on Star and others


So, I thought it would be nice to accompany some ideas along with whatever fiction I post. I used to do it inside of the story posts before, but maybe it’s better to actually separate them to save me the trouble of creating a page for the story for archive purposes.

So, for some reason, I really don’t have any real ideas why Jean Clarke Oliver has always been one of those little weird characters that sticks forever in my head. I’ve written scenes and other stories about him or related to him. I guess there’s just something cool about a little robot who is somehow conscious.

Now, this last post, “Star,” feels a lot more like the beginning of a longer story, which is usually my issue. I’m absolutely terrible at writing self-contained short fiction, and it’s one of the skills I’m going to try to develop here. It’s likely that I have this issue as I don’t read much flash fiction. I’ve read plenty of novels, novellas, and even some short stories (though the short stories were just for class), but I’ll try to research more on the genre. I’ve always loved it because I have so many ideas I want to try, but I never really research it.

Also, here’s a fun fact about the story. I actually wrote by hand. And I’ll add a picture of that here, even if it’s embarrassing because of spelling and grammar errors. But hey, that’s writing.

So, some big changes happened here. Actually, you could pretty much say that they are very different besides the beginning. See, that’s why I don’t write things by hand. I end up typing up something completely different.

To be fair, my thinking was: Hey, doesn’t this end almost exactly like the first one I wrote about him? Also, isn’t it kinda lame that nothing really happens in this story? He just realizes something happened, but he doesn’t make any choices. In the new one, even if they’re not big choices, he decides to learn more about what happened, and he decides to do something about it. Sure, there’s not much payoff. That’s the downside to the current story. It doesn’t really have a payoff. Maybe I should add a second part where he actually does run into some problems because he decides to go out into the world.

At the moment, I don’t really have a plan to continue this specific story, but you never know. Tomorrow is another day.

For tomorrow, my plan was to take one of the old stories I posted on my blog a long time ago and revise it to see how much I could improve it. I plan on posting both versions, though probably posting the original one as a side note on my commentary, just like this one.

All that said, I’ll be back tomorrow!

-e