daily-ish reISH report:
Johnny got auto-corrected to John once and my entire soul left my body in horror.
Re-ordering critical scenes keeps being necessary but then having Consequences and then I wonder how necessary it was to move it in the first place. (If they pick up New Cast Member B at this point, then she’s present for Memorable Scene From the Original instead of showing up after it, which means that New Cast Member A and New Cast Member B are in the same place and Johnny is there also, then B has to do X and maybe it’s too soon, etc etc)
I had originally said that I thought this version of ISH would be shorter (I also said this of reSWAN and it’s twice the length of the original version, so I’m probably full of shit), so maybe this scene condensing is just a part of that. I’d had these ideas to extend ISH itself to include the ‘hypothetical post-ISH’ stuff I began like six months before starting reSWAN, and I think that’s what’s going to happen at least a little, but the decision will just be How Far I do that.
Because then it starts getting into ‘I have ideas for a third thing, technically, or I could just keep making it ISH because maybe it’s a natural outcome of all this anyway’ and ‘I want to use some of that weird extra writing that’s been in the extras section of my website for 800 years’. Also the great ‘jimmy’s boyfriend extravaganza’ like two years ago or whatever. I think about that also. I talked about that in one of my rambling videos about reSWAN, that I laid foundational wiring for like six possible endings for Jimmy because I had no idea what the fuck to do with a character who developed so much earlier and so much more like-ably than the first time around that I was just like ‘fuck, fuck, plan for everything, plant every seed and pick one later’. He’s still at about that point. I do know he’s going to have An Extremely Bad Time during the course of ISH because he has to have a critical moment before he’s suitable for human contact, really, but other than that, shrug emoji.
But today was ‘establishing baselines for (not Edgar and Johnny) people, places, and things before New Cast Member A drops in’. I’d written the original SWAN both as my first fanfic and in a way that I tried to make deliberately hazy, which did not bode well for comprehension but also made it a little easier for 15 years ago me to cheat a little when I realized I needed to do something else. The original ISH tries to hold onto deliberate haze, but a little less. I went in the other direction with reSWAN, getting concrete with shit down to ages and specific dates for birthdays and the like, which, it turns out, makes things less confusing and more real. I think it still held onto ‘slightly blurred and dreamy’ by virtue of what it was, or I hope it did, anyway. I say all this because that’s what I’m doing especially for the start of ISH - gotta nail things to the ground and and make they don’t wobble too much for a bit so that when it all starts turning to supernatural brain fog later we at least have an idea of where the furniture is.
Today’s placeholder brackets include:
[they’re super in love or some shit whatever], [Dib-related shit], and [Johnny brains bad gears]
