I vote we drop the bit about the hotel existing on some unspecified quantum crossroads and the soft spots in reality the portals and such. unless yall want to keep it. the quantum plane dark matter and multiverse were fresh enough back in 2010 or 11 the year of that original class project but it's kinda tired now that marvel has spent the last five years literally shitting its pants in the multi and now the quantum is just part of our collective vernacular. like alt timelines are always a possibility just part of the deal now.
plus I didn't want to get narrative tangled up with the urban setting at large or the logistics of monster city the cardboard shanty town on horizon wanted to keep things contained within the hotel but that was purely because I was working with college students who were art majors after all and we didn't have time for the in depth world building that a whole city would entail.
anyway I'm leaning toward keeping it hard boiled pure noir with splashes or smears of horror because I like the word horrornoir and there is def something unnatural about the hotel maybe not obvious from the jump but yeah straight up noir with horror elements and the hotel gradually reveals its deeper more fucked up elements. kind of like a new girlfriend. or boyfriend. the dark shit always rises to surface.
word.
For anyone currently involved with, working on, or having to do with the 9 story Hotel project. We are in the process of migrating the bulk of the work and community surrounding the Hotel to Discord from The Locals, since the Locals is harder to navigate even than Discord, I would suggest you join up. The server is fully populated and set-up for work, talk, and collaboration.
This is the discord invite, it is good for the next seven days, after which I will probably post another one:
Let's see if I'm not as dumb as I think I am. This is the Google doc link for FRACTALS, the Delphine and Balthazar story.
Little iffy on the first section. I think it's good for characterization and to set up some of the relationships, but maybe it could be streamlined or brought into the main narrative. Feels slightly more like the opening of a novel than a story but I'll let others weigh in.
Hope y'all dig it!
EDIT: I was talking with another writer and wanted to clarify something I should've mentioned above. (Trying to avoid spoilers.) The ending of this is purposely ambiguous, in that another writer could pick up with the next story from another character's point of view, Delphine could achieve either of the possible goals (or none of them), or anything in between. And it's kind of subject to change based on what the next story is or what the overall project needs from these characters. TL;DR: If the ending doesn't quite land with the project from a 30k-foot view, no worries, we ...
Newest Althea story, AKA The Room With the Teeth
https://open.substack.com/pub/cjstockton/p/biting-down?r=1ck2p&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
