Wherein the Rules Are Laid Out

So that is the first chapter in a hopefully much longer tale. As far as I can tell, there's no real easy way of having the story part of my blog be readily accessible so any new additions shall always be entitled "Wherein yadda yadda yadda". I hope that works.

About the story. What is now on this blog had been written by me years ago for Carla. We were provinces apart, so we did the regular long distance type stuff; we talked on the phone all the time, emailed each other lots as well, sent each other gifts, all that good stuff. We also kept diaries for each other. When we saw each other in person, we'd exchange diaries so we'd have stuff to talk about.

There's only so many times a person can write "I miss you" before it loses all meaning, so I filled up parts of the diary with short stories. The one with Lucky was the only one that could feasibly be expanded. In fact I planned on it going on a lot longer in the diary but... Here, I'll just transcribe what I wrote immediately after the short story:

"I had originally intended for this short story to be much longer. You didn't get to meet Lucky's horse (who goes by the name of Peaches) or the evil bugs that plague the old west of the future. I had all sorts of cool shit in mind when I started out. A few pages in I realized that I suck @ writing stories. I'm not nearly descriptive enough. So I cut the whole thing short. Pretty depressing. A wannabe writer who has trouble with a 6 page short story."

I was stupid. I thought that you needed to use a lot of words all the time when writing a "proper" story. But I read a lot during our trip across Oz and I learned a lot. I learned that you don't need to use a lot of words if you use the right ones. Hell, the first Fletch book is so sparse in its style that I had to re-read a passage to try to figure out what just happened. And I liked that. It worked. Wordiness is not a virtue.

And re-writing the story in chunks like this helped me find the "beats" of the story, helped me experiment with its rhythm. Plus I turned some of the turns of phrase into something slightly different, hopefully better. At the very least, this will be an instructive little exercise.

More on the story: Lucky is based on a character that I used to role play. I know I'm a horrible, horrible geek. I won't mention the names of the games I played him in, but he spanned a few genres. So I took the games, plus my own ideas and just sort of smashed them all up for this story.

That's all I have to say on the subject for now. Remember look for "Wherein" in the title for more of the story. I have the beginning of the next chapter roughly plotted in my head, but beyond that... We'll see.