Good morning, fuzzies :3 I hope that you’ve had a good weekend! And that you feel like you’ll be able to have a pretty good week, too.
I finished The Trouble With Coyotes, Vol. 2 I think (Patreon backers, this is in the Dropbox folder). It wound up coming in at about 60,000 words, 600 more than The Trouble With Coyotes, Vol. 1. This has been kind of a weight on me for a few months, and as a short novel I didn’t really think it was going to take as long as it did, but here we are.
Feedback on the novel so far is that it is confusing, which is understandable. The last chapter is not going to make that any better :P
“What can I do to help?”“I don’t know yet. Figure out how to convince Casey?”Devin shook his head. “Alright…”He left, and fifteen minutes later asked her to come forward to the cockpit. Xoc had to move slowly; her chest still bothered her, even if her head did not. Casey was in the pilot’s seat, which she’d swiveled around so she could face the others.“Well,” she said.“Yeah?” Xocoh asked.“Dev tells me you’ve created some kind of catastrophe involving parallel universes and time travel where I occasionally don’t exist and the more you’re unable to pick a story and stick with it the more your head hurts. That’s about the long and short of it? The act of you thinking about stuff somehow fucks it up? He explained it very bluntly, so…”“That’s about it, yes.”“You know, when I tried to convince Devin to take this one on, I had extremely simple goals. I figured we could try a new kind of work—salvage and all that, which is not my wheelhouse but I thought might be fun. I figured I could push you two together like dolls that make loud noises when I play with them. I figured we could make some money. I figured we could not get shot at for once.”“I mean…”The jackal rolled her eyes. “Okay, sure, Dev. The odds were pretty long on that one.”Xocoh walked through Casey’s goals on her fingers. “Okay, but… from your perspective, that’s all still true. This only matters to me. As far as you’re concerned, I’m just being some weird coyote.” Casey stayed silent. “Oh. But you believe me.”“Let’s say I don’t see why you’d make it up. Do you have a plan?”
But I hope I can bring it in for a reasonably safe landing.
Realistically, it was always going to be confusing. At the end of the day, it’s a story that a close friend of mine wanted to commission, starring a thinly veiled version of said friend in the form of Xocoh Zonnie, another coyote amateur archaeologist, in which the triangledog in question—whose character is best described as “well-meaning slutty chaos gremlin”—gets herself involved in an adventure centered principally on psychedelics and time travel. These plot elements would be definitionally incoherent even were the novel not also a long-form way of me coming to terms with loss and operating from an outline my friend never got to approve.
So I am not entirely convinced it will really make sense to anyone, and not entirely certain it has to. It has proven to be one of those times where I hope that what people conclude from it is “that story sure did have a plot of some kind, I guess” and also “well, that was hot” which is probably more of my stories than I’d care to admit.
But it’s nice to have it done, I think?
Also, it is snowing outside. Why is that happening?