MetaFic

I downloaded iBooks Author the other day and began thinking about making Phantom Limb into the media-rich mess I'd always imagined. Embedded music (of my own) and artwork (not my own, as I can only draw pictures that make my little girl laugh) and typefaces and formatting that I like. Really interesting. Especially when I'm trying to avoid doing something useful, like finishing the story. Then I thought - I wonder if the iBook Store has a policy covering derivative fiction, and I wonder if (since I'd be distributing it for free) I'd get into trouble.

I just posted my next chapter. I'm very curious to hear what people think of it. It's definitely a tangent, and that must come as a shock to those accustomed to my economical and highly focused prose, but I'm thinking a lot about what it is to tell a story (since that's a sub-theme in this one), and so here are a few. Anyway, please enjoy.

It's been a while. A really, really long while. But another chapter is looming. It's actually gone off to beta (your copy is coming, mp) and will be posted whenever we finish arguing about commas and whether or not the reader knows who the hell I'm talking about at the end of a rambling paragraph-long sentence. And my two betas are really good at helping me not go way out where the buses don't run.

Killing tears the soul apart, but seemingly that would happen only if the person feels that the act is deeply wrong. So how is a horcrux made by someone who’s a psychopath? The only answer is, apparently, according to JKR, Voldemort isn’t one. So he kills and tortures, but he's not a sociopath.

Thoughts?

Lately I have been thinking about how weird it is to see traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs sort of mashed-up with the magical stuff. It often presents as a deliberate attempt on the part of the author to say, "See, magic folks aren't heathens, so it's okay for me to like them" or something. Or it shows up at as the bizarre "Jesus was a wizard" idea, which is kind of strange as a defense of the presence of religion as it implies that miracles were conjuring tricks and that all of those people who followed that were being fooled or at best utterly mistaken.

Okay. Baby, travel, floods, no sleep. But everyone is healthy, though the parents are exhausted. And because of the travel, there is - lo and behold! - time to write. Fourteen-and-a-half thousand words, probably fifteen by the time this chapter is done in a couple of days - then the two betas gnaw its bones, and then it's up. I hope everyone likes relentless character study and never knowing what happened when or why anything is the way it is. In other words, it's more of the same. Now with even more death, and Nutella.

Here's what I'm debating. I have a two-sided coin right now in the form of a non-sequitur memory of Deasil's that is followed by the scene that follows the end of the last chapter, and then a small cliffhanger that follows those two.