estee

Update: A Duet For Land And Sky

Added 2019-09-16 03:29:05 +0000 UTC

Any writer is eventually going to wind up with one of those search histories.

Mystery authors -- those specializing in crime -- get the worst of it. A mystery writer who's on their game is going to have a search history which resembles that of a serial killer, mostly because they're trying to create a plausible one and that requires a certain amount of research. It's just the sort of investigation which is slightly difficult to explain, even when you're holding up your completed first draft in front of local law enforcement while hoping you wrote enough pages to stop a bullet.

(Definitely an argument for hardcopy. Flash drives have trouble stopping dust.)

For this chapter? It's not quite that bad, at least in that I managed to get through 6800 words without actually killing anypony. But most stories involve some degree of research and in this case? Of the hundreds of apple cultivars in the world, I needed to know which ones tasted the worst.

So there's that. And when I saw one of the names... well, the character pretty much materialized right there. Because if you can't take a cheap shot at something approaching the original target, then when are you allowed to do it?

The lesson: use DuckDuckGo. Because eventually, you may want to write a short story. And not die.