InBrightestDay

Ok! We have four reviews for The Woman in the Statue to reply to before I put the final chapter up on Monday. Since one of those is freaking huge, I’ll do three of them tonight, including the giant one. First up, one by @InvidiaRed. I hope you enjoy the scene in the next chapter. Eparlegna should really be careful about shit-talking Lucifer… I had three lines in this chapter all competing for the title of my favorite badass line, and you mentioned all of them! I legitimately can’t tell which of them is my favorite, I was...extremely happy when I came up with Chloe’s (and it is one of my favorite badass moments for her) but man, both of Luzurial’s are really dear to me, due to their significance. This is a moment I’ve had in my head for so long, and it felt so good to finally write it down. All of your takes are valid interpretations, but I think I came the closest to having 5 in mind when I was writing it. A sort of “I’ve always been proud of you.” moment. It was a pretty emotional thing to write. Thank you for the review!

Alright, going to be replying to a few things tonight, so let’s start here! While it does take place on Christmas, I wasn’t sure if I should put Meaningful Gifts into the anthology, since I know everyone kind of reads everyone’s stuff, and I didn’t want to force anyone to read a sibling incest story if they didn’t want to. You’ve been at this a while, so I interpreted your entry here as an indicator that either people here aren’t that bothered by that sort of thing, or that I shouldn’t worry so much about what I enter into the party. Either way, thank you! Not quoting the other line, but I have to say that the phrase “wild gorilla sex” is hilarious. I understand, and hope I didn’t come across as overly critical. I know how it feels to have something fall through or just not be ready in time (it’s why Fury of the Storm will be next Halloween for me!). And vampire! Not sure if I’ll ever get around to that, but it would be cool to do it eventually. For those who don’t know, Alfred Hitchcock once explained the nature of suspense like this: if you have a scene of two people talking in a room, and then a bomb goes off, that’s surprising, but not suspenseful. If you show the audience the bomb under the table, and then have the scene of two people talking, all while the clock ticks toward the eventual explosion, now you have suspense. The same basic idea applies, I think, to the twist here. If the audience doesn’t figure it out, then you have a surprise at the end. If they do figure it out, then you get a rather suspenseful sequence, and in this case you know the metaphorical bomb will go off, but you don’t know precisely when.

Ooh! Ooh! I can be useful! You actually can do that. If you go to the archives, and sign in, then go to “My Control Panel” and to “Originals Story Manager”. On the story manager page, it should have “Stories Written” at the top, but then if you scroll down (you have a ton of stories, so it may take a while for you), you should then come to “Stories Co-Written” and finally “Story Contributions”. That last one is where you can edit the chapters you’ve added to anthologies like this one. I’ve used it to edit Moonlit Snow after spotting a typo.

Part Eleven is up! One more week and this thing will be done.

Second is a review by Symbalistic! Thank you so much! Honestly it was quite an effort to finally get the thing done. I knew what I wanted to happen, but as I got closer and closer to the end, I kept getting more and more nervous about disappointing everyone, as the ending is a place where a story can easily faceplant (and I won’t name any stories here, but I’ve seen it happen multiple times). That made it harder for me to just sit down and write, a far cry from how easy and exciting it was when I started the story, but at long last I got it done! As for being able to “see” things, I think that comes from the fact that I’m naturally a very visual person, so when I do descriptions sight is usually the first sense I think about. I’m glad to hear it works for you. Thank you so much for reading this far, and I hope you enjoy the ending!

Alright, so I was holding off on these until I got the final chapter (which then became final chapters) done, but there are two more reviews for WitS Chapter 10! First up is @Thundercloud! That really is why I kept pulling these things apart. There were a lot of elements set up earlier in the story, and they all had to be paid off. Also, in general, I just want to say dang it, Thundercloud! You come up with all these cool suggestions, and by the time I read them I was too deep into writing the finale to use them! I know this obviously isn’t your fault but curse you! CURSE YOOOU!!! *Ahem* Of course, there is one thing I can address… Oh, the matter prism is definitely coming into play, just not the way it looked like it was. I’ll let you find out about that in Chapter 11… I’m really glad that went over as well as it did. I was, as you might have noticed in the Author’s Note, rather worried about that. It helps that by way of Pandemic Head, JayDee actually provided even more reasons for him to get pushed through a window. I think this might also offer some long-delayed justice for the ending of Mike Rapes a Dyke, as there you mentioned… Well, Lily didn’t get revenge personally, but as JayDee said of Mike at the end of MRaD: “Eventually his luck ran out, but that’s another story.” Turns out that’s the story of the day he antagonized the wrong rape survivor.

To jump in a bit here for @Thundercloud, Tricked references about five other stories. The most obvious part is that it follows up on Death Always Wins, but there’s also Invidia’s holiday story from last year, Powdered Sugar (where Duncan was introduced), Temporary (where he went to Italy to reap souls from those killed by the pandemic), The Woman in the Statue (Van Dijk is mentioned, though this is obviously an alternate continuity, given that angels aren’t crazed zealots on the verge of extinction there, and that I have a scene with Lucifer coming up and he’s...rather different than he is here), and since Duncan has been asked by some of the kami (guardian spirits from Japan) to track down an errant spider yōkai, one Yua Hayashi, that would be a reference to either After Party, Parlor Games or both. Hel’s mother, “Ma”, is a reference to Angrboða, a jötunn from Norse mythology. After...uh...mating with Loki, the Prose Edda states that she gave birth to three monsters: Fenrir (hence all the wolves), the Midgard Serpent and Hel.

JAAAYDEEEEE!!! *sigh* You know I’m going to have to try and work that into the PRD story, right? Abdul will probably start the joke about stockings full of- Cole: “Don’t do it, man! Just don’t do it.” And for the second review, from @InvidiaRed Thank you! So this is what I was talking about in my reply to JayDee’s review. Something I’ve noticed about Eparlegna’s dialogue is that it’s a mix of more archaic, almost formal speech, like what one would expect out of an angel or demon, and modern vernacular. The pattern was established by one of his first lines in Whore of Heaven, actually, when Luzurial orders him to leave Earth. It established that, for all that he views humanity as inferior and will torture and kill them just to amuse himself, Eparlegna nonetheless likes elements of our culture and uses them to spice up his vocabulary. It made perfect sense to me that he’d quote a good Darth Vader line. Of course, as you said, the fact that he’s doing that doesn’t actually reflect terribly well on him. You know, for all that it directly provokes him into killing her, I can’t help but feel that a not-insignificant part of why he kills her is that Cassie just struck a nerve, similar to Kevin’s Sick BurnTM in the lecture hall. And yeah, finally having someone outright say “You’re going to lose” is always kind of awesome. Thank you so much! As I mentioned in the author’s note, I was concerned that, while I found “archangel pushes serial rapist out of a building” to be amusing, it might feel a bit...off. I tried to compensate for that by trying to show Luzurial’s thought process leading up to it, and how disgusted and utterly incensed she is by this guy, and just how vile all of his rapes and abuse are, even when measured against the horror outside. JayDee actually really helped here by writing Pandemic Head. Having Michael still doing horrific things, like keeping his cousin’s severed head alive and prisoner indicates that he’s still a threat, and that it’s likely that his “at least one rape a year” pattern has likely slowed with old age, but probably hasn’t stopped. Much like JayDee’s reaction, it seems. Evidently what she does here is coming across as some level of righteous fury, an evil man coming up against something far more dangerous than he could imagine. Thank you so much for the review, and I’ll see you again soon!

Surely you can’t be serious. Alright, well, two reviews for The Woman in the Statue Chapter 10! First one comes from the always awesome @JayDee! Thank you! What you mentioned there is, in fact, one reason this finale got so much longer. Originally, we’d get to the bottom of the tower where the Gungnir shootout took place, and then we would cut to Luzurial arriving at the top floor. And then I was like “in how many D&D games do you just skip all the way to the top of the bad guy’s tower? No no, that is not how this is done! As such, the heroes working their way up the tower became a story element all its own. Has Karen Van Dijk appeared in any of the stories? I can’t remember. I don’t know if I’d planned how Cassie was going to die all the way back when she first appeared in Chapter 3, but by the time we hit Chapter 4, I knew it was going to be that her doubts just pushed Eparlegna a little too far. In anticipation of that, I kept bringing up that she’s the one with the most misgivings. Not that she has moral objections to what they’re doing, just that she doesn’t trust that Eparlegna is as in control as he thinks he is. In that sense, she’s both right and wrong. He is underestimating the heroes, but he also does have a plan. I’ll get into this in InvidiaRed’s review response, but the Darth Vader line is definitely a result of trying to keep him in line with your portrayal. When I was coming up with traps, I had the idea for the fractal impalement trap, which was the sort of visceral horror, but I wanted something else too, something a little more magical and out there, and the matter prism seemed like a good idea. Leary catching the use of the wrong term for Chloe was part of my drive to give every character something cool to do. Unfortunately I ended up cutting Cole’s moment, as it was tied to a plot point that I realized was redundant, but hopefully I can give him one in a future story. I had way more fun with that little scene than I thought I was going to. I had planned for it to be a simple shootout, but then I realized they would need cover as they entered the room, and realized that even in her weakened strength, Luzurial can just rip the door out of the wall. Abdul’s “There’s something you don’t see every day.” definitely made me chuckle a little. I’m glad you liked the line I gave Eparlegna. It can be a challenge to write his dialogue, so it’s always a relief when I hear that I got it right. Kevin’s line is just me realizing that he has to say something after watching a woman burn alive from the inside out, and in this case he may be so stunned that he doesn’t consider whether or not it would be wise to say anything, and just vocalizes the first thing to come to his mind, which is something vaguely snarky. Oh, that needle’s coming back next chapter, believe you me. I appreciate the support for Luzurial’s actions there. As I said, I threw the idea out there because I found it funny, I remember you liked it, and then I got worried about whether or not it was a good idea in the first place. Thank you again! Thank you for that as well! The theology of WitS has always been sort of based on The Last Battle. Essentially, you don’t have to be religious to do good things, and it’s how you live your life and how you affect other people that matters. I don’t know that MRaD has the worst title of any of your...stories...well, ok, I can’t come up with a challenger at the moment, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one! The stuff Cadence did is probably why Luzurial left her there under the bed. She’ll be fine, as fine as a head in a box can be, anyway, and after all the stuff she’s done or tried to do, making her wait longer is perhaps a light sentence. Heh. That is indeed true concerning her superiors. The “slight delay” idea is one that also made me grin, just thinking that she would know exactly how long it would take, and encouraging him, like “You’ve got less than ten seconds to live. Maaaybe think about some of the stuff you’ve done. Regretting any of that yet?” Thank you for the review, and I’ll see you again...ok, fair warning, the final chapter may come out Tuesday instead of Monday. At any rate, see you later!

I’m aware that I have received two absolutely wonderful reviews for the latest chapter of WitS, and have yet to respond to them. I am currently working on the final chapter, which is why I haven’t responded. I promise that within the next day or two I will respond to both JayDee and InvidiaRed. Many thanks to both of you!

Part Ten is up!

I...might have one ready by the end of the month, but given WitS, I seriously doubt it. I will, however, review all of your submissions!

So, now for my reply! Revealing my own literary ignorance, I’ve never actually read Of Mice and Men. I do really need to get around to that at some point. My personal recommendation would be for After Party to come first. I think the tension in the first part of After Party at least partly comes from not knowing who or what Yua is, and the spoiler might lessen that early fear. Parlor Games, I think, works perfectly after being spoiled, just in a different way. Knowing who Cody and Yua are, in my opinion, makes for a kind of anticipation when the brothers show up at the house, with the audience knowing fully just how screwed these people are, and it might even make some lines (Yua’s “I wasn’t expecting to have a meal delivered”) considerably funnier. That was all @JayDee. I mentioned I felt kind of bad for Todd after Yua sent him running, and JayDee came up with this epilogue showing how Cody helps him get to safety. Completely agreed on Auntie Pearl, who’s a wonderfully colorful character. They’ve probably done some stuff on the couch before, so it would have been possible for Chad and Ricky to look in the window and find them making out or engaged in foreplay (I figure they’d probably move to the bed, or Yua would haul him up into the web, before things went too far). As for teaming up with JayDee to do something erotic, I did have an idea recently. Not sure if I should do it, but it would be set after WitS (I know; I’ll be working on that tonight ), as well as its immediate sequel New Year’s Visitation, and it would involve revisiting an old joke JayDee and I shared one time, only maybe a little bit more serious this time around… At any rate, thank you so much for the review!

The problem is that none of my other characters can really do this prompt. Lady Aldreda and her squire Elis exist in a medieval fantasy setting, and The Woman in the Statue is set in 2082, so that’s not really an option either. I suppose I could do a Cindy and Ryan semi-romantic smut story where Ryan helps Cindy relax after a very stressful day at the hospital, but you know, that might gross some people out, given their relationship. Edit: What I meant by that was that Cindy is Ryan’s big sister. They’re that...special kind of brother and sister.

Well, alrighty then! Japanese is an interesting language, specifically in its written form. Different characters (kanji) can be pronounced the same, due to the limited number of sounds the human vocal apparatus can make, but mean very different things. The word “jorōgumo” is thus written in two different ways. The first way, 女郎蜘蛛, translates as “whore spider”. Given that they are succubus-like spider monsters, it’s accurate enough, but a bit on the nose if you ask me. The second way, 絡新婦, translates as something like “binding bride.” In fact, the second way of writing it is actually where I got the name for the character. Yua is a Japanese feminine name that comes from 結 (yu) meaning “to tie/bind” and 愛 (a) meaning “love/affection”. Her last name, Hayashi, is written as 林 and means “forest”. I’ve thought about it, but have yet to employ the fire-breathing spiders in any of the stories; maybe later in something with more action. Basically, all of those spiders that congregate in her vicinity, drawn to her natural magic? Those aren’t just for show; she can control them, and in The Spider House I have a particularly nasty scene where she uses them Willard style. While it’s true that I did write a lot (though not all) of what happens inside the house from scratch, that was only because that was where JayDee’s excerpt ended. I mentioned this in the author’s note, but JayDee sent me this as a snippet with the K-Team, but they weren’t sure it fit those characters. I suggested that maybe that was because the K-Team usually deals with explicitly magical stuff, so bad people weren’t really up their alley. I then had the thought of using Cody and Yua, re-wrote the snippet to use that and sent it back to JayDee, who really liked it. In the piece they sent me, “teats” was Shannon, and when Ricky does the pizza box thing, it was Kate at the door and Kizzy who told her to bring their visitors in. After that, Kate took Ricky and Chad down to the basement (where she would go full wolf and eat them) while Kizzy and (I think) Shannon were going to keep Todd company in the living room and make sure he wasn’t hurt. JayDee’s excerpt also had a bit where Kate was eager to go down to the basement with the two guys, and they figured she had some home invasion fantasies that were way off. It felt like a natural fit for Yua as well, so I was absolutely going to keep that. I had to invent the new stuff with Yua in her true form snagging Chad and hauling him up into the web. However, this is where we come back to JayDee, because... When I did the re-write, it ended on more of a horror note, with Yua looming threateningly over Todd, giving him that creepy smile and saying “Run home, little boy,” and him bolting out into the woods in terror. I confessed, however, that I did feel kind of bad for him, since I wasn’t sure if he could find his way to someone who would help him. JayDee then wrote that entire epilogue, inventing Auntie Pearl in the process, who turned out to be a super fun character who could definitely have her own story.

I did indeed get one. I’m sorry you didn’t; I had hoped that co-authors would get notifications too.

I think the reason @JayDee was talking about Parlor Games is that they co-wrote it, as opposed to Social Distancing, which was all me. Of course, now that that’s happened, JayDee, whose review response thread do you want this to be on?

Or he takes a disliking to her diet. Then again, given his job, he might not object to that. That could be pretty funny. An interesting thought; makes me wonder exactly what the connection is. And now we have a second review, courtesy of @JayDee. Thank you! This sort of emerged from something in After Party, where Cody feels safer as soon as he enters Yua’s area of the forest. I liked the idea that since jorōgumo are nature spirits of a sort, that the animals might be able to sense her innate magic and react to that. The spiders react by converging on the area, and the bear reacts to Yua the same way a coyote would react to the bear, backing down from a more dangerous predator. Brushing the leaf out of Cody’s hair was actually a late addition. I realized that while we’d seen Yua in her true form in Parlor Games, we’d never really seen her interact with Cody in that form, so I wanted to do a little of the affectionate stuff she does in her human or in-between forms here in her giant spider form. I think it’s kind of messing Cody up for a few reasons. Part of it is that it’s recently become emblematic of her being, in his mind, overprotective, but the other part is that Yua refers to Cody as her pet human as part of the roleplay they engage in during their bondage games. There’s an emotional association there, to being powerless in an arousing way, and it’s kind of messing with his head to have this getting tied to being powerless in a frustrating way. Still, he doesn’t mean to hurt Yua any more than she means to hurt him. *Listens* You know, you probably could play that pretty well on the shamisen… The two instruments I mentioned Yua being highly skilled with are generally associated with this particular type of yōkai. The biwa is what jorōgumo are described as playing in the stories I could find, but for whatever reason, they’re frequently depicted in art with a shamisen. I went with the shamisen here first because the biwa will be featured in The Spider House, and second as a reference to Kubo and the Two Strings. For those who haven’t seen the movie, the main character, Kubo, plays a shamisen (it’s how he works his magic), and the end credits feature a cover of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” that features shamisen as well as some other Japanese instruments. As I said in the author’s note, I don’t know if this is canonical, but I did nonetheless want it to be canon compliant, so I wrote it taking into account the conversation Yua and Cody had at the end of After Party, so she still gets jealous, but there isn’t a risk of her eating other women anymore. Well, not as much of one, anyway. So for those who don’t know, while I didn’t do this intentionally, I did realize while coming up with the story of The Spider House that it rather resembled the story of Let the Right One In (or the American remake Let Me In), albeit TSH is a shorter, simpler story. I decided to reference that with the reading scene, and I liked the idea of what Cody is trying to get across to Yua there; how he sees the story. LtROI is both a horror story and a love story, but Cody is focused on the fact that it’s about a boy who falls in love with a monster, and the monster loves him back.

Social Distancing is a story written for @kagome26isawsome’s prompt concerning COVID-19. Basically, she proposed that some of us write stories about how our characters would be dealing with the pandemic. Since Elis and Lady Aldreda live in a medieval fantasy world and The Woman in the Statue is set in the future, that left Yua and Cody. Since jorōgumo like Yua can’t get sick (at least in my version of things; it’s possible yōkai may fall ill in myths I haven’t read), the only one at risk would be her human mate, Cody. Now, at first, I was going to make this a fun/hot story where Yua shows the boy exactly how much fun it can be to be trapped inside the house with a woman who’s got seduction down to an art and has 683 years of experience...but then things changed. I can’t explain exactly why, but it started getting more serious, focusing on what it means to be an immortal in a relationship with a human. And thus we come to our first review from @InvidiaRed! Yeah, the idea was that she isn’t smotheringly possessive all the time, but that the disease has made her even more protective of Cody than she normally is. I do enjoy writing Yua because of the inhuman aspect of the character. Luzurial is inhuman, but only in the technical sense, since her morality is essentially the same as ours. Yua is a giant spider that can look like a beautiful woman when she wants to, and as such her perspective is very different. I swear I wasn’t stealing your dialogue from the future! No, in all seriousness, the characters are different (a jorōgumo and a death god) but they share in that same bittersweet experience of loving someone you know you’ll outlive. That line of dialogue in particular is one I’ll be using in The Spider House, which is to be the formal introduction of Yua and Cody and how they became a couple. It’s what I’ll be working on after I finish the last chapter of WitS. Thank you!

Alright @InvidiaRed, @JayDee and @kagome26isawsome, I’ve finally posted my story! It took way longer than a 2,700 word story should have (sorry about that) but it is up. Social Distancing