Story: The Negative Serpentine
Published in: A Breath of Time [print/ebook]
Length: 6,700 words
Brief synopsis:
How the story came to be: Have you heard of The Hundred Line: Colon: – Last Defense Academy – ? No? Well, have you heard of Danganronpa?
If you’re one of the few who reads these and don’t know me personally, then you probably don’t know that the works of Kazutaka Kodaka (the guy who made Danganronpa) and Kotaro Uchikoshi (Zero Escape, but you’d probably recognize his first work, Pepsiman) have just. Permanently altered my brain. And body; I do have a Danganronpa tattoo (but most people aren’t going to recognize that’s what it is lol).
Kodaka’s stories have really strong characters. Like they are absolute freaks, and they are so fun to write (I’ve written a lot of Danganronpa fanfiction). Uchikoshi, meanwhile, doesn’t have the strongest characters, but the structure of his stories is absolutely mind-bending. The two of them made Hundred Line, and in one interview, Uchikoshi laid out a huge diagram showing the flowchart of all one hundred storylines/endings in the game. This is the level of insane I want my own writing to be.
The concept of Hundred Line is that these teens are in the murder school, but they’re not supposed to be murdering each other: bad guys are tower defense-ing their school so they have to do a Fire Emblem about it. The main character (like most Kodaka/Uchikoshi games) is just A Guy, so having to become a warrior is a big change for him. He really doesn’t want to be here. There are some characters, though, who take to it pretty easily. The biker miscreant, the assassin, the pro wrestler, the girl who REALLY seems to have done this before, gee, that’s weird! and the swordswoman.
See, all of humanity lives essentially in a bubble, because sci fi reasons. So this one character saying “I grew up on a remote mountain and my grandfather taught me how to be a samurai” is very ???? what. How is ANYTHING “remote” possible. What does being a samurai even look like in a society where everything else is just modern Tokyo. So she talks very old-timey, is very honorable; she’s weird (all the characters are weird), but in a way I found really interesting.
So, I says to myself, what if I took that character and pushed her to the logical extremes. What if she still wants to be a warrior/hero, but her life has been set up in such a way for that to not really be possible, but it does happen, which causes her to die? Also blood-powered time loops is cool what if her SO didn’t want her to have that “happy ending”?
So that’s what this story is lol. And it’s in fantasy San Francisco (but that one building I described is actually here in my city, but I don’t expect anyone to recognize that). The feeling of the fog, no matter the day of the year, being out there, enclosing the world and making it just this small sphere, it’s very video game-y but makes you feel cut off from everyone else.
PUBLISHING THE STORY
Relative Confidence Level Before Submitting: 7? It’s really long, but I was (and still am!) so proud of it. I think it’s the second best thing I’ve ever written (the first best is also this 1.5rd sapphic sword lesbian fantasy thing type story, too, lol. But no time loops)
Rejections before finding a home: 20. Which is a lot for a story this long!
The eventual home: The A Breath of Time romantasy anthology from Flame Tree Publishing. It’s funny I didn’t even think of this as a romance while writing it, and definitely NOT as romantasy! But I thought. Hey, why not, let’s submit it and see what happens. I also submitted it to Of Swords and Roses since it fit that theme, too. But this is my first pro rate sale of a not flash story! And the book is so gorgeous! So I’m really happy it found this home 🙂
