(This post has been brought to you by the efforts of my 34 practically perfect Patrons! Visit my Patreon page to learn how to become one of them.)
Howdy all! As always, the start of a new month brings my Liner Notes, where I share with you a bit of the creative process used to come up with the stories I posted last month. Let’s take a look at March, shall we?
Vanishing Act: A lot of my creative process involves taking a song title and trying to strip it of any associations it has from the song (lyrics, artist, video, et cetera) in order to see what replaces it. It’s easier to do when I come across the title in a list of song titles, rather than hearing the song on the radio. In this case, I saw “Vanishing Act” and thought of it as a sarcastic term applied to someone who flakes out a lot–leaving early, arriving late, never showing up at all.
That led me to the idea of retelling a classic EMC trope, the person with a trigger that compels them to visit their owner for more sex, brainwashing, et cetera, from the perspective of someone else–in this case, a friend affected by the victim’s frequent disappearances. (It’s an old writer’s trick that never fails to impress, by the way. Whenever you take a classic trope of your genre and try to think about what it would look like to someone who doesn’t generally get to tell their side of the story, it always gives you a fresh insight. Horror stories from the monster’s POV, the clean-up crew’s take on a superhero battle…it’s easy and fun.)
From there, the story gelled pretty quickly. I still think that it’s got a bit of a weird internality that was hard to escape–I couldn’t get out of Kara’s head for the longest time–but the ending is a scorcher, IMHO.
Brand New Me: Again, this was a case of looking at the words and trying to create new associations with them. In isolation, they looked to me like some sort of self-help actualization mantra, which led me to thoughts of the Sixties when everyone was looking for a guru to help them become their best self. Which led me to a) the Beatles dropping out and doing the East, and all the people who followed in their footsteps, and b) the realization that if you really could instantly become your best self through magic, it would be kind of fucking creepy.
Hence Dottie/Gaia and her tulpa. I felt like I was walking a fine line with this story–I wanted to make it clear that Kobutsu (the sinister guru) was a young punk who was misusing the teachings of his faith in order to make compliant New Age bimbos, but I also wanted to make it clear that he was misusing something real with deep spiritual meaning to millions, rather than suggesting that Buddhism was some sort of con. Judging by the lack of complaints, I assume I succeeded.
I wound up liking Dottie a lot by the end. It was hard to let her go. Still, she’s not gone completely. Just…improved.
Factory Girl: I’ve mentioned in the past that at one point, “Girls Girls Girls” was going to be the last Girls(tm) story. I figured that once you learned the origins of the Girls, and saw the scale and scope of their operation, you would be able to draw the rest of the dotted line yourself. But then I took a listen to a classic Rolling Stones song, “Factory Girl”, and even before I wrote “Girls Girls Girls” I knew that there was at least one more story in this universe about a Girl who works on the assembly line and finds a reporter hiding in the factory. (There is a new “final” Girls story, but it’s now a ways off and a lot has to happen before then.)
The story changed a lot, greatly for the better, at the request of one of my Patrons. They asked me to do a Girls story that included a trans woman, and while I hadn’t done any trans material before (mainly because Simon doesn’t generally accept it) I was happy to oblige. I decided that Rory, who I’d inserted into the previous story as a subtle piece of set-up (if you go back and read, the Girls clearly don’t know where she got to) could very easily be a trans woman whose sympathies with Patricia Whately’s crew were even less present than originally hinted, and I felt like it really improved the story a lot by making Five-Thirty-Five’s transformation mean something thematically beyond just, “Not everyone likes their job.”
I did hear back from some trans people who read the story, and they did like it…but not in the way I was expecting. I had assumed there would be a lot of fist-pumping appreciation for the end, where Five-Thirty-Five (who is by that point basically “trans” insofar as the term has meaning for robots) stands up and says that she’s not broken, she’s not damaged, and she doesn’t need fixing. But in fact, the bit that I was told really got to them was when Five-Thirty-Five found out that Rory had a penis, and didn’t care one damn bit. That kind of acceptance and representation hit home, and it’s made me work harder at including more of it.
Learn to Fly: Every once in a while, I’ll hear a song title and think, “Nah, nothing there.” Actually, it happens a lot–I probably spend fifteen to twenty minutes just looking at titles I don’t see anything interesting in for every one that I do. But every once in a while, after deciding that there’s nothing worth using in a song title…I’ll keep hearing the song. Over and over. All the damn time. Until my brain, apparently out of sheer psychological self-defense, starts constructing some crazy-ass scenario around it that makes sense to exactly nobody but me.
That was what happened with “Learn to Fly”. It was on the playlist for the video game ‘Rock Band’, which I didn’t play but which my roommate did (incessantly), and so I saw the title and heard the song a lot. And eventually my brain took the old joke about the two guys drinking on top of the Empire State Building, fused it with my superhero universe and Samantha Steele, the frequently-victimized Adventure Girl, and came up with…well, this. Have I mentioned my brain sometimes terrifies me?
And that’s another month in the books! Thanks for reading!
Jukebox's Hypnosis Blog 