Been a fucking second since we saw one of these bad boys, right?
Because UUUGHH, that’s why. Maybe this blurb is spoilerish I don’t know, but it goes anyway.
Have I written the beginning like five times, three of which feature the Tess connector piece from the original story, only to discover just now, as I was making the timeline again and telling myself to ignore everything about the first version as an experiment, that I am not going to be starting with the Tess beginning anymore?
I sure the fuck did.
I was trying to avoid sort of bending the story into some unnatural bonsai thing because I was relying on the original and so I was actively telling myself even before now not to lean on it. Apparently, I was still leaning too much.
I’m still looking for most of the “iconic” images and things to stay, but Tess’s role is going to shift, and some of the things she did originally probably just won’t fit anymore. This was an expected outcome, and I readily dumped a ton already especially stuff adjacent to Johnny and Edgar’s relationship, so I don’t know why I’m sitting here all surprised pikachu face that I had to just overturn a whole dumpster’s worth of shit, but here we are.
Every time I update like this on here, I’m like, “okay, now it’s going to go smoother” and like, it does, but it is a very relative smoother. Like differing grits of sandpaper.
As a reward for looking at my yelling, here’s Babies’ First Roadkill:
The van suddenly jumped upward and a series of dull thuds traveled the length of the floor.
“Jesus Fuck!” Devi yelled as she braced herself against the dashboard.
Edgar’s stomach twisted. “Did we just hit something?”
“I don’t know!” Tenna called back, “ I didn’t see!”
“How?! What were you looking at instead?!”
“Maybe the people screaming in the van!”
Jimmy stretched his neck and tried to see through the back window. “Is it dead?”
“Oh my fucking god, Jimmy,” Devi said. “Wouldn’t you be?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never been fucking run over before.”
“We could fix that for you,” Johnny said.
