A new piece has been published this week! It has been in the commission backlogs for a while. It’s called Well Within, and I hope you read and enjoy it before you read this blog, since we’re going to get into spoiler territory.

This was a cool commission piece, because the commissioner effectively issued me a challenge. They noted that while I had earlier works that didn’t use a lot of dialogue, like Panopticon and Amy’s Fantasy, a lot of my later work relied—and in some cases over-relied, sayeth the commissioner—purely on dialogue.

Frankly, yes. Guilty as charged. Some people like it more for that, some people like it less, but in my usual style, I like a lot of dialogue. One of my only distinctive traits as a writer, in my opinion, is making convincing dialogue and making it flow well. It’s probably the defining characteristic of my writing.

So, the commissioner challenged, I was to write a piece reminiscent of Amy’s Fantasy specifically—a story that can have a few lines, but they wanted the dialogue to feel sprinkled in for flavor, not to be the backbone of the piece. They wanted the story to be mostly “actual events and not just characters saying things” (a sentiment they expressed with due respect, and okay’d me talking about in this blog). I liked the challenge, and accepted the commission (I don’t want to detail how long ago this was, for my own sanity).

Because of this, I genuinely have no idea how good the story is. I always feel moments of “ooh, I’m nailing this” as I write a piece, and then I find out on publication day if I actually nailed it or not. I thought I nailed it with Teacher’s Threat, and I was correct. I also felt like I nailed it with A Miraculous Affair, and… was humbled by the critical reception. It happens. Very rarely do I feel a piece I’m posting has zero merit, otherwise I would keep working on it. I do feel as though I’m decently self-critical, but I also feel as though my work has a lot to offer.

In this way, this piece will be an interesting test, as it were. One of the reasons I like comments is not because I’m going to be swayed by every single suggestion of every single comment—if a reader commented the following on, say, Consequences: “I’m liking where this is going but you should put a wizard in it,” I wouldn’t exactly feel inclined to obey them. But if many people are telling me a particular piece has a flaw, or it gets poor ratings on any site except, say, the fabled blue website, that tells me a lot. Given I’m going back to a less dialogue-heavy style, pervasive feedback of “Not as good as your dialogue-heavy stories” or “this was your best work in a while” will definitely alter the course of my writing. Meaning, if you like certain aspects of an author’s work and they try new things, you can genuinely make their stories better for yourself, and likely others, in the future by making your voice heard.

Either that or I’m trying to trick you into leaving more comments on my stories. Who’s to say?

Regardless, this story was a chance to flex a different muscle and I had fun writing it. that, combined with the fact I know it made at least one person joyful, is good enough, and the rest of the joy my readers feel is a secondary goal I am always happy to chase. I hope you all enjoy it, and we’ll see what this story (and its reception) means for my writing going forward. I’ll likely not stop with dialogue-heavy longer stories, but knowing what I can and can’t do will help outline my writing journey into the future a little bit better. I’ll talk to you all next week.

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