Bringing you stories, book and game reviews, writing tips, and updates from author S.G. Baker.
As far as you were concerned, burial didn’t count if it didn’t involve dirt. Yet we’d drifted far from land during our fight over who would captain this ship. And I didn’t have anywhere else to put your corpse when I won.
I think I won, anyway.
To this day, I’m still looking for your soul. You lost it during that one game of hide and seek, remember? I don’t know what happened exactly, because you were hiding and I was seeking, and you broke cover before I found you.
But you came from the direction of that old barn where we weren’t supposed to play.
Moonlight glinted off golden panels where you worked on one of the solar arrays of your empty space station. These repairs could’ve waited until you’d reached the sunlit side of the darkened planet below, but I only appeared in moonlit reflections.
And you were lonely.
You got lost a lot. Like a whole lot. Like so, so much, that I had to start leading the way on your walk home.
But then, of course, you came to depend on me.
You just wanted to start over, you said. Everyone who comes to me always does. To escape bad relationships, bad debt, bad choices.
A blank slate.
“Wipe my identity,” you’d told me.
You committed thirteen taboos in a row as if begging for a lifetime of bad luck. The usuals everyone knows about, of course. Mirror. Umbrella. Ladder. Even some superstitions unfamiliar to you. Horseshoe. Scissors. Moonlit water.
Then you just sat. Waiting.
Alright, we've discussed the concept of plotters vs. pantsers enough by now. Haven't we? I just know you, as a writer, have bumped into this question already. Probably you've read the descriptions of each to find which writing style you adhere to most. I bet you're sure which camp you belong to, aren't you?
Yet...maybe you're not so sure. Maybe you find a little of column A and a little of column B appealing? I know I do. There's just something about having some preparation to guide my way, while still leaving room for inspiration and surprise as I go.
I'm not the only one who's felt more kinship with a planning process between plotting and pantsing. In "Plotter, Pantser, Architect, Gardener," EV Emmons posits a third type: landscapers. Her description seems to indicate landscapers land closer to the pantser side of things.
So in addition to landscapers, I wish to suggest one more in-between planning style. One similar to but opposite landscapers, closer to the plotter side of this binary.
Engineers.
Our revel spilled out of a tavern and into the streets like a swelling celebration of your ham-fisted rule. Boisterous screams of laughter ripped through the tense night—calls to arms, drawing more and more partiers to our revelry.
To our secret rebellion.
Because you had gone too far this time.
Your parents had dismissed the old ways by the time I died, so I was surprised to find the hallowed place you’d built for me in one of the stubbly fields.
In the darkening evening, you lit a small pile of twigs, reminiscent of a home hearth. Upon a tiny stone altar, you laid all your supper.
And waited.
When you stepped inside the local cavern, you couldn’t have known you’d walked into my throat. Many came and went from here, no one interesting enough to stir me. But you arrived with a different purpose than they, didn’t you?
