ReISH report:

I added one sentence, I’m sorry, I was dealing with glittereddon and extra birthday things trickled in

Tomorrow, perhaps, more

Dailyish ReISH Report:

Pieces of these horrible people talking.

“Maybe some future version of me will just be normal, huh?  Like not a murderer or possessed by my own brain or anything.  Maybe I’ll just have a stupid laugh or polio or something.”

“I like you not normal.“

“So you want me to have polio.”

“No, asshole, but I’d still be there if you did.”

—

—

ReISH report:

Adorable conversation about the future filled with sincere love

Contains the word ‘polio’ four times

👍

reISH report: 

uh

reISH report:

Jimmy continues to fulfill his role by being the worst. I can always count on him to do things worthy of being sworn at and having donuts smacked out of his hands. 👍

Dailyish reISH Report:

I really love these horrible people, and I love that they’re people enough that they’re sitting with conflicts and decisions I didn’t know they had until I got them to talk it through

Now there’s a big single vein of conflict self-contained in Johnny that will feed through the whole story. It’s a big overwhelming thing to deal with and truthfully I don’t know how I will yet, but it feels absolutely right for him and like a logical progression thematically

That sounds really pretentious and shit, but I hope it’s rewarding for all involved. I want to do more of what I did with reSWAN and look at honest but ugly feelings straight on, give them their space to be true, and then say that an improvement or a rescue or any change at all didn’t make the ugly emotion wrong or render it as though it never happened. It’s not glorifying hopelessness or grief or selfish rage, it is just letting them exist with the time they need to without sending a clean up crew to remodel into a greeting card approved emotion.

I predict Ugly Learning will be a theme this time around.

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]

Actual Dailyish reISH Report:

Large black furry roadblock from earlier has been appeased with ear rubs and dinner.

*writes whole chapter, stops mid-sentence*  “Wait, should this be from Edgar’s point of view instead?

Answer: I do not know, but a bitter Probably.  At least it exists though, and moving it won’t entirely feel like dragging my face on pavement if I change it rather than a from nothing re-do. 

Already got myself excited by being able to allude to something from later chapters early on.  It was one of my favorite additions to ISH the first time around because I had experienced it myself and it had thrown me for a complete loop, so it’s exciting to really Get It In There.  I always feel like putting down foreshadowing and the like is like weaving something or I imagine it looking visually like when my parents had the floor heating system put in under their stone bathroom floor. Sneaking little wires in, payoff on top of the immovable layers.     

Persistent fear there is too much mundane bullshit  (can’t you find a supernatural reason to go to the bathroom sink??!?), but trying to worry about it later.  I won’t know there’s too much until there’s Any, so onward we go.

Actual progress!  Gathering plot lint, approaching the hand off to larger plot elements town.  Feels so much more doable than it did literally just two days ago and has a similar excited vibe as rewriting the first chapters of SWAN, so I’m optimistic this one will finally make it into orbit instead of dissolving in the atmosphere.  

Dailyish reISH Report:

Did not get as much done as I was on track to do because I decided to have some socially distanced human contact by yelling at my friend from opposite ends of a long park bench. I hadn’t seen a person I knew For Real since the end of May so that was nice.

BUT, what I did get done was flowing really well and remarkably On Target. An attempt was made not to traumatize Edgar with Chinese food.

One of the really bananas things that’s going on is that changing lots of little things, but chiefly Johnny, has necessitated a different motivation for new character than she had before, or at least a new angle for it. I keep thinking she has to be introduced soon and she doesn’t have any of the issues she had the first version of this because they just really don’t exist like they used to. Her issues have to be refocused.

I worry that Johnny and Edgar are a bit too soft at the start of this, but maybe considering what they’ve been through and what’s coming for them, I can let them.

I’m happy and relieved to hear that!

Posting them is part Self Indulgence and part telling myself I got something accomplished today but also part like begging the forgiveness and patience of people who were waiting for this by saying, “here please look, this is a record that I actually worked on the thing you want today”

I want to get more detailed in a lot of cases about what needs surgery and why but I also don’t want to ruin anything for people who actually listened to me and didn’t read the old one haha so there’s like a limited number of people who would even be able to understand what the fuck I was talking about if I got specific with what needed to be dismantled and then reconstructed from its own body parts anyway