SFY15 + 1 day
Yesterday was the fifteenth anniversary of Sfstory, everyone’s favorite, on-going, collaborative, science-fiction-like, comedic writing project. (Disclaimer: Use of phrase “everyone’s favorite” may be misleading.)
You may be asking yourself why I’m mentioning that a day late, considering how prompt I was the anniversaries of ZedneWeb and Starcruiser Anonymous, but the truth is that I was spending that time frantically trying to get a story written so I could celebrate the anniversary by posting something—and it couldn’t be something simple, like the next episode of Out of Space, no. I wanted something that could stand mostly on its own.
As the deadline drew nearer, I decided to go with an idea I’d been considering for the first episode of an anthology series following various characters on the Anonymous. That merely left actually writing it, and I ended up rediscovering the joys and pains of writing on a deadline. It’s a great motivator for actually getting stuff done, but the closer it comes, the more you realise you can’t do because you simply don’t have time. (It might be easier if I could start working on these projects more than three days before the deadline itself, but even that’s an improvement over some of my scholastic scheduling.)
Yes, there are sacrifices. A few passages that cry out to be reworked (I won’t point out which ones in the hopes that you won’t notice). A climax that I’m not sure works. The fact that I forgot to mention the outcome of the negotiations that set the episode in motion. (I noticed that last one while I was writing this note. D’oh!) The upside is that there’s an episode, and parts of it are even decent.
So I present to you the first Anonymous Chronicle, “Observation” (text), in which a Zakavian task force arrives at Arorua to negotiate the release of captured soldiers and Green Squadron are sent on a secret mission to make sure nothing improper happens.
It may not be the finest thing written since Sfstory was founded on 19-Jan-1987, but at least it came out in a timely fashion. Here’s to another fifteen years! #