There were many calendars that saw use in Lewisia: from religions that calculated by moons or stars or trees or dreams; from cultures that had never lived in the area but been imported with their people; from times that had not happened yet and times that never would happen. People marked their holidays and working days on paper and stone tablets and computer spreadsheets. On any given day, it was the start of a new year: a chance to begin again if only one was bold enough to borrow a little hope from the almanacs of strangers.
---
LL#365---
This marks one year in Lake Lewisia. One thousand ninety-five sentences, which, wonder of wonders, all came out on time despite everything a year can throw at me. (Well, they did over on the tumblr version, because scheduled posts are a blessing. Mirroring them over here occasionally took longer than planned.)
I always have mixed feelings about writers talking about how they didn't invent their story's world or characters. I think it can be a cheap way of dodging responsibility for what you've set down on the page, whether that's in response to criticism of your message or complaints of gratuitous character death or whatever. It can start to sound a bit unhinged when authors start suggesting that their story cannot be questioned, because they just recorded what went on in some other reality.
That's...that's a tough sell for me. I'll leave it at that. If nothing else, my response will be that just because a thing happened, doesn't mean you had to go and publish a book about it.
(The notion that even nonfiction manages to capture the pure reality of something, with no editorial decisions shaping the frame and the tone of the thing--well, I find that equally laughable. So make of that what you will.)
That being said, I came of age during a phase and space of fandom when stories tended to be bookended by authors having elaborate conversations with their characters, a sort of behind-the-scenes reel or director's commentary track on a movie. You might not have full authority over the characters, but you had a version of them with whom you collaborated. For a certain value of collaboration that always seemed to involve a lot of unapologetic bullying by the author, anyway. That's nostalgic for me.
Throw in an eccentric spiritual background with a lot of wooly New Age roots and a poor grasp of consensus reality and, well.
I'm not as opposed to the idea of finding a story
Out There as I might like to imagine I am.
All I
really wanted to do was figure out a framework around which I could write some microfiction, something that would give the stories a shared flavor and internal logic, something that would help me avoid choice paralysis. I just wanted a project that would force me to post something on my new Dreamwidth account every day.
I had a notebook page full of columns of words that might, I hoped, combine into a tolerable place name. I had a couple stories jotted down. (It all started with the
Buried Gardens and an
off-switch for reality, which did rather set the tone.) They might as well have been a map and a full tank of gas: some very basic starting tools to get me somewhere I'd never been before.
I've done this
once before, you know. New website, serial fiction, a year-long commitment. There's some kind of magic in that format, waiting for me every time I show up. Who am I to fight it?
Some days, the work was work, just trying to fit one word after another until I could pretend three sentences qualified as a story. Mostly, though, coming to the document was the last step, just a quick stop to record what I already knew: this was what happened in Lewisia today. It felt like a channel I could switch over to whenever I wanted, a camera roving at random over the treetops. It was a good place to visit, so I just kept coming back.
I intend to take a short hiatus--a year can be a long time when you measure it three sentences at a time. I've just started to hit the stage where some of the stories I draft sound too familiar, and I discover that I've told that one before. That probably means that a rest is in order.
I'm not done telling stories in Lewisia though--far from it. Longer pieces are in the works. There are stories I want to tell that need more breathing room than three sentences alone can give them. I haven't decided if those will replace the daily microfiction entirely. There is, unfortunately, only so much of me to go around.
So what I want to know is: what's the one thing you most want to see more of from Lewisia? What questions do you have about the town and its residents? Whose life would you like to see explored in greater depth?
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