One thing I’m realizing is that if I try to write a commission piece for the end of a month, I seriously need to factor in the time it takes to get a chapter approved. I had this one done before the end of November, but was waiting for it to be approved for a while. Anyways, surprise, a long-delayed commission story’s beginning chapter has been posted! It’s called Sweet Chaos, and I’m incredibly excited to write it for a variety of reasons.

The clearest reason is that it’s got a female protagonist, and to boot, a very fun personality to write. Without revealing too much, the commissioner gave me quite specific instructions for the protagonist, and this commissioner gets the honor of being the first commissioner to request edits after receiving a first draft. The rest of my commissioners are clearly too kind. Writing a very specific kind of character – especially one that I’ll admit I didn’t quite get at first – has been a delightful challenge. I’m so used to writing things in a particular way that getting something more outside of my wheelhouse in a particular way is a fun challenge, and I anticipate a few other fun bumps in the road as I continue the story.

I’m very used to my writing being very free-flowing. I occasionally scrap a chapter I’m not happy with and start over, but I have the freedom to choose that when I want. I’m also very used to planning things only when I want, and I’m also very used to accepting what I’ve written as the events of the story, without feeling the need to do a second draft. If anything, writing a full second version of a story I already wrote feels weirdly… alien to me. I already wrote down what happened. What do you mean, “it happened a different way”? What’s the joy in writing something where I already know how it ends, and need to make that better? To me, the joy in writing is its immediacy.

But there’s an interesting continuance of immediacy in this collaborative style. I think nine out of ten viewers would agree that what I wrote here is better than my original draft, if they were ever to read it. I considered testing that, but the commissioner said no and I’m going to respect that. Anyways, there’s still an immediacy to it, but instead, it’s kind of… it’s kind of like the movie Clue, where there’s three endings to the movie, and if you watch the version with all three, it explicitly shows text on the screen going, “That’s one way it could have happened. But how about this?”

How about this?

What a joyful way to reframe editing and having to rewrite a story. Not to discount the original as not having happened, but instead, to keep the train moving and re-imagine, over and over, until a commissioner is satisfied. There’s still a playfulness to this, without the rejection. One is playing in a world where anything can happen, and perhaps even experimenting with alternate universes in their head. Then, when one universe sticks, that’s the universe we keep with from this point forward. There’s something incurably romantic about hat idea to me, and it’s such an easy way to shift my perspective from hating rewrites involving changed events to loving it.

I hope you all enjoy this new story. Given multiple commissions are going on at a time, I officially have no clue what I’m ever going to finish next, and I probably won’t commit to a solid “I plan for X story to come out Y month” until, I dunno, I get enough complaints. I’m still working on making a consistent schedule, but that’s still an uphill battle, but hey, I’m trying. I’ll talk to you all next week.

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