Another little piece of The Show, my MCU fanfic in the Forever Captain series about Steve Rogers's life post his retirement to the midcentury in Endgame. The thing I try to do with a lot of these stories is explore the impact being a time-traveling super-soldier has on Steve psychologically and emotionally. Like, what is it like to have lived out of time in the future and the past? What is it like to not know if your foreknowledge means your actions have no ability to affect the course of the timeline, or way too much? What is it like to age more slowly than everyone you love? How much does it separate you from others when they cannot possibly know what you've been through? What was it like to have the weight of the world on your shoulders? Those questions are ripe for drama, and I do my best even in this story, which is primarily supposed to be comedic, to make them feel present in my exploration of the character. I'm afraid that, like the last scene I did for this story in this year's challenge, #9 - Singing and Dancing, this is a bit insubstantial. But I think you can see me gesturing to the impact it's had on Steve to have lived such a singular life.

( Day #17 - Intermission )

Another possible scene for a sequel to Gentlemen Never Tell. An element I like from this story is balancing the rivalry and romantic connection between Justin and Rosaline, for tension, humor, and a little spicy frisson. This scene is too cursory and not witty enough, but it’s meant to set up the nature of their conflict in this installment, plus the idea that they’re going to go to crazy lengths to one up each other.



( Day #15 - All’s Fair )

Ugh, another lame, awkward scene. This is some drafting for an idea for another Justin Hawking story, which we have a half-decent idea developing. But this scene is really awkward and poorly realized. I’m sure it could be saved with editing, but with a scene to bang out every day for a month, editing is not something I can afford to spend time on right now. So… right now it’s pretty bad.



( Day #13 - Two or Three Birds )

Haven’t worked on this one in a long while. This is a scene from an idea I had for a ghost story audio drama, tentatively titled Dead Tongues. A family marries into an old noble lineage with a spooky house in the country, and the presence of the spirits are indicated by whispers of ancient Roman history and poetry. A conceit I’m not sure is workable practically, but I like the idea of it, and so I’m playing around with it.

This is another project I don’t really have fully figured out. Just noodling and seeing what comes of it. This scene comes after these previous:

Scene 1 - "Alea Iacta Est"
Scene 2 - "Left Her in Marble"
Scene 3 - “Shears His Flock”

( Day #11 - Too Much )

I realized recently I haven’t worked on the mainline entry in my MCU fanfiction series, Forever Captain, for like a year now, and I feel kind of guilty about that. Of course, I feel guilty when I spend too much time writing fanfiction as well, so I guess I can’t win. But I do want those stories to get finished eventually. Unfortunately, I always find plotting to be the most intensive work in writing, and in a plot-heavy story like that one, it makes it the number one barrier to making progress.

It sometimes helps when I’m stuck on a prose project to try drafting scenes as drama, to lower the barrier to getting them on the page. That’s not super helpful when I’m trying to just figure out what needs to happen structurally, but it occurred to me it might help on a lower-intensity installment in the series that hasn’t seen any updates recently either. So here’s a scene from The Show, the one where Steve’s great-granddaughter takes him to see Rogers! The Musical. The premise of that piece is that while laughing over the musical’s inaccuracies, Steve gets to reflect to his great-granddaughter about the trajectory of his life, so I can weave pathos into the humor, and I’m afraid this scene is a bit thin for that. But as I continually remind myself— draft now, flesh out later. If you can’t do something you want to with a scene, do the next-easiest thing to it, and fix it in the edit.

I shall definitely have to do that here.



( Day #9 – Singing and Dancing )

Wow, this one turned out long. A good bit longer than most of the scenes I post for the 31P31D challenge. But my rule for myself is I need to present a complete unit of dramatic action, even if it’s a small or short one, in every scene I post, and this took a lot of stuff to come to a stopping point.

This is I believe the third scene of my new horror piece Lacuna, after #4 - New Game and #5 - Curious. I feel like this scene needs to lay a lot of groundwork that would be important for building up the suspense, so I was compelled to really flesh it out. I know the details will need a lot of refining, as most of them are made up as I went and might not actually serve to built to what I want. But I’m hoping to make the audience ask a lot of questions and start their minds wondering without giving too much away of what’s to come.

( Day #7 - Streaming )