Halloween I.F. – “Something Rich and Strange” – Author Q&A
We’ve done it! We’ve made it! The story’s complete!
It was really exciting to get to come back to the Uncanny Valley setting again for the fourth time, and absolutely amazing to hit our eighth story over the 9 years we’ve been doing this little event. Star, as you know, was a minor tertiary character back from A Little Night Magic, but some characters stick with you and make you want to tell their stories. I’m glad I got to do that with you all.
Thank you so much to everyone who contributed suggestions, whether on one part, five parts, or all the parts. It wouldn’t be the same piece without all of you, and I’m so grateful for everyone who turned out and got invested in Star’s little adventure as the stakes got higher and higher.
Of course, I hope you enjoyed this, whether you read it as it came out or read it later, whether your participated in suggestions or not! I had a lot of fun writing it, truly. If you did enjoy it, while it’s absolutely not required, I’d be delighted if you’d consider leaving me a tip over at my ko-fi, and I’d also love it if you checked out more of my work!
Anyway, the full story ended up being 58,274 words! Damn, that’s like an entire short novel out there! If you want to read it again from start to finish, the Index will stay up, and you can find the whole thing linked off my Interactive Fiction page.
Thank you again for reading, thank you so much for participating ♥
Now… ask me questions! You can ask me about the story, about the characters, about the writing process, about how something looked in my planning doc and how it changed to now, what would have happened if you’d done x instead of y, any background details about a character that you’re curious about, whatever! AMA! (And if you don’t have questions, feel free to share some part of it you enjoyed and I’m happy to talk about that part at random!)
Or just talk to me :> It’s been a lot of you suggesting things and me turning it into story but I’d love to just chat.
11 Comments
Skivx
Only thing I can think off the top of my head is Star’s Best Friend/Battle Brother/Oath Brother, the one whose bond of lifelong friendship was forged in the fires of adversity, Macho Manotaur Georgio Savage! 😉 🙂
I’m so happy we got Star a friend, as a commenter, as the story went on, that honestly became my main goal. Cause honestly, it seemed like Star really needed one. One separated from romance (which can be extremely volatile, due to the emotions involved.), just a pure platonic bond that he could rely on, and they him.
Thanks once again for everything, and a shoutout to all the commenters!
I hope everyone and their loved ones have a fun, happy, healthy, and safe remainder of 2024!
Enjoy the holidays all! 🙂
MeredithKatz
Thank you!! I agree with that, actually. Most of Star’s friends are Complicated (he’s got a bit of a tendency to conflate the two, natch) and when it’s someone who isn’t like Viv, they’re often a friend of a friend first. Star’s definitely not interested in Georgio like that and I think that having someone who won him over reluctantly into friendship might get past that guard a little!
Thanks so much for participating every day! It really made me happy to see! Please also have a fun, happy, healthy, and safe rest of the year!
Skivx
Thank you for responding! Happy to participate, it was really fun! Glad you had a good time doing it! 🙂
I guess this convo made me kinda think of some questions?
Would you be willing to expound on (I know I sound like a broken record, lol sorry!) Anything and Everything with Georgio?
I’m curious how you came up with them (cause honestly “Manotaur” and “Talks like the Macho Man” is honestly a perfect fit lol) and curious how your ideas on development of the character were.
Sorry if this sounds selfish, but I’m also curious how the evolution of Georgio was affected by the commentator’s responses.
After our back and forth re: Star needing a friend and at least me pushing for it, I’m curious if you noticed that over the course of the game and how that affected what role Georgio was going to play.
Sorry if this is too me-centric and me not shutting up about Georgio (I just really like how Macho Man talks, is all!). It’s not everyday you can affect things in a living narrative, and even rarer when the Writer will chat about the process with you!
Ty again for offering this opportunity and your willingness to answer questions and chat! 🙂
MeredithKatz
Sure, all about Georgio!
Basically, yeah, when I got both “manotaur (reverse minotaur)” and “talks like randy savage” I was like, ok, I have to combine these. I didn’t want to do the Gravity Falls version of a ‘manotaur’ (just a minotaur but with toxic masculinity), and the reverse of a human body and bull head is a bull body and a man head.
I decided that when people were talking about like, go talk to other jockeys, I’d introduce a rival mount where as far as Star was concerned, the ‘rivalry’ was mostly in the other one’s head. Georgio’s concept was one that I think Star would (without thinking about it) look down on a bit, a real masculine showboat while looking absolutely absurd (a bull with a man’s head is, like, a pretty silly idea). I originally wasn’t sure if Georgio would be an actual bad guy or a heel, but I thought it was more interesting to have someone Star would impulsively look down on still be all those things he’s described as but also a stand-up guy who is eager to put his head down and do some good and Star would just be wrong about all that. As everyone got really hype and enthusiastic to see more Georgio, I leaned into that more. Plus, I wanted to get the same appeal Randy Savage actually had, where his popularity actually changed his heel status and how the fans started to cheer him and he earned a fan favourite status. Everyone likes an underdog story, and it was much more interesting to me to make Georgio just intensely earnest outside of his showy ‘stage persona’. That said, he began to dominate the scenes he was in, and his lack of hands would make him hard to fit into the infiltration scenes, so I had him sent away so that I’d leave readers wanting more but that he wouldn’t begin to get in the way or take attention away from the scarier themes. I thought of it like in the Muppets’ Christmas Carol, how the muppets bow out of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and only come back after that scene because otherwise their in-character muppet joking would undercut the drama. I was always planning that if people DID call the stable about Georgio, that he’d be there for a dramatic rescue in the finale. If you hadn’t, he wouldn’t have known anything was going on and Star would have had to deal with his sister himself one way or another before he could get to the underwater magic circle.
I feel like that sort of answers all three of your questions in one. I could definitely tell that you (and other commenters) wanted Georgio to be A Bud and I was like, yeah, this is a role that could use filling and that would be GOOD for Star to get to respect someone he wouldn’t normally consider an equal (again, not like with a deliberate snobbishness, but he mostly saw Georgio during races where Georgio would have really been playing up his heel role), and good for him to have more friends. Like, the thing kicked off with Star going to therapy because he doesn’t really know how to define himself except in relation to what he is to other people, and someone like Georgio being someone he explicitly didn’t define himself against, but then came in (with a steel chair) as a good friend, he does really need that.
Skivx
You did answer all my questions, and more! I really appreciate it! From everything you’ve eloquently described here, you put a great deal of thought and effort into it all (honestly I feel kinda ashamed and foolish for such shallow and surface level thinking to all this! I should’ve given it much more thought like you and the others (ex. Fordatspoff) did.) and it came through fully. I think you completely and utterly succeeded in your character and narrative goals.
I also agree with your lines of thinking, and thank you for articulating stuff for me I might’ve been subconsciously thinking, but unable to coalesce into proper thoughts. I am glad the relationship turned out how it did (the last scene between them was so sweet! 🙂 ), and would love maybe to see the two of them getting into additional adventures (or just having fun) at a later date. Even if they weren’t the leads, I think that pair would be a fun addition to a cast, and would have me smiling, knowing they’re helping each other be better more fulfilled people 🙂 .
Once again, thank you for everything (I’m glad a friend on a discord i’m on linked me to this, this was my introduction to you, haha! 🙂 ), and once again, I hope you and your loved ones have a fun, happy, healthy, and safe remainder of 2024! 🙂
fordatspoff
It has been so much fun following along with Star’s adventure. There were legit moments where I got stressed out from the power of being able to influence his actions, and would reach the end of a chapter just mentally shrieking, “I don’t know, what’s the answer that will make sure these goobers are okay!?” because I was so invested in the characters. Thank you so much for not just a great story, but the big high stakes feelings that come with getting to collaborate in an experience like this.
I do have a few questions! Please don’t feel like you have to answer all of them if they don’t all make sense or don’t speak to you.
1) If we’d pursued Seerose specifically somehow earlier on, could she have become an ally? Was there a particular moment where that door closed, or was it just not ever in the cards?
2) Can you tell us a little more about the fight between the Twilight Council and the demon? We kind of just got a semi-conscious horse’s eye view of the battlefield, but did you have a more bird’s eye view in mind while writing it?
3) Tell us about a bullet we dodged due to the choices we asked Star to make, and also a complication or extra problem we caused, if there were any.
4) What was a fun or unexpected moment or idea you got to flesh out due to audience contributions?
5) What’s something you had in mind right from the beginning that was really satisfying to write, or that you are proud of how you pulled off or really hoping came through to us readers?
6) Are there any particular characters from this year’s I.F. whose stories you’re particularly hoping to tell in the future?
MeredithKatz
Thank you so much for both following along and hopping in! That’s, like, always a thing, isn’t it? The sense of infinite choices, many of which are probably fine, but what’s the best and what’s the worst? I’m so happy you were invested, and so so happy you collaborated on it!
1) Seerose is a hard sell. I wouldn’t actually say it’s impossible, but you’d have had to lock in super early on and focus on drawing her out and approaching her, and I don’t think you (/Star) had the information available to do it. Ultimately, she’s resentful more than anything. I think deep down she knows it’s the rest of the herd who ruined her life, but she views Star’s leaving as the catalyst for it. She viewed Ramullin as her ‘out’ and she adores them. But it’s not uncomplicated, and she knows that Ramullin will always put themself first. It’s just that she’s used to being told to put her ‘self’ aside for a bigger thing that she’s just a part of. She has no regrets on taking lives or anything like that, she simply doesn’t feel like she had any freedom. I’m not sure she has it now. I will say she’s survived, though, so who can say where things go from here?
2) I totally didn’t. My bullet point notes for this part said something like “WRITE THE FINALE BASED ON WHAT THEY DECIDE” lol. I can say that it would have been more of a fight had Star not shoved Ramullin underwater and impaled them on a tree branch; since Ramullin was trying to get out and get line of sight on things. They formed a giant circle and did a banishment and honestly I was a little relieved at not having to describe it in depth lmaoooo.
3) You yourself I think suggested that Star not invite Dom home early early on but to meet in a third party location. If you hadn’t done this there would have been an attack directly on the household and I wouldn’t have introduced the Lindwyrm’s home for troubled monsters (I’d have had to find another way to bring up a Lindwyrm because two people nominated one in the instructions comments, though). I definitely saw that reply and chortled at it because you absolutely saw and cut off the big “Dandelion’s home gets robbed and burned down” sequence I’d been planning. As for introducing more complications, it’s hard for me to think of it like that (anything you suggest is a new story opportunity). It’s stuff like… by not following up on Caoimhe when Star had a faint inkling it might be connected, she got captured; by avoiding traps you also avoided the chance to search the rest of the building and find the teleportation point, etc. I guess also, looking for magical ways to drain the track earlier, or going to the track earlier, would have given a huge advantage, but narratively I was trying to lead you away from thinking of that because I also want big dramatic showdowns and climactic scenes to happen! (This is also why characters occasionally didn’t show up or had their own things going on–you could still insist and follow or what have you, but as an author having everyone there talking is good but needs to happen on down beats, so I tried to make that less available when we needed to hit an up beat.)
4) Everything in the Lindwyrm’s house! Everyone was insistent on getting some protection on Dom about days 7-8 iirc, and it let me find a home for the suggested Lindwyrm character as someone who barters away his protection. You could have learned a lot more about the Lindwyrm (technically the Lindwyrm could even have been a locked romance route!) but it would have had to involve being nosy there with a character who did not want people being nosy. But by creating this I both got a place for the Lindwyrm, and other people under his protection, which meant I could introduce several more of the suggested monsters from the Introduction (the cat sith and the selkie). I knew I wanted a character who was dubiously on one side or another so the cat sith could have gone either way depending on how the story developed, and I knew from the start I wanted a blind musician who hunted by sound since we had “something that has to rely on exclusively hearing alone to chase the mc” in the introductory monsters, and I knew I wanted the selkie to be compromised by one of the villains holding her skin. Because of this, I decided that the selkie was under the Lindwrym’s protection since she knew the demon was out there, but when we had Dandelion and Star both show up there, she was a piece that could then come into play. Miette’s true motivations obviously came out fairly early but they’re also under protection for reasons that didn’t come up. They often risk take, though, and don’t stay in very often. (Fun fact: the cat tail that’s seen in the party pic Adrien sends on day 19 was Miette’s.)
5) Lol well. My notes before I wrote any of it were this, in their entirety:
Star POV character
news that Dandelion is around has made it back “home” both to fairies and demons
The demon he snubbed thinks he hasn’t been punished enough
That demon also has an enemy who wants to use Dandelion
Then, his own ex-court: a rival who is worried he’ll try to seize power again
A relative who misses (?) him
But they’re the same person
The herd wants Star back and will start to intervene
Someone manipulates Dominic, Star’s jockey (/love interest?)
EMPHASIS is on the demons doing things (#1 was witches, #2 was fairies, #3 was vampires, so this is #4 demons) but they may not always know it.
As you can see, I dumped some parts of this actually wholesale because they didn’t fit in the story that was developing. I ended up focusing only on the demon side beyond having the demon having ties to fairies. That other stuff is definitely still going on with Dandelion and he just doesn’t know it, though. What I’m saying here is that the things I had in mind from the beginning were minimal, I tend to start REALLY WIDE and pull threads in tighter and closer as I see which parts the readers want to focus on. (We’d have probably ended up with more of the fairy stuff if we went with Dandelion at the end of Day 1 instead of Dom!)
PLOT elements aside, the emotional thing I really wanted to balance is that Star is the same person in both forms. He’s always a brook horse, he’s just sometimes a gorgeous young man who likes to play music under waterfalls and sometimes he’s a four-legged majestic beast who runs around and is meant to drown people and eat human flesh. Either way he’s just–the same, he isn’t either a horse OR a human, he’s a fairy. I think I did a great job introducing some horse mannerisms to his human side and human speech/behaviour to his horse side. I don’t think it ever felt weird like “Uhhh he’s a horse don’t go kissing people” when he was in humanoid form or “Uhhh he’s a human why does he want to be ridden or thinking of someone in relationship to him as his rider” when he was in horse form. I feel like I sold the fact that he’s neither, he’s both, he’s a fairy.
6) EABHA OBV. I’d like to do that side quest and have a girl’s trip plus hangers-on. She’s bitter and misanthropic but she’s not evil, she’s simply… you know… not the so-called “ideal victim”. She’s an abuse survivor and she has problems but she’s still a person. I’d like to bring up more of what Miette’s got going on, which could fold into the same story. On another side of things, Matthias has been in every single Uncanny Valley story that I’ve done (obviously not the one Aveline did, since that was set in a different city in the same world) and he actually does have stuff going on, it’s just nobody brings him in because he’s just a barista. Doing something with the Beanheadings crew as a whole might be interesting. And there’s still the fairy side of the fact that Dandelion helped protect a fairy realm in A Little Night Magic and those who recognized it offered to speak on his behalf to lift his exile. Like you can see in my notes above, that’s not going to go unnoticed.
Obviously though I need to be careful not to ever make these not stand-alone. Star and Dandelion’s story here obviously had its ORIGINS in the fact that in A Little Night Magic, they were spotted going a bit too close to the fairy realms and although they had an excuse there, it would have kicked things off. But I didn’t want you to have had to read A Little Night Magic to be able to follow this story. I don’t want you to have have to read THIS story to need to read the next one, either.
Thank you so much for your questions, it was so fun to dig into these! If you (or anyone else) has more, let me know, because I had a blast answering!
fordatspoff
Omg you answered all of them lkdjsfls thank you for indulging me! I definitely agree that you pulled off the balance of Star’s fairy nature beautifully, in that I absolutely never thought to question that he is all the things he is at the same time and therefore it simply never struck as weird that he would have a rider and human lover and that hey maybe thoes could be the same person. Everything just seemed completely natural and believable within the world of the story. I’m so stoked for the possibility of further Éabhe adventures!
Skivx
I would also read that Éabhe sidestory. And yes, thank you for answering Fordatspoff’s questions, and thank you to Fordatspoff for being eloquent enough to formulate and asks questions, much appreciated! 🙂
fordatspoff
awww u///u thanks! it’s been really fun reading all your comments and suggestions, too.
Skivx
Thats very sweet of you to say! I have to admit, part of my routine the last month was reading the post the night it was posted, thinking about it, but waiting until the next day when you posted, because honestly, I could always rely on you to either: have the same idea as me, but the ability to express said idea much more elegantly and eloquently, or come up with ideas I didn’t even think of. It made my job as commentator much easier when I could just agree with you lmao! 🙂 Hope you and yours have a fun, happy, healthy, and safe remainder of 2024! 🙂