I’m surprised to report how inspired I’ve felt on the idea of writing a Wicker Man remake, and have done a fair bit of work on it already. I like the idea of working in the idea that (minor spoilers for The Wicker Man) the Summerisle cult is basically an excuse to instrumentalize and consume women, which I am going to endeavor to weave throughout my adaptation.

This scene immediately follows the opening I posted yesterday, #18 - “Summerisle”. Its main purpose is to lay a lot of groundwork in as natural conversation as possible. Exposition is never easy to work in, and often boring, but I’m also trying do a little planting that will payoff later.

( Day #19 - Morrison )

Another little piece of The Show, my MCU fanfic in the Forever Captain series about Steve Rogers's life post his retirement to the midcentury in Endgame. The thing I try to do with a lot of these stories is explore the impact being a time-traveling super-soldier has on Steve psychologically and emotionally. Like, what is it like to have lived out of time in the future and the past? What is it like to not know if your foreknowledge means your actions have no ability to affect the course of the timeline, or way too much? What is it like to age more slowly than everyone you love? How much does it separate you from others when they cannot possibly know what you've been through? What was it like to have the weight of the world on your shoulders? Those questions are ripe for drama, and I do my best even in this story, which is primarily supposed to be comedic, to make them feel present in my exploration of the character. I'm afraid that, like the last scene I did for this story in this year's challenge, #9 - Singing and Dancing, this is a bit insubstantial. But I think you can see me gesturing to the impact it's had on Steve to have lived such a singular life.

( Day #17 - Intermission )

Well, I stopped being able to write Lacuna scenes in the order they would probably occur. The challenging bit is that the scenes where they’re playing the video game, I really need to think through the imagery and how to manifest the ideas that I want to convey, but it’s very tough to figure that stuff out in time to get a coherent daily scene of it together. I hopefully will get some together before the end of the month, but I’m not there yet.

So this scene is not the next in the sequence, but a later part of the interview between Amy and Twist, trying to subtly build on the themes of the story and the specific nature of the horror.

( Day #16 - Collaborator )

Another possible scene for a sequel to Gentlemen Never Tell. An element I like from this story is balancing the rivalry and romantic connection between Justin and Rosaline, for tension, humor, and a little spicy frisson. This scene is too cursory and not witty enough, but it’s meant to set up the nature of their conflict in this installment, plus the idea that they’re going to go to crazy lengths to one up each other.



( Day #15 - All’s Fair )

Ugh, another lame, awkward scene. This is some drafting for an idea for another Justin Hawking story, which we have a half-decent idea developing. But this scene is really awkward and poorly realized. I’m sure it could be saved with editing, but with a scene to bang out every day for a month, editing is not something I can afford to spend time on right now. So… right now it’s pretty bad.



( Day #13 - Two or Three Birds )

Haven’t worked on this one in a long while. This is a scene from an idea I had for a ghost story audio drama, tentatively titled Dead Tongues. A family marries into an old noble lineage with a spooky house in the country, and the presence of the spirits are indicated by whispers of ancient Roman history and poetry. A conceit I’m not sure is workable practically, but I like the idea of it, and so I’m playing around with it.

This is another project I don’t really have fully figured out. Just noodling and seeing what comes of it. This scene comes after these previous:

Scene 1 - "Alea Iacta Est"
Scene 2 - "Left Her in Marble"
Scene 3 - “Shears His Flock”

( Day #11 - Too Much )

I realized recently I haven’t worked on the mainline entry in my MCU fanfiction series, Forever Captain, for like a year now, and I feel kind of guilty about that. Of course, I feel guilty when I spend too much time writing fanfiction as well, so I guess I can’t win. But I do want those stories to get finished eventually. Unfortunately, I always find plotting to be the most intensive work in writing, and in a plot-heavy story like that one, it makes it the number one barrier to making progress.

It sometimes helps when I’m stuck on a prose project to try drafting scenes as drama, to lower the barrier to getting them on the page. That’s not super helpful when I’m trying to just figure out what needs to happen structurally, but it occurred to me it might help on a lower-intensity installment in the series that hasn’t seen any updates recently either. So here’s a scene from The Show, the one where Steve’s great-granddaughter takes him to see Rogers! The Musical. The premise of that piece is that while laughing over the musical’s inaccuracies, Steve gets to reflect to his great-granddaughter about the trajectory of his life, so I can weave pathos into the humor, and I’m afraid this scene is a bit thin for that. But as I continually remind myself— draft now, flesh out later. If you can’t do something you want to with a scene, do the next-easiest thing to it, and fix it in the edit.

I shall definitely have to do that here.



( Day #9 – Singing and Dancing )