Here again is an artist hard at work: that same artist from "Companions The Creator Seeks" is investigating diligently. This was a bit harder to write than its companion story, mostly because I don't want to require that you read them in any particular order. I did pretty well at that - and I did try to write it quickly and without inhibition. That tends to produce interesting results: see recent journal. I have several more ideas that I'd like to shove into this story - but I also have a strong sense that if I did that, I would get too far into perfectionist territory and not finish it. Finishing it is important - as the programmers say, "shipping is a feature."

I also ended up with an amusing problem - I try to give my stories good thumbnails, and I've ended up with some visual conventions that I like (the spiral, biohazard symbol, and others). However, for this story, I decided to match the visual style of the previous story so that it's easy to see that they 'belong' together, and so I needed to go find more of the technology icons from Alpha Centauri. I'd love a full set of those, that would make my life easier - I like that icon vocabulary.

If you can suggest opening sentences that match the ones from these two stories, but for another city, I'll see about investigating what the artist gets up to there. Bonus points for using the "Nouns The Creator Seeks" format.

~2300 words.



Everything that I post to FA is under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
You may share and remix it, but may not use it for commercial purposes,
use it without attribution, or refuse to share remixes/adaptations/derivatives of it.
Having to add this everywhere is anoying, but it's important.