Coming to Patreon in May: A new Troubleshooter vignette!

While my first two fiction posts on Patreon were old, unsold stories dredged up from the depths of my files (one posted virtually unchanged, the other heavily revised), the story I’m working on for next month is essentially all-new. Though it didn’t start out that way. My initial idea was to post the deleted opening scene from the first draft of Only Superhuman, an introduction to Emerald Blair/Green Blaze and Arkady Nazarbayev/Medvyéd that I deleted in the revised, shorter draft because it was too much “walking to the plot,” an infodump that delayed getting into the action. I wanted to update it so that it could work as a canonical account, but I discovered I’d reworked the situation so much in the final draft that practically nothing from the original scene was usable.

But I still wanted to do a vignette set during Emry and Arkady’s stealth approach to Chakra City, one that would let me flesh out more about Arkady’s life and his family, only mentioned fleetingly in the novel. Then I realized that the scene lent itself to analogies with current events, which took the planned story in a very different and much more meaningful direction.

So what started out as an attempt to save work by tweaking a deleted scene turned into the creation of an entirely new short story. Luckily, I know these characters and their world so well that Troubleshooter stories come fairly easily.  I’m polishing the story now, as time permits between other projects, but it should be up early in May for Patreon backers at the $10-up level.