Top Secret Code Name of Current Project: An Army of Janes
Current Pitch: The opening act of Resident Evil: Afterlife . . . but with less zombies.

Number of Darlings Killed: 2
Number of Thematically Relevant Conversations in the Dark: 2
Author’s Relief to Finally Be Finished With the Second Draft: Extreme

Song From Current Project Playlist: “Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums” – A Perfect Circle

Goal Met: Yes

Apologies for my general absence from the blog of late. My RL dance card has been a bit full, so to speak, and that may be the case for a little while. On the upside, I successfully finished a draft of my clone story!

Is the draft any good? Not sure yet. I’m happy with some of it, although I think I might still have a little work to do with exposition, specifically which pieces I need to add and which I can just chuck. I’ve actually chucked quite a bit, although there’s definitely some parts that are heavy with the info dump . . . but in a way that I think feels natural with the story. It’s interesting. The more I work on Army of Janes, the more it feels like a small personal story in a much larger world. (Which is kind of funny, because you don’t really think about small personal stories including a lot of covert attacks on government facilities.) I don’t have any immediate plans to revisit that world, but I like to keep my options open. At any rate, I suspect I’m quickly approaching the point where I just can’t look at it anymore and have to send it to my crit buddies before I can do much else.

The thing about this story: I wrote the first draft of it years ago after watching Resident Evil: Afterlife because I was so disappointed by all that movie’s wasted potential, and I wanted to write my own clone story, something that really spent a lot of time talking about identity–because if a clone story is inherently about anything, it’s definitely about identity. There are some explosions and some face-melting and hopefully that’s as fun for (potential) readers as it is for me, but this is mostly a story, I think, about trying to figure out who the hell you are, and whether you have a moral obligation to stay true to yourself at all costs, or if you should try to be the kind of person others need you to be. I feel like these are some decently solid YA themes in that, despite it not actually being a YA story.

In conclusion, your random line of the week:

She’s disconnected again and in no particular hurry to reconnect, sitting in the sub-level with a dead parallel reality at her side and smoke drifting far above her.