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.

---

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)

Bus Stop

Published: March 16, 2019
Word Count: 2,004

Have you ever had an art piece that really grabbed your attention, even beyond the way it might display a particular like of yours? That happened to me with a piece by Pantheric on FurAffinity, a link to which I will include below. It portrays a rather well-built black jaguar sitting on a bench in a bus stop. I've always enjoyed art that seems to tell a story, the background and subject suggesting a before and after to the now that we can see.

That definitely happened with this picture, and with the picture being what it was (and with me being me), that jaguar seemed to be getting bigger. I wrote Bus Stop with that as the theme, and well, hopefully he and the bus made it to where they were going intact.

Read Bus Stop

See Pantheric's "Waiting For The Bus"

SCP-9653

Published: January 24, 2016
Word Count: 1,737

A little history, if you’ll indulge me:

The year I wrote this, 2016, marked the 20th anniversary of Mataki’s journey as a character. She was created a few years earlier, but she didn’t really come to life until she got on FurryMuck in 1996 and started interacting with other people. She started small, but grew, both physically and conceptually.

As she did so, it became more and more of a challenge to portray her in a manner that didn’t come off as powergamey, God-mode, Mary Sue…whatever name you want to give it. I’d been on the receiving end of such characters, and I found them as annoying as everyone else. For that reason, she became more subdued, mysterious, and enigmatic. She gave hints here and there of her capabilities rather than announcing them to the room over and over and doing some Herculean task every other pose. I liked that about her, though she probably drove people crazy with her refusal to give a straight answer about herself. It was by design and by necessity in order to keep her interesting to me, and hopefully, to others.

Unfortunately, I think I went a little overboard with it, and that led to a lot of her story not getting told. I’ve spent a lot of time building Mataki’s world (and it’s a big one!), but it has only been completely shared with maybe three people. Perhaps that’s why these stories are starting to come out after twenty years; I’ve decided it’s time to let more of her out, and the roleplaying world has more or less moved on from what it was back in 1996.

That brings us to this story. I am a big fan of the SCP site, a place full of stories about creepy, dangerous, and bizarre objects and people. It’s a favorite time-sink of mine, and I love the approach and challenge of telling a story in such a bureaucratically awkward format. It’s what creepypasta would be if your manager at work made you write it and submit it to Corporate.

I wanted to write Mataki up as an SCP entry. I thought it would give me a chance to lay out a bit more of her structure without giving the whole thing away, as another thing I love about the SCP is the strategic (and often maddening!) use of redaction blocks to hide information. Teasing is also Mataki’s thing, though she doesn’t come out and say it in the story.

I doubt this will ever be submitted to the official site, and I have no intention of doing so. I think it’s too out there and personal for a wide audience, and I probably goofed on some of the established canon since I wrote this piece only from my own experience reading SCP entries. It was written mostly for my own enjoyment and the challenge of doing it.

Finally, and before this intro become s longer than the story itself, this work echoes some ideas from my previous two stories, Revelation 3:14 and Spiritbreaker. Some of those similarities are annoying to me as I don’t want to keep writing essentially the same story over and over, but I think this one’s different enough to be enjoyable. As to the "9653" number, it has no special significance other than being the numbers you get if you transcribe "WOLF" using a telephone keypad.

(Image credit in story: Nobody/NB/Enbee)

Read SCP-9653

Visit the SCP Foundation site

Spiritbreaker

Published: December 27, 2015
Word Count: 1,223

Spiritbreaker was written for Squeaks/CivilNuker as a three-page-long joke.  The name itself is a play on words for the title of the movie it parodies.  I had a lot of fun with this one, and it may still be my favorite thing I've written.  Rereading it just now, I was surprised how much of Mataki's lore is included in there.

Blue Sky Green, referenced in the story, is a wonderful tale on its own written by Scott Grildrig.  I will most probably give it its own post in the future, but I'll include a link at the bottom here for immediate reference.

Read Spiritbreaker

Read Blue Sky Green (FurAffinity link)

Revelation 3.14159...

Published: December 26, 2015

Word Count: 2,037

Revelation was written for a dear friend starring one of his characters, Wendingo. Giving credit where credit is due: the plot element involving a search for a hidden message in an irrational number is borrowed lovingly from Contact, the novel by Carl Sagan. Please read it if you haven't. It was much better than the movie. Disclaimer: This may not be your cup of tea. Some may find blasphemy, and many will find passages that induce eye-rolling. If you are part of its intended audience (read "those enamored with god-like beings"), enjoy! Without further ado, I give you the story of a wolf who takes a bit too close of a peek at the fabric of the universe...and finds a message there.

Read Revelation 3.14159...

Visit Wendingo's FurAffinity page