On: Mirror Play

First an update on Dark Valley: I am currently writing the next chapter, so hang tight. I want to say that the holidays should afford me some time off to relax and write, but I'm not sure that that's the case. This is not a hiatus notice! I am going to publish this next chapter hopefully next week. If it doesn't happen next week then I will be posting another, lengthier, One Shot.

To tide you over I recently put my first One Shot up. It's entitled "Thereabouts". There's nothing really to spoil, but I highly suggest you turn back and read it before continuing to read this. Seriously, it takes almost no time at all to read. I'll wait.

Done? Good. The first draft of "Thereabouts" was written in February of 2014. (There's no way I would have remembered that, but thank goodness for Google Docs. Yeah, that's where I used to type things up in college.) Believe it or not, it was a lot shorter back then. Probably by about 150 or so words, and I was still over the word limit. "Thereabouts" was initially written during an in-calss speed writing assignment about a pilot that was afraid of heights. We were working with oxymoronic characters, and that was the one that I pulled out of a cup. I remember hating it, but that's about it. However, I liked the setting. A gross, outdoor gas station restroom with brown, slushy snow on the floor? C'mon, doesn't get more poetic than that. I have an affinity for gross places that compliment or contrast with how a character acts. I'm not sure that that's shown in the final form of this story, but that was an important part of the genesis of the idea. It was then adapted for our first major a grade in which we had to tell a story in 400 words or less. Well, less a story and more of a detailed vignette.

"Thereabouts" quickly became very personal. I used to (and to be completely honest, still) dream about being the sort of person that would give that ticket away. My struggles with social anxiety have always held me back from making those kinds of story-worthy decisions, though, and I felt that creating a realistic self-insert might be a fun exercise. By the end,"fun" is not the word I would have chosen. I find other ways to be impulsive now, but this is not something I would say that I have mastered. In that way "Thereabouts" is almost a kind of anti-story for me. Stories require characters to make the right decision for the plot to progress, and this character...well, to be quite frank, whiffs it. There's not even a swing. It's just a miss. I'm sure a lot of people can relate.

It felt cathartic to delve into the anxious mind of a good person making what might be characterized as a selfish decision. And maybe it is selfish. He is too caught up in himself to really consider the good that ticket might do for the Tallahasse kid. But the man in the bathroom is one of my very favorite characters that I've ever written, because I explored him. It is sometimes tempting as a writer to explore the amazing world that you've set up, but it's the characters that keep people invested. This is why I never expanded upon this story. I wanted it to thoroughly capture this particular man, in this particular setting, at a particular time. That's it. I want to leave him there just like he leaves the "kid" (who in my mind, is probably about college age, not actually a kid at all, just to be clear) in the bathroom. He doesn't know what happens to the Tallahasee kid, and we don't know what happens to him. I like to leave things hanging. it's a bad habit as a writer.

And I believe at this point this blog post is longer than the actual story, so it might be time to wrap it out. However, I wanted to leave you all with some music that's perfect for staring out windows pensively while you travel.

#mirrorplay #oneshots #thereabouts #darkvalley #cubicolor #brainsugar #music #listen