Self-Reflection

Published: June 2021 - November 2022 (Twitter posts), November 27, 2022 (FurAffinity)

Word Count: 38,015

I don't think I'm going to be able to write about how this story came about without giving quite a few spoilers along the way, so please read the story first. Y'know, if giant women growing and stomping buildings and eating people interests you at all. I have a feeling it might. 

Read Self-Reflection

Self-Reflection is the result of a storytelling experiment. I wanted to see how easily I could tell a story on Twitter, adding one post of 280 characters at a time, maybe posting once a day and seeing how far I could go.

Pretty far, it turns out.

I quickly realized one post a day wouldn't be enough to have a good flow, so the output became three posts a day. I decided to set it up a bit like a newspaper comic of old, with five "strips" of three posts per week, Monday through Friday. Starting in June of 2021, those posts told the story of Dr. Samantha Shepherd and her misadventures with teleportation and artificial intelligence. And growth, of course!

The story had several inspirations. The most obvious is the 1986 Cronenberg remake of The Fly, which provided the telepods and the idea of a computer mucking about with one's DNA unasked. The growth angle came from an old roleplay session from years and years ago. What if said computer thought it was improving you by making you bigger? Artificial intelligence was making waves as I wrote this tale; web portals and APIs that allowed users to create art and prose were popular, though the novelty of it soon lead to worries of copyright theft and alarm over yet another territory of human endeavor being invaded by machines. The AI in Self-Reflection doesn't play any part past the first few pages, but I do like how its motivation to improve our protagonist turns out to be quite short-sighted.

Originally, this was intended to be a short story about a scientist who discovers she's slowly growing day by day, exploring all the problems that would create. Somewhere along the line, I thought it would be interesting if, while attempting to solve her problem, the computer decided to split her in two once she was big enough. I considered making another Twitter account to tell her double's side of the story, but I figured it was complicated enough to follow the narrative on Twitter to begin with, and I thankfully dropped the idea.

Like Samantha, the story grew. What I thought might be a month-long project turned into several months as Big Samantha had her fun. I intended to use her as the sole antagonist for the story until one Briony Titania Thakore sort of just wrote herself into it. Once she was in the story, I knew she wasn't destined to be a minor character, and she became a foil for both Small and Big Samantha.

One of my favorite parts of this experiment was taking those ideas that just came out of nowhere and running with them, unable to take them back once I'd put them out there. Titania was my favorite of those, and her inclusion grew the story still longer. I saw how it should end, and the big feline and canine made their way through the story beats that would lead them there.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine.

It was a stunning event that shocked the world, and I put the story on hold for a while. I couldn't really explain why at the time because it would have given away where I was going with the plot, but now I can.

Titania and Samantha were originally going to meet their end in an attack from the military with a nuclear weapon. After Russia's invasion, this did not seem like a good idea with which to carry on. Everyone was on edge about the Ukraine conflict boiling over into a nuclear war as well, and I had flashbacks to my childhood where the fear of such a thing happening was always buried in the back of my mind. So, I just stopped for a while.

As things became a quagmire for Russia and the panic subsided somewhat, I reworked the ending to be what it is now. I think it fits a lot better, actually, as Titania's destruction is a fitting consequence of her own greed rather than a foil from outside.

So there it is! This is my longest story to date, and I had a lot of fun writing it. The interactive nature of putting the story on Twitter, which allowed for comments, encouragement, and guesses as to where the plot was going, provided a ton of motivation for me in keeping it going. Thank you so very much to everyone who took the time to let me know how much you were enjoying it. You played a huge part in its creation.

Because of how it was written, the story and structure is rough around the edges. Sentences are often short because of the need to fit things into 280 characters. For the same reason, pronouns repeat much more than I'd like, and dialogue is a bit clunky. The military thread just sort of disappears due to the above-mentioned nuclear concerns. Wolfman-Al deserves many thanks for compiling it all into one big text document, which I then edited and cleaned up as much as I could without huge rewrites. It's big and clumsy and sprawling, but then it's a story about newly-minted giants, so I suppose that's appropriate. I'm proud of it.

I hope you enjoy it too.

Strange Attractor

Published: May 7, 2020
Word Count: 6,616

More than the other things I've written, it has a tale of its own.

Portia is my oldest OC. She came into being sometime during my high-school days (I can remember thinking Portia would be a great name for her when we read Julius Caesar in English class.), so she's even older than Mataki by a few years. She played the same role then as the brown wolf does now, sort of an uber-big cosmic femme fatale. I envisioned her as something like the version that appears in Strange Attractor, although I think she came by her ability originally by growing too large and collapsing...you know, how people normally become black holes, I guess. When Mataki came along later on, she sadly took a back seat in my mind, and she curled up for a decades-long long cat-nap back there.

I'm not sure what woke her up. I mentioned her to a friend of mine once and tried a bit of roleplaying, so that definitely had her poking her head up over the seat and asking "are we there yet?" I got to enjoy her company again in my thoughts, and when I started sharing stories on FA, she dropped hints that she really ought to have a story of her own. I thought about what she might be and do now since Mataki had since usurped her place as the greedy too-big-for-anyone's-good character in my mind, and I decided it would be neat if she used her abilities to get rid of potentially dangerous space objects.

Two things finally got me to sit down and write it. The first was Anomalies of Scale, by Wendingo. It's a story very much in the vein of Strange Attractor, so if you like one, you'll probably like the other. Read it if you haven't! It stars a brown wolf instead of a black panther, though, and Portia's poking about a story got a bit more desperate after that. The second thing was this whole Covid-19 mess we still find ourselves in at the time of writing. Working from home with a very downsized workload, I suddenly had a lot more free time, and Portia finally said, "no more excuses!" so I outlined, then wrote.

I figured the story would be around 2000 words, my typical length. Once I'd written the section where Portia does her thing to Tau Ceti I, I started to think about an ending, but I realized I couldn't leave poor Thaxter there with all his questions--that'd drive him nuts. I also wanted to try to come up with a (sort of) believable way one might actually turn into a living singularity, so I wrote the scene in the bar where Portia finally gives her origin. I've often heard writers talk about a story writing itself, and I sort of understood what they meant, but it really happened here! It fleshed her out quite a bit more, and I'm happy with the way she emerged. She had to be different from Mataki, and I found the difference--she's much more level-headed about her condition. Not that Mataki isn't nice most of the time (as a lot of you will point out), but man, she can turn the evil on when she's of a mind. Portia's more careful.

As to the tale itself, I'm the type that loves sneaking references into a story. There are quite a few here. Some are homages to books, short stories, and movies that have to do with cosmic demolition, and most people that aren't Portia or Thaxter are shout-outs to friends' characters. I'll tackle those in another post--this one's getting kind of long!

Finally, a big thank you to Wendingo again and to Becky Cascane for all the inspiration and encouragement. You both rock.

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Read Strange Attractor

Read Anomalies of Scale, by Wendingo, on FurAffinity

Browse Becky Cascane's stories on FurAffinity  (content warning: some adult themes and imagery)