Peanut Butter Adventures

Being a fiction writer means being a slave to your imaginary friends. -.-

Today I'll tell a tale about PB Adventures.

It began back in high school as a school project. Jessica, Kristin and I were to make a radio play. We were all nerds, so we thought that an overly cliche fantasy would be right up our alley. We created the charming yet incompetent hero with a sparkling smile, a big, dumb sidekick, a sarcastic smart sidekick, whiny princess, twisty moustached villain, and grunting villainous sidekick. We also named them after food, just for kicks.

After that, we mostly forgot about the story, except for a laugh or two. However, I started to bring a notebook to class exclusively for notes--as a way to look back at what we said throughout our school years. It wasn't long before one of us made a reference to the radio play in the form of a quote. We continued to quote it back and forth for a bit until we went off script and, well, just kept running with it.

This went on for months, and we filled up notebook after notebook with the crazy adventures of Skip and his pals. There was no rhyme or reason to what we wrote. Characters would spontaneously find themselves in swimming pools, crushed by giant sponges, split into two mini-versions of themselves, have their heads fall off at random. It was a serious mess, but we never intended to make anything of it.

Once high school ended, so too did PBA. With no boring classes to sit through, Jessica and I had little reason to write about Skip's adventures. I eventually tried to make a semi-coherent version, with an ending included, but more or less, it was just as patchy and confusing as the notebooks. Sure, I took out the sponges and talking swords, but there was definitely something still missing.

This led to the ongoing quest of "making PBA coherent." For the next ten years, I didn't so much ask, "what" as much as "why." I would fall to sleep with backstories for each character running through my head. I'd write out the politics of the world. I'd put everyone in the future to see if I could make more sense of it in spaceships. I made it into several kid story versions. There was even a weird version where I had a great deal of the conflicts happening in dreams.

But in the end, nothing has lasted in my mind as much as the traditional fantasy (albeit with some extremely untraditional mechanics). And as many times as I've put it away and said, "I'm not writing this anymore!" As many times as I've started other stories, or decided to give up writing all together due to my extreme lack of success in finishing anything, I've never been able to. Especially with PBA. It seems that if this story doesn't get finished, my restless ghost will wander the earth for eternity, having never accomplished this one goal. Or I'll have to get reincarnated and come across it all over again. Or I'll just get a severe beating in writer-hell.

So, guess what? I'm writing it again!! This is version 17! The original notebook transcription + ending was 115k words (around 460 pages). My longest fully original version was 47k words. My shortest was 823. I also wrote a web comic with 403 six-paneled strips. Seriously, this thing needs to be over with, once and for all.

This time around, I've made a promise not to show it to anyone until it's done. I've noticed that showing it to people = the death of any story of mine. Once it's in the hands of another, you start to go over all the imperfections in your mind, and suddenly realize that you really really suck as a writer! At least once the whole thing's written, if you think that, you've gotten the whole thing written, so after you finish having a pity party about how horrible you are, you can go back to it, read through it, and say, "Hey, this isn't half bad. I think I'll edit it." At least that's the idea.

In any case, thus explains today's picture: Jef (the "true" hero of the story), is picking me up by the collar saying, "Hey! I've been fighting villains for ten years, here! Finish the story already so I can finally take a break. Geepers!" Heroes can't swear.