"ARRAKIS TEACHES THE ATTITUDE OF THE KNIFE - CHOPPING OFF WHAT'S INCOMPLETE AND SAYING: 'NOW IT'S COMPLETE BECAUSE IT'S ENDED HERE.'" - DUNE

If it's true that you have to kill your darlings, you can consider this a form of public execution - but it's also sincerely intended as a celebratory wake.

After finishing "Probability Experiment" at the beginning of 2022, I spent almost the whole rest of that year alternating between working on the book project° and planning and writing what I fully intended to be my next novel. That was this one. I had a good premise with a lot of fun opportunity for worldbuilding, a core cast I liked and looked forward to bouncing off each other, and a rough idea of a satisfying theme for the story.

° (It is coming, I swear - it's just taken a lot longer than I anticipated, mostly because I lost a lot of time in discovering the wrong ways to do layout and typesetting. But it should be out by the end of the year, God willing.)

Unfortunately, I just couldn't get it to "click" the way I wanted. I was lucky with "Probability Experiment," which after the first couple chapters came to life so readily that it practically wrote itself in my head, aside from a few trouble spots. "Nyandemic Story" never did come together that way, no matter how I persevered in trying to write it. And the more I wrote, the more it felt like the whole thing just took too damn long to get moving. Worse yet, I really couldn't figure out how the story overall worked - how the beginning connected to the end, why the end was the end, or what came in between them and why. I had ideas for a bunch of assorted incidents that I liked, but absolutely no structure into which to fit them.

And then, around late October, I was struck by inspiration for another story - one which I like a bit better, which doesn't dawdle so much in getting underway, and most importantly one which I have a clear idea of the progression for. I'm enjoying writing it and I look forward to publishing it, once I've gotten the book project out the door and made sufficient headway on the new story.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

But the problem is, I just haven't been able to get over "Nyandemic Story." I keep feeling like I'd rather be working on the one when I'm trying to work on the other, and vice versa - and there's too much shared DNA between them to do both, even if I had the time and energy. Continuing to develop this story would involve pilfering stuff that fits better in the other one. No matter how I might like each of them, I have to choose one or the other - and if I have to do that, I'm not going to choose the one I was already stuck on.

And yet, I do like this story, dammit. I like the setting, I like the characters, I like various bits of business that I got to write. I don't want to just throw it away, and I can't, anyway, because when I try to do that I find pieces of it sticking in my head and trying to reincarnate in the new story. I don't want to just assemble that one out of cast-off bits of this one simply because I'm too attached to let them die.

And so, I'm doing this: just publishing the damn thing as-is, incomplete, clearly labelled as a fragment and not planned to be continued, not because I think it's bad or I'm unhappy with it, but because I'm trying to focus on something that I hope will be better still, and this keeps getting in the way. It's an exorcism, if you will, and I hope this thing can find some rest.

(And yes: this is, in part, a satire on Current Events. If you think that's in poor taste, well, I won't tell you you're wrong, but I'm of the opinion that, having suffered through the real thing, we've all earned the right to at least get a few snarky chuckles out of all the stupidity surrounding it; if it triggers bad associations in you personally, you have my sympathies. In either case, you have my blessing to ignore it and go on your way. The new story won't be like that, for what it's worth.)

- NothingSpecial