POT O' GOLD

in #writing7 years ago (edited)


POTOGOLD

You know what they say when you get to the end of a rainbow—a highway. But, if the Irish have their way, we'd all think that there's a pot of gold with a leprechaun at the end of it. So, ladies and gents, allow me to be your leprechaun for this post.


leprechaun
Hat Source, Beard Source, Clover Source

Ironically, this serves as the SILVER LINING for this series. Although in this case, as much as it pains me to say, I would have to argue that gold is equal in amount to silver.

As I mentioned in all of the preambles, this series was inspired by @kalemandra's #ColorChallenge, which is shown through the artwork and photos that headline every part. I was intrigued about it when I saw @dreemit's and @sykochica's posts for the challenge. They included poetry or commentary to accentuate the post, while still giving emphasis to the subject matter. It goes in line with my principle of not shortchanging the reader or milking the rewards pool by giving only minimal effort. Now, I'm not saying that people who just post one photo is doing something wrong. It takes skill to take a great photo, but yeah, you get what I'm saying.

It's funny though, this was a series for the Color Challenge, but I don't recall anyone ever commenting about the art or the photo hahaha! It was always about the story, even though I wanted the story to just complement the art or photo. I just wanted to put it out there, the subject of this series really is the art or photo. I spent about 70% of the time working on the art, as opposed to the story. Yes, seriously.

Just to add to the challenge, I placed a time-restraint factor via @improv's #FreeWrite initiative. If you don't know him, go check out his account. He's an actor and a really funny guy. He has tons of contests up, so go join at least one, if not all. It's usually a 5-minute FreeWrite, but you can adjust it according to your needs. It's fun for one-off short stories, but I found out quickly (eh?) that it's stressful to use in a series. If you're writing a series of posts, you, at least, have to try to aim for coherence. It was quite hard to think about tying parts together while the clock is ticking down. You have to think about the interconnectivity of everything—how the past parts fit and how to move forward with the next one. As you can imagine, five minutes doesn't afford you too much time to think. Flinch for only a couple of seconds, and that's already 0.66% of your writing time.


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I'm a longform writer. I plan until the ending even though I haven't even written a single word. In a way, I play the story out in my head (even going so far as to act the scenes in real life) and then I just document everything by writing them. Sure, there are minor changes here and there, but those aren't game-changing modifications. But this time around, I had no map, no paddle as I went down the river. I had an initial thought when I created the painting for MondayRed, but I wrote a whole different story when I began the countdown. My fingers moved separately from my head, and I just rolled with it.

Even though this whole series was supposed to be just 90 minutes long, everything, including the artworks and rest, took me 8 hours (split into two days) to finish. I wanted this to be a 5-minute FreeWrite series, but it wasn't enough time to plot out an entire series, so I gave myself some leeway during the first part, halved it for the second, then decreased it by two minutes after every part. As the time decreased, the difficulty exponentially increased. @therealpaul was actually the first to notice this decreasing timer, so kudos mate! Suffice to say, I was positively drained by the end of it, but my brain felt like it was on fire. It wasn't the therapy that I expected, but it felt like the one I needed. While it didn't fully rid me of my writer's block, it still nudged it further out than it ever was.


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Writer's block & leprechaun

To top it all off, I felt a bit more experimental after I finished the first artwork. I had a theme I wanted to do (which I'll expound on later), but the thought of injecting elements of affective writing also slipped my mind. As if this initiative wasn't already fully-loaded with concepts, I set out to do just that. I don't know if many of you read comic books, but there's a concept in DC comics about the emotional spectrum, which mainly concerns characters from the Green Lantern line.


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Oh God, no.

I said DC comics you feckin' leprechaun!


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Ahh, much better.

As I was saying, there's this concept of the emotional spectrum, with different lantern corps representing seven different emotions. Rage, avarice, fear, wait, you know what ... I'll just show you a self-explanatory picture.


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Some of you have noticed the different tidbits I add in at the beginning, mostly telling my sentiment about the post. While I have kept mostly mum about it, I can tell you right now that they were all intentional :D I wanted to setup the story even before it began. I want the reader to feel the respective emotion that I want to convey. Whether it be anger or hope or compassion, I wanted to drill it in with the color and the image, and every other factor in the post. I wasn't satisfied with just trying make the reader relate to the situation, I want to immerse you all with the emotion of the day.

Since the whole series is a short read, feel free to revisit the parts to see if the emotions I wanted to convey line up. I only had a few minutes to think about how to incorporate them, so I certainly could've done a better job with it, given more time. Did I succeed with this? Let me know your thoughts about this revelation in the comments section. I would love to hear your thoughts about it.

Now, onto the story itself...

Wow! That introduction stretched longer than I initially thought. I did tell you I was a longform writer, right?

This story is about a dystopic future where homosexuality is illegal. That was the basic premise I thought of before I started writing. It was the only thought I had. No characters, no plot, nothing. Just that basic premise which I built on part by part. I thought about homosexuality because the Color Challenge involved the colors of the rainbow, or what's currently the flag used by the LGBT community. Also, because I've written about gender equality quite recently. Think of this as my ode to equality.

As I began writing, the story unfolded before my eyes. Since this was set in the future, it had long been ingrained that homosexuality is illegal and neural inhibitors have been placed immediately after birth to reprogram their brains and quell the illicit tendencies. I'm a firm believer that sexual preference is biologicial (see Born This Way), so that's where I built the story on. The red pill at the beginning was a means to disable the inhibitor.

The torture scene at the start was meant for mental reconditioning. Hebbian learning, and extreme cases like that seen in A Clockwork Orange are my influences for this method. I wanted to insert something violent, something way out of leftfield to give emphasis to the fanaticism that these people have. They're operating with a skewed sense of morality, and this is just the tip of the iceberg with regard to the lengths they will go to. What's crazy is, you can see shades of this level of ignorance already in our society today. What if people like those take power? What if they were able to spread their hate more effectively? Doesn't that make you feel angry?


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I thought about placing the accused in concentration camps, but that had already been done. It's cruel, downright evil even, but I wanted to use something that breaks people in a different way. Yup, I always said that I'm one lab accident away from becoming a super villain. Imagine living in a world where you're denied every basic human need, but you're forced to see everyone else enjoying life. A world where everyone else is allowed to abuse you legally because you're considered a social pariah. They live in a world where everyone has a hololens technology embedded in their eyes, so they could easily see who someone is just by looking at them, which makes it easy to discriminate instantly. I didn't want to say it out loud in the story, but the main character had it easy when she found a sort of halfway house that took in deviants like her. Others aren't so lucky.

Speaking about the main character, when I was writing the names, I just wrote the two letters without the numbers. I had thought about adding the numbers, because near the end of the first 30 minutes, I thought about @naquoya's story about how his name came to be. He had an interesting thought about names being primary keys, so I borrowed it for this. I wanted to give the effect of them being constrained in a sort of prison society where freedom truly is an illusion. With their names sounding monotonous, I wanted to emphasize the lack of control that people have over their lives. As @naquoya put it, the juxtaposition of the metallic names and their emotions are what I tried to play with. The names aren't even variable, they're not free to choose what to name their children. It's predetermined based on the parentage.

The two letters in their names are the first letters of the names of their parents. I wanted to outrightly say it in the story, but I had run out of time and had completely forgotten to include it in the next parts. They are required by law to pair up, and to produce an offspring. Since XJ was inhibited, she had urges that led her to women, but she ultimately forced herself to comply with the law. I wanted to leave a lot of doors opened in case I ever want to revisit this world for future stories. Every time the two letter combination has been taken, a person is assigned the next number in that sequence. Just goes to show how few the people are in this dystopia.

The numbers are references to significant years in history. August 18 (08-18), 1920 was the day the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, allowing American women the right to vote (or the right to suffrage). 1967 was the year when homosexuality was decriminalized, and 2003 (3002 in reverse) was a big year for same-sex marriage.

In terms of the name of the series, I just wanted to go the Occam's Razor route and go with the simplest one—The Rainbow Series. Much like @dreemit's The Playground Series. I want the focus to be about the colors, the art, the photo, the emotions. This time, the story was an aside—a means to an end, if you will. I wanted to end it on an ambiguous note because that's what the colors of the rainbow result to—white, or, what I think, something that represents an infinite number of possibilities. Will VI choose the red pill so they could live miserably together or will she choose the blue pill and live happily without XJ?

Yes, the red pill-blue pill was directly lifted from The Matrix. That series has been a huge factor in my life. In a way, I think it contributed to my decision to pursue a specialization in artificial intelligence. I wanted to create the Matrix. Nah, just kidding ... or am I?


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And, just like the Matrix, I've peppered this series with a lot of existential and philosophical questions. So, if you feel like you're reading too much into the story, rest assured that you're barely scratching the surface. See how much stress I was in juggling everything given the time? Haha!

Also, just one funny little aside before I wrap this up. The title of the first story was supposed to be "Red Days". I wanted to write a comedy set in a dystopic future. Go on, look at the art again and tell me what you see haha! When the timer started, my mind instantly went to suspense thriller, so the comedy idea went out the window as the 10-minute mark passed. It all worked out in the end though. I didn't achieve what I set out to do, but I steered the story just enough so that it still fit with the art. I wanted to start this post off with "It's that time of the month..." because, coincidentally, a month ago, I went on a 7-day posting binge as well, documenting my trip to Singapore. Will I make this a monthly thing?

In retrospect...

Combining the Color Challenge with FreeWrite (and affective writing) was very challenging. You know when they say that we need to step out of our comfort zone? This was it. It was an uncomfortable ride all throughout, a nightmare for a strategist like me. I went into a battle with zero strategies, but I came out of it as a sharper writer, I think. I hope. I wish. Since, I'm the leprechaun for this post, I'm able to grant that wish. So, hmm abracadabra!

I used Streemian to schedule my posts, based on the best times to post for every day based on Steem Reports. It might work for some, but it definitely didn't work for me haha! I think I had more votes when I just posted whenever I felt like. Maybe my posts just got lost in all of the Color Challenge posts, or whatever. It was an interesting experiment, though one that didn't result in any gain for me.

Also, I tried posting and upvoting using @minnowsupport for the whole series. While I've heard a lot of people raving about it, I really didn't feel a lot of support, from the initiative and the community. Most of my self-votes weigh more than what I received, and my self-votes really aren't worth that much. It was good to try it out though, definitely has a lot of room to improve. I actually delegated a little over 500 SP (which is already a lot to me since it's 20% of my total SP) to try the boost @msp-lovebot provides, but I didn't really feel all that much love. 500 SP isn't a lot for many people, so my contribution might've just been put to the wayside. Contemplating whether I should just cancel my delegation and put it to good use elsewhere.

Admittedly, this is not my best work, and I'm fine with it. Given time to plan and revise, this would definitely improve, but I'm not going to change any part of this story. Based on the votes, I couldn't help but notice it sloped steadily downwards haha! That's okay. I'm looking at it as building momentum for when I shoot upwards :D This was a great learning experience, and if you have some time to spare (five minutes to be exact), I advise you to try it out as well. Not a series, but even just a story.

So, what did you think about the series? Did you enjoy it? Did you think it sucked? Would you do a little jig for it? Did you not even read it and just think that it's a Nice post? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section :D



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Vote for lukestokes.mhth for the betterment of Steemit! ;D

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That was an impressive and imaginative series execution - it's so true that the tighter time limits increase the stress even though they technically save you time! And I admit I'm more sucked in by the stories than by the artwork. As soon as a piece of visual art is associated with a story, it's very hard to try to disassociate the two in my mind.

Thanks for sharing all your thoughts that went into the creative process (and the Steemit-specific process as well). It's a good dose of inspiration.

Oh, wait, did you manage to finish the whole series in one sitting? :O The whole thing was very challenging indeed, and one that I won't repeat in a long while. I always like to share the creative process behind the things I do to provide some sort of transparency. I do hope that it sparks something creatively from people who read it. Thanks for taking the time to read (if you read the whole thing), and for stopping by to share your thoughts :D

I did read it in one sitting, but more quickly than I would have liked! I opened them all in separate tabs and went through haha.

Haha! Yeah, it was a quicker read than my usual offerings. Personally, I enjoy quicker reads more. I have the attention span of a fish, so yeah. I appreciate you reading them all, I hope you enjoyed the series!

Great write-up into the insights into your awesome series. It's something to be very proud of and a great achievement in itself as writing great fictional works can be very tricky at the best of times. But you've excelled every time and I hope you keep on pushing in this platform as you WILL become a huge force to be reckoned with. It's only a matter of time, my bro. :)

Do I keep a word counter of the number of words I have left to write in this platform? I invoke my right against self-incrimination hahaha! But yeah, I am proud of what I finished. It's something I didn't think I would do, and it wasn't planned for very long. I owe a lot of credit to my fingers, as they did 90% of the work. Really though, I was just the "face" but the whole time I just sat back and watch the magic happen.

Thank you, my bro! Words will never be enough to convey how much I appreciate the encouragement you provide. So, I will put it into a song one of these days hahaha! Just kidding... Or, am I? ;)

This is exactly what I needed.

This is excellent work.

This is pure brilliance.

You're a genius!

This is excellent work.

You've done your homework.

You managed to weave a lot of themes into a story that ultimately had so many self imposed restrictions placed on it. And they were all there, yet woven in to it in such a way that they weren't obvious. Only on review do I see them. The Rainbow Theme, the colours of emotions, the artwork. They certainly all added to what you set out to achieve. I'm just surprised you did all that AND found time to actually write the story.

The story is great. It stands on its own merit, but more so given the restrictions. As an exercise in creative writing it served as a boost to your writing capacities, and risk taking, I feel.

This one was definitely something that needs to be read again to fully capture all of the details. It's good that it wasn't too long of a read haha My brain was firing on all cylinders as I wrote it, so yeah it was exhausting.

Thanks for the compliment, mate! I really do appreciate the recognition for it. This definitely proved to be challenging. As to its results, it remains to be seen. I'm still waiting for my brain to fully recharge. But yeah, it has been invigorated, kind of like jumpstarted. Knowing the restrictions does add some flavor, but I'm glad the story was cohesive enough to stand on its own.

I appreciate you going through everything and sharing your thoughts. Coming from an all-time great, the praise was received with open arms. The encouragement was not wasted :D

EDIT: Ooooh and thanks for the randowhale vote by the way! I've already resteemed Blasphemous, I hope it helps it get more exposure.

Great story and writing! So much creativity with attention to detail in every aspect. Thanks for sharing!

Thank you for the kind compliments! I hope you enjoyed reading the series :D I hope you would consider voting on this or any of the chapters if you did find it entertaining.

Now this is just brilliant! Here I was looking for each day's color to show up in that day's episode within the text as words used in the story, and I thought I saw the pattern at first with red and then orange and even yellow appearing in the story, but this is much more sophisticated than that; you actually used the emotions associated with the colors like a chakra system, and I do see how the story generally followed that spectrum of emotions. Very well done, especially with that timer ticking away! Thanks for this thorough 'ending', it answered some of the questions that had popped up along the way this last week. I think that this turned out great.

Ha! I knew someone would go directly look at the colors. That was a sleight of hand, my friend ;) I really do like being tricky when it comes to experiments, but you were definitely the first to spot the decreasing time. Yes, I did use it kind of like a chakra system. That's spot on!

Whatever way I can, I tried to set make the reader angry, or compassionate, or hopeful during their respective days. I'm glad it worked out well. Thank you for sticking with it from start to finish, brother! I appreciate all the kind words you threw my way :D

Ha, fecking deceiver. Leading me around and up the garden path. I would say I am raging but I aint. OBVS!

I liked the art pieces you put in your posts but I didnt want to comment on them too much in case they were throwaway pieces that you were using to support the writing. How chuff from elbow could I possibly more be!

This was a great accmpnaying piece. I think you definitely got some of the emotions. At least in me as the days went through. Perhaps I am not the best subject though as my predominant emotion is often cheery puzzlement ;O)

I see a lot of minnow support stuff on posts in my timeline and its good to get a subjective view on the utility of it all.

Now I demand you keep the leprechaun outfit and make more arty posts! lol

Haha! I really want to say that it was intentional, but sadly it was just a (happy?) coincidence. There must be something wrong with how I approached it. The art really did look like they were there for support. I truly appreciate your enthusiasm throughout the whole week, dude! It was definitely uplifting :D

Yeah, the minnow support, I really don't know how they're supporting people. They almost always end up at the bottom of the vote list.

By the way, did you manage to look at the RED art again? Haha! Did you catch my explanation about my initial intention for it? Haha!

Artsy posts for sure in the future! I had too much fun making them, perhaps I'll just include a hundred word story to accompany them next time. Or maybe just a poem. Or a limmerick. As for the color challenge, I don't think I'll be doing it again, since it didn't seem to add anything. It was a good inspiration for this week though. Also, I won't be doing a freewrite series anytime soon again haha!

Aye, I'm never taking off the leprechaun outfit again! Expect the wee lad to pop up again in the future ahihi!

The fact that you wrote this all under pressure is amazing and you should be proud of yourself. Everything about this from start to finish, the color theme and the art, the emotions you intended to elicit, doing it under a time constraint, and that it was a small serial, seriously impressive. You are a man of integrity, and actually the mistakes in your work only serve to prove that you did exactly as you intended. It's one thing to write a single short story in this manner, but a connecting story like this one most would be hard pressed to come up with anything even close to as well done and cohesive.

I'm sorry it's taken this long to reply. I resteemed it after reading earlier, but everything keeps getting in the way the past few days. For the first time managing my life and steemit is getting a bit difficult, just know that even if I' not on top of it immediately I will always get here.

Aww warms my heart to hear that, sis :') I intentionally left the mistakes in to remind people that this was all done under duress time pressure. I sincerely hope people get it and don't think less of me as a writer who makes careless errors. Heck, I don't even know what errors I made, I didn't bother to give them a second look after the time stopped.

Never mind the delay in the reply, your undying support is what really matters. The resteem is highly appreciated and the comment is accepted with open arms. Remember what I always say: life comes first. For times when it's hard to balance steemit and life, priorities shouldn't even be questioned :D

Oh, and by the way, when you find the time, read the bottom of Chapter 37's comments section haha!

Oh wow there was a "Silver Lining" LoL XD

I would probably have to try to read it again to see the emotional stuff seeing as I was glitching til pretty much indigo so all I had was rage XD Plus we have a stupid plebiscite vote coming up (which is still making me want to punch first and try to sort it out later, fortunately I'm not predominantly a psychopath) so I'm very "triggery" XD

I was wondering that about the names actually but seeing as there was only one child in the entire 7 chapters had nothing to compare to. I did also pick on the decreasing timer at some point as I remember thinking YOU'RE INSANE but you know what you still write pretty well for a time limit that would have made me curl up in a ball somewhere crying XD

In Minnowsupport, I'm delegating to three bots (creative, centerlink and...minnowbooster possibly, I can't actually remember) and lovebot comes to visit regularly as a result. Creative and Centerlink seem to do +/-10-20% votes which last I checked (a while ago) was less than 1sbd. Cliche more there for the community blah blah blah. I pretty much exclusively hang out in the TeamAus chat as we actually talk in there most of the time (and people who try to drop links and run don't get very far XD). Also, we're almost all fecking minnows, even when 80something of us including the bots vote on a post the poor author still only gets like $2, we're doing our best! LoL XD

We have fun conversations though! And I think I told you already there's a TeamPh chat in there :D

There always is ;) Oh please do, when you find the time. This whole series is as long as two chapters of A Day in the Clouds so it's different because they're all a quick read. It'll be waiting for you when you mellow out a bit :)

Regarding the names, yeah, I wanted to say it outright, but the time restriction prevented me from doing so, that's why I elected to just explain it here :D The timer thing, yeah, there was a bit of insanity going on there, but I'm glad it worked out. It could've easily tarnished what little rep I had, but yeah, I thought it was something worth the risk. You curling into a ball crying is a great validation indeed!

I recently canceled my delegation there as I haven't been feeling any benefits. I tried chatting there, but whatever I say gets lost in the conversation. It's like trying to insert yourself in a group that knows each other for a number of years now. It's alright though, I'm used to it. I don't waste my time in groups like that anymore, lesson learned. It's what I told you before about me not being that socially inclined.

That PH chat in there haha I really don't know what to say. I wish them the best of luck, and I'm glad they've built up a solid community for themselves. I'm dropping my country allegiance yet again haha I did try to banner the flag all throughout A Day in the Clouds, but a group splintered, which eventually thrived, and I was left off the list. So c'est la vie. I might pop into the nomads window from time to time though :) As I feel that I once again find myself without a country haha!

Yeh that can be hard. I think if I hadn't been dragged in I'd probably be in the same boat as you. Well if you ever have time to be on Discord you can chat to me if you don't mind having extended conversations that can span days just to cover simple topics XD

You can come be a tourist in TeamAus and chat with us if you like XP

Maybe my attitude just aligns more with other nationalities. I have quite a few Aussie friends, and I feel like I fit it with any other country other than my own haha! It's weird, but it is what it is. I'll take you up on your offer some time :)

I just read them all in one go as well, and like @therovingreader was more sucked into the story. Having read this last sum up, I'm very impressed with all that you put in there, especially given the time limits. I want to go back and read them all again with a wider viewpoint. Well done!

I can never complain about people being sucked into the stories I craft :D If you do go back to re-read them knowing everything, please do let me know what differences you take from it. I can always trust your perceptive eye. Thanks for stopping by, my friend! :D

You are very right in what you say dear friend @jedau. No one I highlight or congratulate works of art, as far as I am concerned, one without knowing or wanting to form a patron of the author, there are authors of all kinds of work, those who make humor, when you write something serious you do not know if you believe it, the Always present works of art, when they make a writing and add it to that work of art, so they do not congratulate the writing congratulates the work of art, in your case the employer is a writer so one will intuitively appreciate reading and Forget the work of art.
I admire the genius and the imagination that you put to your works, as for example the meanings of the numbers. To each reader it turned out differently to me, I am the number of the pool to other models of cars.
I always find pleasure in visiting your blog, there are very interesting things to read.
Thank you very much for the good performance and wonderful works that you present.
I wish you a beautiful day.

Awww! Thank you for the kind words, my friend! It's always great for my efforts to be recognized :') This was a labor of love, for sure. So, any and all praise is welcomed with open arms. I'm so happy that you were able to notice those key point. Thank you for your support of this series from start to finish :D

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