Epiphanic

Oh — !

There’s a story I started some time ago that involves people breaking promises to voodoo loa, and the story ends badly (as it must) for the people, because you just don’t renege on deals with supernatural entities; they’ve collections departments that are uniformly more horrific than the IRS with PMS.

But the story didn’t really go, and got trunked informally.  I didn’t know why.  I mean, the people were showing during the story that they were going to deserve what they get, and I felt the horrific thing that they get was appropriate and unexpected.  But it didn’t go, so it went.

I just realized, while thinking about other things entirely (a quote by Neil Gaiman about bird’s eggs, and why data combined cannot be uncombined, and why people want things that they won’t want to pay for) when it occurred to me what was wrong with the story.  The collections department has to have a series of requests, then dunning letters, then threats of strong legal action, then the warning shot, and then the unexpected horrific thing.  You can’t just jump to garnished wages, you have to get there with a feeling that it has been a long time coming and there was a point, somewhere, when it could have been averted but everyone was too foolish to notice, and now things have become inevitable and Just Desserts.

– oh!

I’ve got to hurry through the rest of my novel draft so I can untrunk the short story, go through a draft of that, and move on with editing the novel.  Or perhaps edit then untrunk.  But the story is back on.

Crossposted from Epinephrine & Sophistry