Perspective

I'd considered telling this from more than one perspective, one from a heroic Speilglase person who is fleeing the approaching army and retreating toward Glashause, but for a story of 5000ish words, more than one perspective is...difficulty. Short stories are hard enough without mixing in half a dozen different camera angles.

The problem is that the Fate Binder is kind of a jerk. Alright, he's a total jerk. Do I really want the story to be about a guy who defies prophesy and gets burned by it? That's particularly ironic really since the ultimate theme of the novel WAS going to be that prophesy and destiny have a way of petering out, of not being reliable when you want them to be there.

Then again, this would kind of show the capricious nature of Fa's prophesy. After all, this anecdote in history is supposed to be THE poster child about why thwarting prophesy is impossible, but if I were to show that in the story and PROVING just how random Fa can be would be interesting. So instead of making the Fatebinder ignorant of Fa and blown up in a fit of solar rage, what if he deliberately plays a cosmic game of chicken, using his own rules against him and in the end showing him that he only follows those rules in name only?

That still makes him a jerk and a rather unsympathetic character. And yet I need to start writing next week. I think that the story has to be about Fatebinder, but I may give Fatebinder an assistant or a side kick of some kind. Someone with redeeming qualities that can see the good in Fatebinder while being blind to the bad. Of course, in the story, the irony will be how the reader is able to see both.

We'll see if it works.

In the meantime, I've dusted off an old story that I'm nearly done with, and will finish tomorrow or Sunday, that I'll be revising next week as I write this story. The goal is 500 words a day for two weeks, which will produce 5000 words, with then a week of multiple rewrites before submission. We'll see if I can do that.