Stuck on the junasso project. What’s next? Keep moving. Keep reading. Reading, particularly, that which will fertilize the soil most favorably for the next one…
This project is also ~3 years old. I want it to stay a novella: quick moving X-men pastiche, where of course the reader knows there’s mutant academy, alien invasions in the background, etc. Casually throwing ridiculous corny details at you, the way the novel Soon I Will Be Invincible does.
This one involves two adults who had a crush on each other in their school years. Leith is a reality manipulator whose powers were not evident in youth. The same is half as true for Nathan, who was always powerful but kept growing after their peers topped out. Leith was bullied for dissenting from the school’s strongly insular pro-mutant culture; Nathan always thought Leith was in the right but was too afraid of social ostracism (again) to speak up. Nathan is kidnapped and tortured – as it happens, by an alternate universe version of Leith – and his powers are out of control when he is rescued. The only person capable of guarding him while he recovers is Leith, who noped out of the adult league a long time ago and is widely distrusted. Always uncomfortable to have someone you bullied in middle school be capable of leveling continents. Leith refuses to help or hinder the league when aliens attack, and spends most of their energies collecting books from other universes and hosting orgies. (Behold what a non-threat I am!) They are called the Wildwife.
(They are assumed by other characters to be nonbinary because they went out of their way to get a hermaphroditic body when their powers came in. I haven’t decided what sex they used to be in their youth. Many of my characters change sex or become double-sexed by choice, but because I as an author am uninterested in writing about gender itself – especially in an American discursive milieu I find poisonous and tiresome – my characters will also rarely touch upon it.)
So: novella. Let’s keep this simple. (Please!) Upon receiving Nathan and the large payment they required for the favor, Leith is confronted with a problem: the throughway that runs through all realities has become blocked several universes away, and their alts – who become increasingly different as you get away from the story’s universe – have been unable to resolve the issue. They’d like Leith to take a look. They can’t leave Nathan to go on a multi-week investigatory jaunt, so they take Nathan…
And do what exactly? How embarrassing: I don’t know much at all. I’m at the tail end of the depression from the last project and can feel myself quietly panic at housework I normally find easy, so I suspect I shouldn’t tackle the question directly yet. Their alt – the one who tortured Nathan in the first place – is responsible for the blockage. The resolution has to intersect with Leith’s core pain – that of standing up for what they believe in, to their ingroup, and being rejected. We also have to address Nathan’s, which is failing to do the same.