Your Update Link: Desperate Measures, Part 15

Hey! As I said yesterday, today’s Flash Fiction was delayed. I thought it would be due to the doctor’s appointment I had this morning, but the tropical storm decided that I wasn’t leaving the house, heh. The worst of the rain for my area with the flash floods would have been when I was supposed to be driving there and back, so I rescheduled. I still decided to wait until the worst of the rain and wind had cleared in case I had a power outage. We’re all good here now 🙂

Plugging along with Mad World. Can’t believe there are only three chapters left! Some of the early feedback from Patreons is starting to roll in, and I really appreciate all the ways they’re helping me sort out where stories and characters kind of get dropped. That’s one of the interesting things that happens when you write something with so many characters that is so big — you start getting really focused on the big things, and the little stuff gets dropped. Revisions will be weird, lol.

The first video in the Fool Me Twice vlog is dropping today — I’ve embedded it below with text highlights. On Friday, I’m making the next set of videos — a follow up to Mad World to kick off revisions, and a summary of discovery for this week. Let me know in advance if there’s anything you want to me talk about in those videos.

I’ll see you guys tomorrow!

• this title is totally taken from the Sega Lion King video game. Every time you started the game, you’d get Timon’s voice saying “it starts” and, like, I died a lot so it’s embedded in my brain, lol.)
• Also — I filmed a first version of this that ended up being a 16 min rant about how terrible the show did with this story.
• How I start stories — I start with kind of premise. What am I doing? Why am writing this? What makes me want to rewrite this story?
• Talking briefly about last year — I get more into last year’s problems in Video 4.
• Learned a lot about my process that I’m going to apply this year.
• Excited to write a story without a lot of trauma and sexual violence, soooo yay. Except Franco is in this one.
• What is the premise. (I debate the plural of this word briefly).
• I rewrite the show more than creating new universes. What story am I rewriting?
• Two reasons I rewrite:
  • 1. I like the show’s version, but they zigged instead of zagged. What if they’d zagged? (this relates to the story I wrote with Broken Girl. Love the 2006 Liason reconnection, but wanted a different spin centering on Liz not Lucky.
  • 2.  The show’s version was garbage. See: Mad World. And Fool Me Twice is also this. LOL.
• Biggest problem with the show is that they didn’t think through the implications of the memory swap, didn’t use all the history they couldn’t have, Oscar and Kim didn’t work in practice because they had no emotional connection to Drew because he didn’t know them. That would have changed Drew’s story a lot. How to fix Oscar.
• Franco got centered for no reason that made sense – if you want that, let’s do something interesting with it that builds on history.
• My idea is to take advantage of all the ways to deepen the story and create long-term consequences. A big miss was the Ava situation — could have given us a way to deal with AJ and Morgan again and bring up Sonny/Carly’s sins.
• Sam got screwed out of a whole-ass emotional journey and all of those characters deserved more.
• Also want to play with Drew/Liz friendship.
• I want the show to call Sonny/Carly out on their hypocrisy more.
• Using the same beats the show did but changing the bad guy and spending more time with emotional beats and reconnections.
• Mini-rant about GH because none of the stories have consequences. I’m thinking of 90s – Jason’s lost of memories in 1996 like Franco in 2019 — but Franco got his back and nothing changed. Jason didn’t — everything changed. Serial killer story changed nothing.
• Books 1 and 2 mostly plotted out — Book 3 depends on Books 1 and 2.
• this first video rambles a bit because it’s really kind of my thinking through ideas of a story and all the things I’d like to do.
• Really want to focus on Jason/Drew relationship, particularly building a character for Drew.
• Then I have brief recap of everything that we’ve taked about that gets moved into the next step of the process with shade thrown at the useless of Peter.

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