The KidVegeta Anthology/A Flap of the Wings

The last three stories I completed for A Short-Lived Dream were all "problem" stories - ones that I saved for last because they each presented different problems. I have already detailed the problems I had with Country Matters, and the anthology for Black as Blood can be found two anthologies after this one. Every one of these three stories was significantly harder for me to write than any other ASLD story, though for different reasons. The reason why A Flap of the Wings was so difficult was due to several different factors.

For one, AFOTW features a character of mine named Audacci, who, while a major villain in the upcoming Dragon Ball: Heart of the Dragon, lacked a defined personality at this stage. This story was essentially going to be her backstory. Audacci had existed for years before I wrote AFOTW, and yet throughout that time, I never developed a detailed backstory for her. I had vague ideas about where she was raised and what kind of person she was, given the personality of, but that was only a starting point, not an endpoint. It was difficult, as it was with Chari, to narrow down a personality and history for a character I'd known existed for a while. She had of course already appeared in the earlier ASLD story, Ice Age Coming, but her appearance in that one was relatively minor. I knew I'd have to come up with a significantly more tangible personality for this story.

The second problem was one of form. I needed to show a lot of different memories in this story, and doing so in a traditional story would require probably at least 12-15,000 words. I was unwilling to write such a long one-shot. So instead, I decided to use a more stream-of-conscious style of prose, akin to how the writing in The Falconer is. That story was a large influence for me here. I also wanted to incorporate a stuffy, imperial style of recollection, akin to what appears in The Pillow Book.

That's a strange combination of influences, I realize now. The Falconer is a genre-breaking, experimental novel, while The Pillow Book is an imperial Japanese diary that, despite being a diary, is rather formal and stuffy. Both of these influences made it difficult, but intriguing to attempt. While I had figured out that I wanted to use these two novels to influence me from an early point (as early as December 2016), I was unsure exactly how to write this out. It was difficult writing, so AFOTW was left until there weren't many ASLD stories left to write before beginning. It likely would've been the last story for me to write had not Black as Blood become the problem it did. I remember routinely thinking that this story would be the last one for me to write, due to the scary nature of having to come up with so much backstory and lore for Audacci and piecing it all together in a strange stream-of-consciousness way. But then BAB proved that it was even more difficult. If Country Matters was an 8 on the difficulty scale, A Flap of the Wings is surely a 9.5 at least. It was more than a tier above CM in difficulty for me to write.

I knew that Audacci would grow up on a planet away from her parents, but which planet that was going to be was a plot point that I was stuck on for a while. I eventually decided to go with planet Faeri due to me drawing inspiration from The Pillow Book. I felt that the Faereth were the best species to mimic the ancient Japanese court, and I did not particularly feel like creating a new planet or species to accommodate Audacci's backstory. It would be far more useful to use a location that existed in the lore already I thought.

I didn't have much planned for Audacci when I began writing her memory fragments. All I wanted to show was that she felt like an outsider on Faeri and mostly knew of her father through outside tales. The stuff with the prince and then the pirate captain were improvised.

I began writing on January 28, 2017, though I only managed to get the first sentence done that day. And I only managed to complete the first paragraph and write a sentence of the second on the next day. These two paragraphs ultimately ended up being the opening to the fifth section of AFOTW.

I managed to write out the first section on January 31st, but that took me all day. Considering how short that section is, I think this illustrates how difficult it was for me to write this out. It took a lot longer than one would imagine.

On February 1st, the slow-going continued. I managed to finish what is now the third section, although at the time, it was the second section. Additionally, I wrote about a third of the fourth section (at the time, the third section).

It wasn't until the next day that I decided to move the opening paragraph, still unfinished at this point, to the (at that point) fourth section. That day I also finalized the first two sections, spending a lot of time editing them. They grew somewhat longer in the editing phase. I also edited what existed of the third section, but as I have already mentioned, that section was only roughly a third of the way done.

I took the next day off and continued writing on February 4th. The first thing I did that day was create what ended up being the true second section. By this point, I was getting a hang of the story and knew that I wanted to make it a dream-fragment one-shot. The second section was therefore written without much trouble. I also completed the (now) fourth section with Ckaro-Ckaro that day. Feeling the momentum I was building, I then proceeded to finish off what had originally been the first section, but was now the fifth. I decided to make the chunks of history italicized text and intersperse them with another series of memories in order to make that section tolerable to read. And then once that was done, I put in a final section that was "modern" so to speak, showing Audacci with The Benefactor following the events of Ice Age Coming.

Before going to sleep again that night, I re-edited for a third time the first two sections, and then edited the remainder of the story after I woke up the next day.

Coming up with the backstory for the Faereth was very fun for me. It was almost as fun as coming up with Audacci's relationship to them and all of the little moments I showed with her in love, training, betraying, fighting, in grief, and all that. There was a lot shown of Audacci here. This one-shot is basically a prologue to her character in HOTD. It's a useful story in that way, but I think it also stands on its own as a compelling tale. That's just my own opinion on the matter, though. Let's get onto the endnotes and discuss this more specifically.