No Mask?!?
Jan. 31st, 2021 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustPowered through the most recent story last night, finishing it up around 3:00 AM, which is when I usually go to sleep (these days). Which makes three stories finished since the beginning of 2021, each in vague increments of two weeks (one week for thinking/planning/outlining, the next week for hammering down). I'm feeling good on one level, tired as hell on another--that sort of fatigue which is half hyper-awareness, an angry excitement, with a constant Jacques Brel-esque under-beat of: "Next...!" Like: Don't stop now, Gemma. Don't fuck around. Get it done, get it done, get it done.
In this case, the VERY next thing is a King in Yellow-informed story I've been sniffing around for three years now, always set in a time of plague but now handily reframed by COVID; I had it pegged at novella-size to begin with, but I think it needs to be shorter, faster, sharper, worse. The idea of everybody having to wear masks makes a lot of sense, given that a portion of them are immune to the general pandemic but also facially deformed, easy scapegoats for post-Trumpist Know-Nothings who purport to not believe in the pandemic but blame the facially-deformed for it anyhow. Previously I had the idea of there being a serial killer who preys on the facially-deformed, but I think I'm going to go full political and make it a local cop. Because why not.
(A subplot might even address the fact that the facially-deformed no longer read as white or [otherwise], though they also all read as pariahs. One step forward and another step back, or sideways, into a whole new world of Othering. Horror!)
The last time I did anything this overt, it was "This Is Not For You," and that turned out okay. So yes, let's go for it.
In this case, the VERY next thing is a King in Yellow-informed story I've been sniffing around for three years now, always set in a time of plague but now handily reframed by COVID; I had it pegged at novella-size to begin with, but I think it needs to be shorter, faster, sharper, worse. The idea of everybody having to wear masks makes a lot of sense, given that a portion of them are immune to the general pandemic but also facially deformed, easy scapegoats for post-Trumpist Know-Nothings who purport to not believe in the pandemic but blame the facially-deformed for it anyhow. Previously I had the idea of there being a serial killer who preys on the facially-deformed, but I think I'm going to go full political and make it a local cop. Because why not.
(A subplot might even address the fact that the facially-deformed no longer read as white or [otherwise], though they also all read as pariahs. One step forward and another step back, or sideways, into a whole new world of Othering. Horror!)
The last time I did anything this overt, it was "This Is Not For You," and that turned out okay. So yes, let's go for it.
