Count Herm O. Globin VS The Phlebotomist started as a prompt in the Cauldron discord story-ideas channel, a throwaway idea about a fic set in an Alternate Universe where capes would need to drink blood, focused on the logistics, because I thought it might be a neat thing to read. It led to a conversation about whether it would lead to capes leaning into vampire aesthetics or trying to distance themselves from them, considerations on Dragon, a good amount of blood-related puns, and not much else, and I kept the idea in my back-pocket as something that might be interesting - that kind of Alternate Universe is surprisingly rare in the Worm fandom.
Of course, I knew I couldn't actually write the idea as I had proposed it - the kind of worldbuilding minutia a fic focused on logistics would involve is, frankly, beyond me - and the story slowly evolved into something I believed would be more interesting: the Undersiders stealing a vehicule transporting blood, and Armsmaster finding himself in the need to stop them. Two things, however, made this a arduous endeavour, the first being the complexity of balancing a large cast of character - Armsmaster, the Undersiders, at least one other Protectorate member (and possibly more) -, especially with my short chapters, a difficulty compounded by the fact that I find Lisa and Alec extremely hard to write. Brittany was created to solve this issue: a joke villain, who would enjoy teasing the hero, with a mover power suitable to games of cat-and-mouse. This, however, didn't solve the second issue, which is that such a story would have to, by necessity, involve repeated fight scenes.
I had, at this point in time, never actually written what I would call a fight scene - scenes of one-sided violence, yes, but not
fights. Even as is, the fight with Wendy constitutes my second fight scene, the first being the fight with Dog-Hungry in
Sinews. A story with multiple fight scenes, with the same characters, with the same powers, without things being repetitive? I did not feel confident to write that. I still don't, honestly. I therefore replaced the fight-heist with a mystery aspect, which I will come back to in a moment.
Readers have pointed out that the "Alternative Universe - Capes drink blood" aspect felt more aesthetic than anything, like it wasn't quite integrated and could have been replaced and I have to agree with them. Although it was the initial premise of the fic, the story went through enough changes that it grew, if maybe not
beyond, at the very least
beside it, to the point where the story would have benefited from me taking a step back and either excising it or tying it back in. As is, most of the actual blood-drinking parts of the story were actually tied to Colin's character arc, and that's were I ran into another problem: I bit more than I could chew.
Going back to the mystery for a second, some readers have pointed out that they felt that the flash-fiction format of the story had, in this instance, worked against it, and was perhaps not suited to the writing of mysteries, which I both agree and disagree with.
I don't agree that flash-fiction is unsuited to mysteries. Two of the fics I am most proud of,
Tylwyth Teg and
Sinews, are mysteries, and although they didn't have a lot of twist and turns, I think I did manage to build and maintain a good tension throughout, despite perhaps some stumbling at the ending of
Tylwyth Teg. What I do agree with is that, in this case, the flash-fiction format was not the more suitable to the story, not because of the mystery itself, but because I was juggling the mystery, two different point-of-views and two significant character arcs, which ended up being detrimental to all three.
I didn't establish Wendy enough. This is, frankly, my biggest regret here. Her motivation for the kidnappings weren't clear enough, and as her motivations were supposed to make her a foil to Colin, this ended up detracting from his own arc. I should have built her up as a character more, and introduced her earlier in the story, as an acquaintance of Brittany presented in a semi-helpful manner, making the reveal of her being the Phlebotomist more of a twist, or at least more emotionally impactful. Furthermore, it might have been a good idea to have her kidnapping of
Horace in particular be a revenge on Brittany for her "teasing", even if she would have kidnapped someone anyway, as it would have tied the actual plot into Brittany's arc of "actions have consequences" more.
(To clarify Wendy's motivations - she kidnapped homeless people, but didn't actually drink blood from all of them - although I should have made it way clearer in the text, she released some immediately, because blood tests showed they were sick. The reason she resorted to kidnappings, specifically, instead of using PRT-sponsored programs as Colin does - which also should have been made clearer - is that she's so ashamed that she'd rather kill than let
anyone know, and that she's so convinced of her own monstrosity that she doesn't think it makes a difference on who she is and her own morality.)
That said, there
are a few things I am happy with in this story. The first is that I had a lot of fun with imagery - some of it might have been a bit too on-the-nose, and some of it I think might have gone unnoticed, but the rollercoaster imagery at the start was a lot of fun, as was trying to go for vampire stuff whenever possible. Another thing is that I wanted to use this fic to practice my character voices, and having them come of as noticeably different, and I think, overall, that I succeeded - although you may feel free to correct me if I am mistaken in that. And, finally?
Writing Brittany was
a lot of fun.
Also! to answer your question,
@Ziel, my process is that I outline the entire story beforehand with a half-sentence for each chapter, and write the chapters directly to size. Sometimes, I find myself removing a sentence or two during editing, or rewriting two chapters as one if one of them doesn't make the story progress enough, but I don't write longer/regular-size chapters which I would then cut down.
