Author Side Bar 2025/01/07

I meant to post this next piece a lot sooner than I wound up doing, but 2024 had one final parting shot in store for me: COVID.

Not being dramatic, I'm totally fine. I was off work anyway and the weather was flirting with getting nasty so I alternated between bed rot of the sleeping variety and bed rot of the trying to finally play some of my Steam library backlog of the last twoish years. I couldn't remember the last time I spent so long not worrying about what time of day anything happened or even being quite sure what day it was. Then I recalled, it was probably the last time I had COVID.

In the end the week was a victory because on day 3 began a nearly 24 hour spell during which all my smell sense was underlaid with this bizarre mildewy smell when I was 100% sure there was no mildew nearby—the humidity right now is like 18% or some shit—anyway, I started to psyche myself out worrying that this verifiably nonexistent mold smell was going to be a permanent fixture like some of the insane sounding semi-apocryphal shit you hear about with COVID. Then it just went away and I am deeply grateful for that. Whatever shit show this year might have in store for me, I am not currently staring down life with unique and indefinite the call is coming from inside the house style persistent mold smell.

New topic. I have three touchingly faithful fans here who noticed my recent update after like a year of dead silence, and interacted with the story or with me within that first day and overall made me feel like I wasn't an idiot bitch for coming back and thinking anybody gave two shits about my story. Three people is not no people. Three people is pretty great. It's probably more actually when you factor in habitual lurkers like me most places online.

Anyway, the story. In my opinion we're entering a patch of territory that on tonight's re-read, I find to be barely edited and heavily overwrought in general. I was going through a thing. Mainly mentioning in a don't-get-too-attached sorta way—except if you do actually, I guess tell me? Cause I'm second guessing this direction for that branch of the story and thinking some stuff over. I thought about just killing it and skipping to the next section. Then I remembered this is a branching website. Probably kinda the exact right time to stop second guessing and just go ahead and let the branching happen and then take stock later of whether it was any good after there's some distance from it.

Long term though I'm guessing this probably belongs in my personal archive for memory lane purposes and I come up with a new way to get my prime thread from point A to point B for the next story act.

That being said—I also wanted to share that while a lot of it is rough, there are a few places in some of the upcoming material (just not this chapter) that to me feel like some of the best fiction writing I've ever done. I might be exaggerating that assessment based on the sense of accomplishment it gave me to have yielded the narrative tone I was personally looking for. Anyway. Just some stuff I personally felt most satisfied with and proud of.

If I sound incredibly vague, it's partly trying to be discreet and not spring my unsolicited dirty laundry on the unsuspecting, but I'm also trying to avoid spoiling anything about the next chapter, which I wrote in the context of some life experiences I'll wait to remark upon. I may post a follow-up side note after it if anybody is interested in... hearing commentary? Editorializing?

Ugh. I took a long time dicking with this stuff tonight and just looked at the time and noticed it's late and I have to be up for work in way fewer hours than I'd like. So I'm going to pack it in for tonight since I keep doing this to myself lately. Not sorry I checked in though.