Lake Lewisia #666

[scrubjayspeaks]

If he just made the perfect first impression, he told himself, she would be his at last, and so he wound the little time machine again. A week or a month of following her--learning how she ticked--imploded and collapsed back to the first meeting and the next attempt, but she only seemed ever more resistant. Unfelt by him, the fragments of her undone memories hung about him like flies around a corpse, warning her away again each time he reset.

---

LL#666

Comments

[chanter1944]

*shivers* I'm going to guess that the intersection of this installment's number with its content is not an entirely random thing. *That*, dear folks who hang out in quantum, is why you don't let a certain kind of creepy person get hold of a time machine. At least, I read this guy as creepy rather than desperately earnest. I may have missed the mark; is he meant to be lovesick desperate, or genuinely stalkery?

[scrubjayspeaks]

No, you're correct--he's deeply creepy and A Problem.

On the other hand, it is, in fact, *completely* random that this story got this particular number. For a bit of inside baseball, I queue up these stories over on the tumblr first. (At the moment, I'm doing them a month at a time, but I used to do it week by week.) I only transfer them over to DW as they post, at which point I assign them the next number in order.

I arrange stories based on any seasonal considerations first--holidays mentioned, weather and cosmological conditions--and then I massage things around in an attempt to maintain a good balance of tone, theme, dialogue/prose. Not too many dark pieces in a row, not three weeks of gardening-themed ones, and so on.

I don't normally have any awareness of what number a story will end up. For #500, because I wanted to do something special, I did sit and work out when exactly 500 would be scheduled. But for the most part, it doesn't matter.

Now, that being said? When I went to mirror this one over and realized it would be #666, I *frantically* went to check which story I had scheduled for the day. It hadn't posted on tumblr yet, so I had time to change it if, idk, it felt like a weird vibe for some reason. Imagine my surprise when I realized THIS of all things had been next in the queue.

Sometimes things turn out just right without any help. *shrug* I just work here, you know? :D

[shipperslist]

Well that’s a properly creepy entry for #666. 😬

[scrubjayspeaks]

Every now and then, it's fun to lean into the spooky hard enough to cross the line into creepy. 😈