story, and I believe I did a pretty good job with it. Unrelated, but I do quite love the line “The torch turned into a lantern,” it succinctly describes ‘time passing’ and also the increased dedication to Cloverleaf’s grandparents’ hobbies.
That pretty much covers everything except the cover art, which was really quite simple, just a stock photo with a stylized fade. I’m quite happy with how that came out as well.
It’s not a complicated story, but that pretty much describes everything about Forgotten Memories.
And until next time; be awesome!
-Dashie
When we went down to Georgia this summer, we had to make various rest stops (it is a 16 hour drive). We drove through the Michigan border because driving through the New York border fucking sucks, so we ended up driving through Ohio. Now, we don’t like toll roads, so we steered clear of those. I know exactly what kind of rest stop you are talking about because we stopped at one of those on our way there and on our way back (heck, on our way back to/from South Carolina we also stopped at a rest stop just like that).
Just a stretch of road, some parking spots, a long one story building with bathrooms, a map, a vending machine or two outside and like maybe a few people if you’re lucky, all while being fenced in and surrounded by farmland. Am I right? Not even a “Welcome to Ohio” or something like most rest stops have.
It’s cool that it inspired you to write a story. I remember just being like “wow this rest stop sucks but hey I can buy drinks at a vending machine so it’s fine”. I did however really enjoy our rest stop in Kentucky. There was a cool statue of horses I took pics with.
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That is pretty much the exact type of rest stop I was talking about.