X Marks the Spot

I've finally completed my little body-swap arc.  I think my goal for today is to try and write A Glitch in Time and Unpossible, both of which are fully sketched in, so it shouldn't be too difficult.

At the end of Vows, all the members of a wedding party had been transported to another world.  This meant that I could decide to write a sequel explaining what happened next, or just leave them there because, after all, a lot of Grandpa Anarchy stories end in the middle of quests or fights or in places where you just have to assume that things got resolved in the end.  And I was feeling like I'd already written more than enough on this particular arc, and I didn't really need to explain how it got resolved.

But then, earlier in the month I had decided to write stories beginning with letters that I hadn't used for stories yet.  This is how I came to write Zero Hour, Questionable Judgment, and Your Stupid, Stupid Minds.  I still had Unpossible to write, for the letter U, and I had a file simply titled "X" so that I would remember to come up with a story beginning with that letter.

There aren't a lot of words that begin with the letter X.  I got out a dictionary Thursday night and looked through all the words that began with X, hoping an idea would occur to me.  When I came to X Chromosome, something clicked.  I had Grandpa in the body of a girl.  I had a group of people summoned to another world by a sorceress who was only trying to summon two girls.  I knew this was another Oz-like magical world, and the thing about Oz is that the protagonists are always girls.  Frank Baum's wife was a prominent feminist; he very purposefully made girls the protagonists of his stories.  I'd always wanted to push that idea a step further, and write about a world where girls were sort of pre-ordained to be adventurers and soldiers, and it was considered unusual for boys or men to do anything of the sort.

I finished X Chromosome last night, and revised it a bit this morning.  After the revision, my entire body-swap arc has been completely resolved -- with a twist, of course, but Grandpa Anarchy is back to his old body and so is Nina Ballerina, so I actually do explain how things got fixed.  And I think I wrote a decent enough little story too, even though I still had doubts about whether I've stretched the joke too far.  But mostly, I wanted a story that begins with the letter X.  Once I've finished Unpossible, I'll have a story for every letter of the alphabet.  Heh.