#wip: bilocation

[catchingbigfish]

oc name meaning tag game

ooooooh this is an interesting game, thanks for the tag @dotr-rose-love! (sorry @ everyone whose tag games i missed pretty much the entire month of march btw, i know i'll never get to catch up on them but might work through a few that look immediately doable at some point) i'm tagging @nanashi23, @inkspellangel, @linaket, @pga-books, and @ls-daydreams!

rules: list OCs and explain the meaning of their names

i tend to pick names based on the vibe i have for the character -- i have strooooong associations with various vowel combinations, or arrangement of letters, or pairings, etc., so most of this is just "idk it sounded cool". but because i love the idea of this game so much, i'm going to do it for every WIP i have rn:

so it goes

Marisa: i wanted a name that ended with an A because names like that make me think of someone sincere and serious

Isaiah: i wanted a biblical name; i associate those with families with deep lineages and a strong matriarch for some reason, which was a quality i wanted Isaiah to have

Ali: i wanted a name that complemented marisa's because they were sisters in the original draft, and i feel like L's and S's complement each other nicely. her full name is Alison, but i wanted her to be someone fun and outgoing, and Ali feels like that more than Alison

Paige: i got stuck on her name and picked a name from a random generator -- for some reason, when i see the name Paige, i instantly think of a girl who is aesthetically similar to the character (whose description is inspired by Gillian Jacobs)

Henry: another random generator produced this one -- i wanted it to be a very common man's name that wouldn't provoke much interest

Sophia: she's not a main character but i fucking love the name sophia/sofia so much. it's probably my favorite ever girl's name. it means wisdom and in some schools of gnosticism it was the emanation of god that was paired with Christ and unintentionally caused the world to exist

the space between pomegranate seeds

Meredith: i wanted a name that felt like the weird religious girl everyone knew growing up, but wasn't super cliche like Chastity lol

(most of the other characters are purposefully unnamed)

decomposing gods - priestess of bones

Claire: when i originally came up with this story idea i was deep into my Early Cronenberg Period (end of 2021) and had just rewatched Dead Ringers. i knew there would be a trio of women, so i gave them the names from the movie as placeholders: Claire, Bev, and Elly. i chose Claire for the documentarian because i felt the name fit her personality/vibe best, a diminutive brunette intent to prove herself

Bev: as above. i originally wanted to go Bev/Elly for the documentarian and camera person's roles, but realized they didn't fit right. also frankly i always categorized this as a lesbian name in my head for some reason, which worked out best since the character is queer

Sofia: even though i felt like Claire and Bev fit well with the characters i also never intended to actually use the trio's name. Sofia as a filmmaker is actually most inspired by Julia Ducournau, but i do love Sofia Coppola, lol.

bilocation

Emily: the real person she is based on is Émilie Sagée, and i didn't want to trick myself into not writing this by deciding to do research on the historical period she's from (1800s latvia), so i americanized her name and placed it in a 1980s boarding school in oregon but retained the formal speaking voice i'd imagined for her

Ms. Frond: i honestly went with the first word that popped into my brain on this -- i have so many characters named after the most bizarre shit because i'll use anything for a last name that pops into my head. i love it, though, because Emily becomes obsessed with her and has an established fascination with plants

Roland: i wanted a name that felt like a surprise on the groundskeeper character -- he looks like a dude who would be named something like Biff or Johnson or something, but he becomes a much more tender and gentle character than you anticipate from the description

[catchingbigfish]

find the word tag game

@leebrontide tagged me in this.... 11 days ago, lol. let's goooooo

i'm going to tag @oh-no-another-idea, @isherwoodj, @indecentpause, and @saphoblin! your words are stars, hedge, justify, written, and question.

my words are sweep, bright, pain, and tired. the voice of this story is a massive challenge so please excuse the uneven tone -- i don't feel like i've really hit my stride yet with it!

cw for implied self harm and maybe also for body horror, even though i did work around the most explicit parts it's still good to know those are the prime focus of this story

sweep

“Ms. Saget.” The headmistress’s proud, booming voice fills this corner of the echo stained hall. “Come join me and Roland.” I swivel my head searching for the source of the entreaty. She stands stoic against the varnished wood planks of the wall to my right, the gap between us not longer than this Roland is tall. He is a standard man; his body the rigorously muscled, staunch one belonging to any of the farm boys I knew at home, his face the kinder, gentler version of the priests I once knew at a parochial school. I sweep towards them, allowing children to dart and leap through my path until I reach them.

bright

[The sea] is so far I will not see it without travel. My ribs take a moment to steel against the sadness creeping between the bones and I straighten against the tightening of my skin. It is time, it whispers to me. I resist its invitation while the new headmistress speaks. It is easier to resist than I expected because I am now making eye contact with the headmistress, the Ms. Frond whose signature boldly dashed across my offer letter. She looks me over once with a dithering glance which makes me wilt in my shoes. Her eyes are so brightly green it makes my eyes water to look into hers. My body closes in on itself and I fold my hands at my waist, keeping my eyes off hers in fear of what she might see next.

pain

“Ms. Saget?” the one who accepts promises asks, her voice nasally and reedy like only a girl child’s is. “Are you okay?” I nod and a breath hisses between my teeth, an inhale that rockets through my body like sustenance against the pain. “Yes.” My shirt falls back into place and I tuck the tweezers and the part of me I have excised into my fist. “You scared me.”

tired

When I wake, my hand cramped around the pouch, the rain has ceased its incessant battering. Although there is a light patter still coming down, it will not drench us; it is insufficient for a flood, it is safe now. I withdraw my hand from my bag and clench it tight in a fist, loosen it with a sound like fireworks, the joints popping as they flex. My eyes burn with exhaustion, my skin begging not for relief but for sleep. Tired, it says. Sleep. I cannot, and my skin knows this — yet it still asks, even as I walk to the classroom.

[catchingbigfish]

i got a good start this morning and wrote 1,246 words. i'm hoping to get back up to the 1k per word standard, so i'll probably do a brief sprint later. i'm pleasantly surprised how well it's been going, considering i didn't plan or outline this at all

[catchingbigfish]

camp nano april '23 | project intro

placeholder title: Bilocation

summary: Primary school teacher Emily Saget arrives to a boarding school for her seventh placement in twelve years. She knows this time she must be more successful at keeping her secret: she is already dead. While hiding this fact from the others, she finds herself experiencing a new sensation she has never felt — lust — for someone she never expected — the headmistress. A duplicate of Emily begins wandering the halls and completing her routine duties, leading dead-Emily to the brink of madness as she figures out how to prevent this living-Emily from destroying her life.

genres: body horror, magical realism

themes: doppelgangers and duplicates, tension between compulsion and willpower, the unrecognizable quality of one's own body, the institutionalization of women

content warnings: self-harm and mutilation, mental illness (OCD, PTSD, Cotard's syndrome, DPDR), internalized biphobia/unrecognized sexuality (implied)

word count tracking (5,408/30,000 goal): April 1: 928 April 2: 1,115 April 3: 78 April 4: 1,246 April 5: 1,248 April 6: 115 April 7: 61 April 8: 466 April 9: 108 April 10: 43

[catchingbigfish]

ahead is an informal wip intro for the story i'm going to work on this month! the story contains themes of self-harm, so tread with care if that is a trigger for you.

every so often, i spend 3-4 weeks trapped in a weird cycle of headaches, nightmares, and insomnia. i experience migraines fairly regularly but on occasion they impact my ability to sleep, and when i have headaches and struggle to sleep, i have more nightmares than usual. when i have a lot of nightmares, i don't want to sleep, and my body strains against my efforts to do so; when i don't get enough sleep, i have more migraines. see the tricky cycle?

on a lot of those insomniac nights, i find myself down a wikipedia rabbit hole on a topic i find fascinating. recently, these have included reading the wikipedia page for various professional wrestlers and eras, delving into the topic of video nasties and other banned horror films, and exploring one of my favorite thematic tropes, the doppelganger.

i'm almost guaranteed to love a film in which an actor plays two roles. there is something so deeply unsettling about the idea of a duplicate even though at its core it should be neutral -- there's nothing inherently wrong with a duplicate, yet our bodies reject this idea and claim it's terrible. reading about doppelgangers led me to the topic of bilocation, and its most famous "proven" example, Emilie Sagee.

truthfully, the so-called "evidence" is threadbare; a few different people reported the same story being told to them. still, it's fascinating, right? the concept of a benign classroom teacher who simply has the ability to be in two places at once. yet she was fired from her school because students' parents were unhappy.

so this is what led to the idea which cropped up without warning and bloomed unexpectedly into a fully formed story. i'm usually a relentless plotter -- i like to write to a coherent outline with a fairly well defined path to follow from beginning to end. in this case, though, i know the loose concept of what will happen and i'm going to have to discover it along the way.

here's the vague concept: Emily is a teacher at a boarding school who believes she is already dead. because of this, she identifies more strongly with the dead pieces of her skin which are shed and left behind -- whether naturally, like when our skin cells slough off and become dust, or on purpose, like when she relentlessly picks at her cuticles and shreds the skin there. she tries to collect all of the debris she leaves behind and keeps it safely stored in a pouch in her bag, until one day it goes missing and a second Emily begins traveling around the school. Emily has to ascertain which of these she really is and what to do about the impostor.

current status: out of nowhere i wrote 1k words of an introduction last night, so i guess i'm in the drafting-and-planning-as-i-go stage. i think this will likely be more of a novella than a full-length novel, so i'm aiming for 30k words for the first draft.

[catchingbigfish]

Ice and sand for the elemental ask game

tysm for the ask!

Ice: What do you always get stuck on when writing?

oh that's easy -- i have a tendency to write basically all vibes, no plot if left to my own devices, but that makes me second guess if i try to write without an outline and i get stuck and freeze up and can't keep going. if i don't have an outline ahead of time i'll never finish a WIP! (which is what happened to bilocation, tbh)

Sand: What’s the softest scene you’ve ever written?

So It Goes has so many gentle, indulgent, soft af scenes -- there's so much dark stuff going on that i felt like i had to buoy the characters with something nice constantly. i think my favorite is when Isaiah takes Marisa to watch the sunrise and sleep under a tree, it's just so kind and sweet!