At A Glance
Media Type: Short Story
Platform: Web-based
Released: June 2019
Made for: ENG 366: Fiction Editing @ UW-Whitewater
Created with: Google Docs
Writers: Cass Aleatory (solo project)
Media Type: Short Story
Platform: Web-based
Released: June 2019
Made for: ENG 366: Fiction Editing @ UW-Whitewater
Created with: Google Docs
Writers: Cass Aleatory (solo project)
The Creek's Edge was my first attempt at writing a higher-order short story, one that operates on multiple levels for practically the entire course of the plot. In fact, it was one of the first times I wrote a short story that stayed a short story, instead of trying to become a larger work of fiction or a video game. The end result has to be one of the more potent and ambitious storytelling projects I've undertaken, despite the fact that the story is only 13 pages single-spaced.
As implied previously, working on The Creek's Edge forced me to think about my writing on many different planes of meaning all at the same time, something I'd never been required to do previously. It provided me with a great deal of valuable experience reconciling the sort of conflicts that tend to arise when the plot needs one thing to happen but the symbolic structure demands something different. I feel that I ultimately succeeded in my goal of creating a story that strikes an interesting balance between the actual and the metaphorical, yielding a lot of page space to the main character's thoughts and feelings as a meeting ground for these two planes. This focus on interiority also allowed me to exploit one of the greatest strengths of text stories as a narrative medium: the ability to express what goes through a character's mind in limitless detail.
I wrote the entirity of this story, however, it was inspired by The Agitprop, a short story by Mary Elizabeth Dubois that fell into my hands mostly by good fortune. I repurposed some of my favorite scenes from her work for use in this story. I'm immeasurably grateful to Mary for her story and all the creative inspiration that it provided me.
Since Mary likely has no idea that this project exists, and out of respect for the intellectual property of hers that so profoundly inspired me, I have no intention of publishing this story. Instead, it will join the plethora of freely-accessible yuri bildungsromans already lurking in obscure corners of the internet, hosted here for the benefit of anyone who might stumble upon it.