I actually wrote this one before September, but since I forgot to mention it then, I thought I’d blog about it now. The rough draft is only about 3,700 words, and is basically a time travel / alternate universe story set in a fantasy world, where the evil sorceror weaves possibilities in order to magically alter the timeline.
Once again, this is a Mythulu-inspired story, though instead of drawing a bazillion cards, I only drew six (one for each card type). The cards I drew are:
- PROSTITUTE: Selling time, body, safety, passions, or dreams to make a living. A few aware of their vulnerability find honor in their work.
- LIBRARY: Sanctuary for knowledge. Doesn’t necessarily have 4 walls.
- EXPERIMENT: A controlled investigation where subject does not understand the test. Undertaken to resolve conflicting theories about the world.
- DYING: Terminally ill, facing extinction, or on a trajectory of colliding beliefs that will rewrite identity forever.
- WOVEN: Fibers lovingly tangled into a useful shape.
- AETHER: Matter that is nothing yet, but can become anything. Pure possibility.
It was that last card that started to move everything into place. Others, like the prostitute card or the experiment card, kind of got overlooked in the formulation of the story, though they did serve as useful initial prompts to get me thinking. But once I figured out a way to relate those aspects to the rest of the story idea, they morphed into something else entirely—which is fine.
Got feedback for this one from my writing group yesterday. A lot of things about this story worked really well for them, but they were confused about how the magic works, which is something I need to rectify. Ironically, there was not enough exposition or info dumping in this one. Fixing that will probably add another 500 to 1k words, so I’m expecting the final draft of this story to come in somewhere between 4.5k and 5k.
But it’ll have to wait for a few weeks at least, as I work on finishing the first few stories for September’s writing challenge!
