More Writing Process

If you haven't read the second half of job security go back and read it first. 

Okay, now...

Faye's dream. She dreamt of an office where as she entered the head of a department was being dragged out and beaten. And it turned out that all heads of departments served "for life" and also had to choose how they would die. Crazy. 

And totally right up my alley as far as weird stories go. 

Now I'm going to give you a little insight in choices I made. 

You all know me, you know that stories go certain ways, so I wasn't even going to try and fool you with wholesomeness. The Institute can never really be a good place right? And I also went with just dialog until the very end, and even then it was kind of dialog between the new employee and the employee manual. 

The just dialog makes everything seem kind of unfinished. Kind of off kilter. Like a dream would be. 

Think of all the details you just kind of fill in in dreams. Big and small things. And no names. Because I'm bad at names for one, and I also liked that it left things even more discombobulated. 

Which became a challenge when I introduced two other characters that would only pop in for a second in the middle of another scene. How do I get you to understand that they are different people? 

Well...

Maybe you do or maybe you don't. Maybe you have to back up and look again. 

Which, again, to me, added to the feeling that this was all a weird dream someone had. A dream that needed to become a story. 

Nothing realistic. Nothing that would actually be handled so calmly. Dream logic. 

I had a different spin on it for awhile as well. A super short story with a book of choices and egos and how big of a splash (so to speak)you wanted to make on your way out. But I ended up liking this skewed view a little better. And to be honest, was kind of hoping I could stretch it to three parts, but alas, there wasn't enough there. 

So now I am down to needing four more fiction pieces. I will know by next Wednesday if I made it out of the first round of the contest I did last month (month before?) and if that happens then I have my second submission locked in and will still be looking for either one rando submission or two more contests. That is, if I complete the year.

Still might not. I've got a lot of check marks and trying to learn how to live without getting all of them is always a decent goal in and of itself so...

We'll see. 

So I hope you enjoyed the off kilter dream story and I hope you were able to follow it and were a little disturbed by it as well. 

Now to think of something sweet and holiday themed with only happy endings...

Right...