“Okay, hello, welcome to what is going to be chapter one of The Lesser. I haven’t done anything like this before (as far as recording while I’m writing goes) so I’m probably going to be nervous and fuck up a bunch. So be prepared for that.

Also for my visually-impaired workshoppers, I will have included in the video description a summary of this whole bit as well as a link to the StorytailorWorkshop.com blog, where you can find a full copy of the finished (well, “finished” as far as I get it in one go) chapter and a separate post with a retrospective that should be accessible to screen readers.

That said, this video is not gonna have audio, because I don’t talk much when I’m writing and it would feel weird and performative to try. Also all the music I would be listening to while I’m writing this would be copyrighted. Or, like, not music at all. Right now I’m listening to a Twitch.tv stream (Barry) so if you want the full immersive experience I would recommend pulling up a VOD from his youtube channel or catching one live and playing that in a different tab while you watch this.

Or, y’know, you can listen to like… fantasy/medieval bard compilation no. 1, or those really specific playlists like “you’re a hot badass villain but you’re falling for the protagonist” or “you were a bad guy but you’re redeeming yourself” or “you’re dancing alone in a ballroom in 1847 but the ghost of a man who died forty years later is somehow the perfect parter” shit I dunno they get really specific and you get what I mean. If you want the true experience, anyway, that’s what you go for.

Okay. So here’s how this is going to go. I am going to copy all of this and paste it into the retrospective so that it’s available, but more or less once I’m ready to get started, we’re just getting into it. I’m intending to speed the video up so you’re not staring watching me do this for like four hours or however long it takes.

Disclosures and warnings! This is a horror story. It is going to get messy and by that I mean gory. Such is life. Also I’m not the best writer in the world so I’m going to fuck up repeatedly. That’s the point of showing this process. But I’m going to show the whole process from start to finish.

I’m writing in Microsoft Word, Times New Roman 12pt font. I will be screwing around with the formatting in a minute so that it looks acceptable to me (and doesn’t have the weird additional gaps between paragraphs). I usually write in Google Docs using 14pt Spectral because it looks nicer to my eyes.

And before I get into anything else, I just want to say sorry for how messy this is! It’s my first video, my first public art experience? Thing? Doing the stuff where other people might look at it? And it’s hard enough to share finished pieces so this is a bit of a nightmare but I want this for you.

So. Let’s use what I’ve written here as a base for our format fuckery, and then let’s copy it into a separate document and get started.”

The first thing I noticed going back and checking the video is that my menus aren’t visible, so that’s something I’ll need to fix going forward. The whole process does include the formatting part, after all.

I also didn’t want to get performative with it, but I still sort of did. I do write asides and weird notes when I’m trying to figure something out, but not to the degree I was doing in the first video. Maybe I should do a post-recording voiceover? Let me know if that seems like it might be useful.

Now for this chapter, I knew a few things had to happen. We had our exciting start, the amputation. We had our doctor and a bit of her personality get introduced. We got a little characterization for Jack, and for the society as a whole. And then we had our doctor in a perilous situation, given safe haven by Seth, who we also got to learn is a Shatter-Eye but it’s unclear what that means at this time.

I did struggle with the opening line a bit on this one. I had thought about it for many days before settling on starting out with a bit about the guy’s leg coming off. But even then I couldn’t figure out how to make it punchy enough to be interesting. This is sort of what I settled on.

I don’t know, I guess I don’t think very much when I’m writing, at least about what my actual process is. Sometimes I’ll use a word, realize it doesn’t work, think for a few minutes, look up synonyms, finally settle on something I like, and by the time I come back I’ve lost all my momentum.

In the case of this chapter, I guess it came pretty quickly because I’ve been preparing for it quite a bit. I also know broadly what the next few chapters will look like, and hopefully I’ll have sorted out my video process a bit better by then.

Anyway, the chapter (linked here!) is being posted about the same time as this is going up, but I’m trying to figure out a way to keep the blog posts and the actual chapters separate so it might be a little finicky for a bit.

Thanks for your patience! And please let me know if there are questions, comments, suggestions, or concerns. Always happy to listen.