Since I'm at a point where I'm out of ideas for new short stories for now and we could all use a break from politics, I thought I'd ramble a little about some of the writing I've posted over the years.

I've had 3 drafts of Surface so far. The 3rd is officially the "canon" one, which I'm still intending on trying to publish when I can, possibly on Amazon Kindle. I started writing the 1st one all the way back in 2005, but gave up on it in 2007 or so. I wrote the 2nd one in the summer of 2014. There were various reasons for which I thought the 2nd draft was better than the 1st one, as well as why I thought the 3rd one was better than the 2nd one.

The 1st one suffered from being overly verbose, when I look back on it from today. I tried to address too many things as part of one sentence, without really giving the reader a chance to catch their breath. I also wrote conversations in a clumsy format, with too much straight up back and forth without any descriptions of actions in-between - a problem I'd at least fixed by the 2nd one. I went into too much detail about everything, and took too long to get to the point. I was basically putting down whatever was coming through my head as it did.

I do vaguely miss the scene where Mano, thinking about the importance of helping others, has to fend off an overly aggressive beggar at a bus station insisting that she give him ten dollars. It was darkly comedic, but from my current perspective it has problematic elements that I worried could be misinterpreted as Objectivist. It was supposed to be about the difficulty of striking a balance between selfishness and being taken advantage of - and based partly on my own experience at a bus station, incidentally.

I still have the 1st draft posted on an alternate LiveJournal account from way back, for archival purposes and to keep the feedback I received about it there back then. Unfortunately the 1st draft never recovered from the end of the Boko arc. I didn't have things plotted out clearly enough in my head for what was going to serve as connective tissue between Klein and Mano's storyline leading up to the cult storyline, and my cow and archaeopteryx characters fell flat compared to the previous ones. It was abandoned without being finished.

The 2nd draft already seems to me from today like it could've been written by a different person. This one started out simply because I decided to take my characters and write an old school martial arts tournament series of seven short stories involving them, more for my own entertainment than anything else. Once I'd finished it, I started thinking about how maybe it could be used as connective tissue between the Mano/Klein arcs and the cult storyline, so I rewrote the intro chapters, then continued until I'd finished and reorganized the whole thing.

I wrote out standalone character ideas back in 2010. At that point, those characters weren't connected, some of them had different genders and names, and were otherwise completely unrecognizable compared to who they became today. But in 2014, I started thinking that they could help me fill in the blanks I'd had so much trouble filling in during my previous attempt at it. Rakim wasn't even Muslim or trans back then! Ogun didn't do Voodoo, and wasn't even named. Fugue and Bridges were mentioned in passing. Mandrake wasn't Jewish.

I assumed that readers had very little patience for plot development and character growth in this one! I thought that people would get bored with too many details about the characters' personal lives and that they'd prefer more action. This turned out to be a mistake. The excess of action collapsed under its own length, and didn't have enough momentum to sustain the reader's attention in the long run. It was only in the 3rd one that I realized that I had to approach the story from the perspective of the characters' spiritual lives in general.

Rakim was kind of rude in the 2nd draft in a way I don't really picture him being now, especially in his fight against Klein. The way they'd talk to each other during fights as they'd watch them together after that is still how I picture their friendship starting though, but there was no way to seamlessly include it into the 3rd version, so it had to be sacrificed. Ogun as I picture him now would never torch Mnemos with his fire breath, especially not in front of Rakim. I still like the surreal vibe of her blindfighting scene against him in the 2nd draft's "Dead Trees," though.

What I was trying to go for with the tournament was an "anti-narrative" of the "typical" tournament storyline basically. Klein's mistake is that he misinterprets everyone's intentions when they tell him he shouldn't be in it as arrogance on their part. He thinks he's in a "traditional" male narrative of having to prove himself, when in fact, the other characters simply care enough about him to warn him he's really out of his depth. He finds this out when he loses cruelly at the end. I liked the "Wonderland" quality of the moment when they all gather around him to lecture him about it at the end.

Instead of bragging about his victory like the "jerk" the audience is usually encouraged to imagine, Ogun's response upon winning is to panic and ask Klein "Shit, are you okay?" The 2nd draft was too "shonen manga," but it still broke expectations in a few ways, at least. The Dawkins VS Muslims combined with the refugee crisis that I thought more about between 2014 and 2016 made me reconsider some of the subtext in the 2nd draft, which I decided to approach in a different way when I set out to write the 3rd one specifically. The 2nd also had too many dangling loose threads.

I started writing the Rakim series in early 2016. When I first started writing it, I had no intention of including it as part of anything else. It was going to be a standalone series, one that I expected to be much shorter than it turned out to be when I first started writing it, at that. Once I'd finished it, though, looking at it and thinking about it, I realized that it'd integrate very well with the Mano and Klein storylines by providing a counterpoint to them that the more extensive Mnemos arc would also complete. I gave them all a "real" ending that was missing from the 2nd draft.

While I think I'm done fiddling with the 3rd version as such by this point, I've written a half-dozen other short stories in the same universe this fall, some of them taking place during Surface itself, some of them taking place after it. I've wondered whether or not I should include some of them as a kind of multi-part epilogue to Surface or not. I want it to be streamlined, but they also address elements of Surface that I became worried could be misinterpreted - which is ironically appropriate, since it's a story about the disastrous effects of misinterpreting someone's work in the first place.

I was considering a shortened, clean, edited version of Fish Out of Water, Only In Dreams, For Sore Eyes, Gaslight, Lemmings, Spheres of Influence and Sands of Time. Some of them are a bit darker, so they do risk bringing the reader down from the high note that Down The Stream tries to leave them on. Although Sands of Time arguably does the same, it still leaves Mano in a bad place. It makes the overarching arc more about Rakim than about her, which I'm not sure is what I want to do. It also has Mnemos have a bad time, but it does introduce us to the rest of the Cat's Eye.

During my outline for the 1st version all the way back in 2006, Mikra was my initial vision for what Klein's story with Rakim was going to be! Klein was going to meet her after Boko, Fugue and Bridges but before Shinai. I ultimately never got to that part of Klein's story back then because I dropped the 1st draft before getting to it. After having decided to scrap it for good, I finally decided to recycle it as part of an alternate timeline during Sands of Time, Rakim's big time travel "episode." Reintegrating old writing has been a crucial step the whole way, the more I think about it.