Before Scampy and I even started on Three-act Play, we sat down for a marathon five-hour initial story conference. I boiled down the Discord transcript to a ten-page Adobe InDesign document—yes, I use that instead of a word processor, sue me—and generated a PDF file. In turn, I pulled the text from that PDF file, pasted it here, and cleaned it up a little. I abbreviated the three primary characters’ names to their respective initial letters: W for Wallflower Blush, S for Sunset Shimmer,

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While reconstructing Sunset’s idiosyncratic living space, I realized it actually is laid out quite poorly. In no way, however, should that be considered a negative criticism of the art and animation staff! I have seen equally or more awkward arrangements in the real world, especially in older constructions.

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This is an approximation of the efficiency apartment Rose Brass moves into after being retired to the army’s permanent disability list. She lives there for more than fifteen years, partly out of inertia, through her entire career as a youth social worker. The furnishings are shown as described in Three-act Play, with a couple of simplifications due to limitations in available art assets and for clarity. The footprint of the usable space is ten feet (3.0 meters) wide by twenty feet (6.0

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This is an approximation of the ratty old SRO where Sunset found Wallflower early in Three-act Play, as it looked when the latter moved into it a couple of months before the start of the story. The bedroom is ten feet (3.0 meters) wide by twelve feet (3.7 meters) long.

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. . . But I was curious.

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So this is it—the last of the choice cuts. It was a long and difficult road, but it’s finished now. Hard to believe.

Scampy: First off, I just really really love the idea of the journal as the framing device for this chapter, good idea. So four scenes again. What’s the timescale for this? About a month? Longer? I’m not as sure as I should be. Cuz this chapter ends right before Virga begins, correct? Like, a few days or so.

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Fortuitously, the three-chapters-at-a-time format brings us to the climax of Act II and the chapters immediately before and after. Buckle up—this one is extra long, involving as it does two of the biggest chapters I’ve posted to Fimfiction, and the story conferences were commensurately lengthy. Moreover, they involved two other people, not just one.

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Scampy: Sunset intentionally only says things she thinks Holly would want to hear, positive things about her daughter, things that would make her smile. But then Holly specifically asks her about the things she knows Sunset is leaving out. Oooooh, what if she asks if Sunset knows why Wally did this. And what did Sunset just learn?
Dave: Ooh, I like that. Suddenly Sunset has to deal with the question she already is wrestling with, and that sets up the next scene.

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For obvious reasons the transition from Act I to Act II has been one of the most fraught stretches of Three-act Play. Scampy and I chewed it over a great deal, working and re-working various elements for maximum impact (pun intended). With so much of the story revolving around trauma physical and mental, and hospital ICU procedures, we went into a lot of gruesome detail. Wallflower’s mother changed names from Ivy to Holly; the latter seemed more appropriate given how poisonous holly

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This is still fairly early in our collaboration, when each of us still was learning about the other’s style and approach, so we occasionally discussed writing in general as well as Three-act Play in particular. For the sake of privacy I’m not including our conversations about Scampy’s writing, but I have dropped in one time we talked about Rose and Amphorae because of the larger issues that touched on.

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Even before Three-act Play took shape, self-harm/suicide was a major item. For Scampy it was foundational; for me it was not. We decided to set aside self-harm, but to make an unsuccessful suicide attempt the basic driver of the story. To avoid rehashing Amphorae we structured the outline around the attempt being much earlier in the story, with the aftermath and eventual recovery forming the middle and end. Sunset planting the seed with “No one would even care if you disappeared”,

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When I first watched “Forgotten Friendship” I enjoyed it, but found it . . . scattered. What story, exactly, were they trying to tell? Only later did I learn, in part thanks to Scampy, what we saw on the screen must have been watered down enormously, not to mention shifted greatly in emphasis. As far as I can reconstruct, the original story must have been much darker, Sunset confronted far more directly with the consequences of her bullying days in the person of a morbidly depressed girl

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This is an approximation of what Rose’s ten-foot-square (three-meter-square) office looks like, at pretty much any time during her years as a youth social worker.

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During a story conference with Scampy, working out the chapter introducing Even Keel and in the process sketching out that character, I made the snap decision they would be nonbinary. To my pleased relief, though not surprise, Scampy immediately endorsed it with enthusiasm. My reasons were many and varied, and not all were clear-cut even in my own mind.

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Three-act Play continues to exert a subtle retroactive influence on Virga—or, at least, such influence is revealing itself to me. In this case the influence is on Sunset.

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Three-act Play is about a lot of things. It’s about depression and anxiety. It’s about self-harm and recovery, physical and psychological. It’s about love—in several forms—and about penance. It’s about Sunset and Rose as much as Wallflower; Rose, in fact, was the reason Scampy asked me to write the story.
   It also is about something else, something I hadn’t considered when I set out on this strange, uncomfortable journey. It’s about burnout.

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Me: I could see Rose [Brass] and [Sticky] Note being coworkers. I think Rose would like him.

Me: I may borrow Sticky Note at some point, with I-A-M’s permission.

Scampy:
Sticky Note: “I got a new case today. Some girl named Wallflower.”

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