magicshoppe

Talk: A tale of two (or three) stories and one vent

Added 2024-05-14 22:02:34 +0000 UTC

Chatty mood. I wrote a story, a scene really, of about 600 words about six months ago. It was written around the time Unboxing Day was written and at the time I was happy with those short, short stories. Show and Tell, the title, was even listed in the Coming Soon part of the global index for a little while. I recalled it from the index three or four months ago. Two days ago, it grew to 4k+ words. I'm really happy I didn't give up on it. I'll probably be released in August given the length of the queue. This assumes I finish it by then. EDIT: A recent look at it again and I discovered it needs a little more. It's over 5k words now. And I still think it doesn't stick the landing.

Writing that took place between the first and second drafts of I'm With The Band, Part 4. Also coming in August, Ravenna's three years of childbirth will finally come to an end. Poor woman. While immersing myself in the IWTB universe I thought I'd create a revised version. Parts 1 through 3 plus the Megan Becomes Drums interlude is 34K words. I've made minor changes to them to solve some timing issues, more about that below, and repartitioned them in eight approximately 4k chapters. The "4th part" adds three more chapters. I'll probably collect this chaptered version of the story into a book eventually.

Timing. IWTB runs three years before the birth of Ravenna's child. Part 4 adds another 16 months. Ravenna spends over two years venned. Part 4 is all about finishing their second album and Ravenna coming to terms with who she is. More interesting to me is Steph who's become enby. Steph has remained venned and in a polycule relationship for over three years. I hope the revision highlights that more.

The story will always be Ravenna's story. But I like how important to the story of Steph became. Originally, the story was going involve Scott and Steph leaving the band like Stig. But, that stopped being the story I wanted to tell once Ravenna got pregnant. EDIT: Part 4 is 12k words at the moment. I can't decide if I need to move bits of it to Part 5. (There's room for a part 5.) Or if I need a bit more to get to a good stopping point. (Stats: Parts 1 & 3 are about 9600 words each. Part 2 is 14k words.)

EDIT: I started this post a few weeks or so ago and kind of forgot about it. The EDITs are all added "now". Since starting this post, Show and Tell has gotten longer and I've started another story with a similar theme: Lost Time. It's a theme I've thought about a lot more than I've written. (One of the novel-length stories I will finish someday is of the same theme. So perhaps I notice it more than the reader.) Other lost time stories of mine: Slow Writing, Hold That Pose. The Transformation Inspector Two and Three, The Asters part 3 - Diane Isn't Here (kind of), as well as 5-6 unpublished stories I won't list here. I'm not including stories like Boop in this list. The inanimate passage of long periods of time by those dolls/mannequins was desired.

Where was I? Newer story. I usually jot down the premise and a short outline when I get a story idea that I think has legs. I try to do this before writing anything else because too many times I've found 300 words of a story in a file whose name I barely remember that didn't get to the important part and I wonder where it was going. This one is interesting because, the outline is over 600 words. And I still don't know how it will end. I've got a 12 day vacation in which to think about it. (I just turned off my office computer!!) I'll probably post one more commentary post before leaving.

Venting:

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See that? Three asterisks. If I paste a story into Patreon, it turns into this:

Even if I use 20 asterisks, it ends up as a bullet list item with 1 asterisk. Highly annoying. I can't decide if I should replace them with something like << >> or just a blank line: