#writing post mortem

My evaluation process for drafts is pretty straightforward. I’m a confident writer and over time and experience (and a non-trivial number of failed drafts) I think I’ve gotten better at feeling out what will stick on the wiki. Most of my writing is unplanned, stream of consciousness type stuff. It seems to make the dialogue better, but it has an unfortunate side-effect of every draft’s a mystery, who knows where the hell it’ll end up.

But I’m straying. After I get my draft finished, I’ll ask in the channel for a day or two, I’ll put a forum post up, and I’ll read and wait for a week. After a week, I’ll look at the feedback, decide if it’s something I should address, make whatever changes I think are needed, and give it one more once-over for conciseness and tone.

Then they go up. Sink or swim. Sometimes they swim when I expected them to sink, sometimes it’s the opposite. If they’re sinking I’ll pull them and keep a copy of the feedback on my computer. Sometimes you’ve gotta let an idea go, sometimes the feedback hits the nail on the head.

Today I put two up, and so far they’re both swimming. SCP-004-J was originally a different idea that came up in staff chat, about a guy so boring that he made anomalous objects near him fizzle out. Cimmerian and I both wanted to do it, we agreed on a collaboration, and I said I’d kick it off. Where it ended up going was in a totally different direction (stream of consciousness, folks). So I told Cimmerian the idea was all his, and I worked more on this new angle, of a guy that is so buzzwordy that he makes everyone around him talk in buzzwords. This came from a Dell security convention that my boss, my wife and I went to last year. The various talking heads giving speeches led to me using some of those buzzwords to my boss without noticing. He called me out on it.

Humans and Houses is a tale that has been done before, but it hadn’t been done on our wiki. This one also started life as a different idea. It was initially going to be set up similar to SCUTTLE as a series of trouble tickets. Someone notes via ticket that the Foundation has discovered the number of atoms in the universe is a perfect power of 2, and we’re likely living in a simulation universe. Punch line: Known bug, unable to resolve, ticket closed. That idea was largely blown to hell when another author did a collaborative entry for Foundation IT tickets. So I knew I had a plot point to put out there, but now the vehicle I wanted to use for it wasn’t available. So I just started writing. “The O5s about shit in their pants.” Alright, let’s see what develops. I had no idea what I was building up to. What it ended up being was a double-punchline: Not only are we in a simulation, but a video game that the player isn’t even particularly good at.

As I was working on the last bit of dialogue, it occurred to me to give the ‘smiley face’ a distinctly non-human smile. One thing led to another, and it gave me a chance to give a nod to Humans Go Home. The leaderboard also references that article.