#bavitz

[weaselandfriends]

The Making Of: 1 Over X

I. Final Summer

It was the final summer after I graduated high school. My group of friends and I were at one of our houses, playing video games. There were about ten of us. These are not their real names.

This group had been friends since elementary school, except for me, because I went to a different one. It was a group of nerds. Some were academic achievers, some cinephiles, some tabletop enthusiasts. Some of us were going to Stanford, some community college. One, Dan, wasn't going anywhere.

I had a complicated history with Dan. Unlike the others, I knew him in elementary school; he attended mine for third grade before transferring out. During that singular year, he was my nightmare. I was a weird child. Basically nobody liked me, even the kids I hung out with, even their parents. (Especially their parents, in some cases.) But most of the kids I hung out with were straight-A students with parental expectations, so their abuse lacked real cruelty. Dan, not a straight-A student, was different. He was savage. This was a long time ago, so I don't remember exactly what he did to me in third grade, but I do remember wishing he would die.

When he transferred out it was my salvation, and I returned to a more typical level of social ostracization for the rest of elementary school. When I went to junior high, Dan and I were in the same school again, but by then he had his own group of friends and was content to ignore me.

My whole problem was that I liked to make myself impossible to ignore. I was not quiet or introverted. I was not someone who vanished into a corner. I was loud and obnoxious and incapable of taking a hint. I liked to follow people around, even if they didn't like me. I wasn't aware they didn't like me. I thought I was part of their group. I ignored their abuse for weeks, months, even years. Then, at some point, something would break, I would get fed up and realize I was despised, go hang out with a new group, and the cycle would repeat.

Junior high was bigger than elementary school, with a lot of new people who didn't know me and thus didn't hate me yet, so it was the perfect time to find a new group. In PE I talked to this guy Nate, who seemed chill enough, so one day at lunch I sat down uninvited at Nate's group's table. This group happened to be the one Dan was in.

That first day, they all ignored me. They didn't acknowledge my presence at all, even Nate and Dan. I was just there. This was a great improvement for me, so I kept coming back.

Eventually, of course, they had to acknowledge me. And, acknowledging me, they didn't like me. Particularly Dan. I tried to ingratiate myself, in my typical wrongheaded fashion. In computer class, where I gained access to the school's yearbook photos, I photoshopped Dan's head to a picture of his pet Chihuahua, put the chimera in outer space, and gave the picture the Word Art caption SUPERDOGGY. The computer class teacher, looking over my shoulder, said, "Are you sure your friend will like this?" I said, blithely, "Oh of course. We're cool like that."

Dan was not cool like that. When I printed out the picture and showed him at lunch, he attacked me with a pencil. Physically overpowering me, he jabbed the pencil into my back as though it were a gun, forced me into the computer lab, and made me delete the file. This heralded a period of physical abuse where he would chase me around school. I was a fast runner, so this often felt like fun parkour to me, jumping up and down flights of stairs. Once, after we went to a friend's house and I beat Dan at Smash Bros. (and gloated prodigiously about it), he waited until we left to go home to jump me and try to throw me into the canal. I managed to squirm out of his grasp and run away.

Eventually, as the years went on, things changed. Rather than becoming more aggressive, Dan mellowed out. The group went from hating me to accepting my presence. Dan and I found mutual interests. We would spend hours discussing what would happen to our group in the event of a zombie outbreak, or if we all got put on an island and were forced to kill each other. He told me about weird webcomics, like Dr. McNinja and Thinkin' Lincoln. We made a shitty Halo 3 machinima. He took me to his house and let me play this new game, Persona 4, and I saw the secret twist villain (who I didn't know was the villain) and said "That guy's the killer I bet," which made him mad but in a fun way, not a way that led to him hitting me.

We had, in fact, become cool like that.

Then, about two weeks before we graduated high school, he stopped showing up to school. He didn't show up to graduation. He was never a good student, so we figured he just stopped caring, the way seniors stop caring during their last semester. None of us were worried. He still showed up when we got together to play video games at someone's house. He was there that day, during the final summer, with the other nine of us. He was quiet. He was very quiet.

Near the end of the day, he said he wanted to tell us something, something serious. He had us all go outside, into the yard. We sat in a circle. He explained, solemnly, that his dad kicked him out of the house.

None of us knew his dad, with whom he lived alone. We never went to Dan's house, not as a group. Only, sometimes, would he allow one of us to go there with him, and only right after school, while his dad was still at work. He didn't like to talk about his dad. Once, while we were playing Persona 4, Dan pointed to a painting of a mist-shrouded landscape above the TV and said his dad smuggled it out of North Korea. That was all I knew. Whenever his dad showed up, a silent and stern figure in the hallway, Dan quickly said it was time to leave.

The inciting incident, Dan told us, was that he failed a driving test, which meant he wouldn't be able to get a job. So his dad kicked him out. Didn't even let him take any of his things, including his clothes.

This was a dramatic revelation for a group of suburban kids insulated from any true drama. I didn't know what to say. Out of the aggregate, though, a consensus emerged: Dan would obviously be allowed to stay at our houses until he figured something out. Also, we would break into his house and steal his stuff for him.

We loaded up into a pair of cars and drove to his house, which was on the corner of a major road. His dad was at work. One of us stood outside as lookout while Dan led the rest to the backyard, climbed in through an open window, and unlocked the back door. Equipped with trash bags we collected his clothes, video games, worldly possessions. In broad daylight, we walked out the front door and loaded all his stuff into the trunk.

I was terrified. I was certain the police were going to get us. For weeks afterward I was certain they would.

Possibly because I was terrified, I volunteered to let Dan stay at my house first, even though my house was small and he'd have to sleep on the floor. He spent the next few days there. He was very quiet, very withdrawn, which made sense, given what happened. He told me he was talking to his mother and older sister, who lived a few hours away, to figure something out. The next day I took him to see Toy Story 3, and afterward we stood in the parking lot around my car for an hour, saying nothing.

Another day, he wanted to see his friend from the Korean school he went to on weekends, a guy named Ken. I hadn't met Ken. None of us had. Dan had mentioned him a few times, always in conjunction with Korean school. I said sure, I'd drop him off. He told me not to take him to Ken's house, but to leave him at the middle school we used to go to. I did, and he spent all day away, and at night I picked him up from the school, still without seeing Ken.

After about a week, and apparently no answer from Dan's mother or sister, another member of the group let Dan stay at his place. So I dropped Dan off there with all his stuff.

For the rest of the summer, Dan bounced from house to house. Eventually, a member of the group named Ron suggested Dan stay in a house that had belonged to his grandmother before she recently died. His family was holding onto the place to sell it, but in the meantime it wasn't being used. So Dan moved in.

This was when he started sending us messages.

He saw a dead bee, he said, on the sidewalk. He touched it with his finger and it revived, flying away. There was a helicopter hovering outside his window at night, shining a light on him. Ron's grandmother wasn't really dead. She set up cameras throughout her house, recording everything he did.

We didn't know what to make of it. Dan always told a lot of jokes, invented stories like the elaborate zombie or battle royale scenarios. I started to get nervous that something was going to happen, something bad, but I didn't know what.

One day we were all at someone's house, playing video games. Ron had picked up Dan and brought him along, though Dan spent the day in another room, apparently on his laptop, refusing to talk to anyone. At the end of the day, Dan came out of the room.

"I'm going to kill myself."

This caused a stir even more dramatic than when he told us he'd been kicked out. Everyone once again loaded up into their cars and drove to Dan's temporary house, where we would be on suicide watch. All knives, razors, and drain cleaners were rounded up and hidden. The whole group would be there all night for him, making sure nothing happened.

Dan immediately went to his room and fell asleep. Everyone else stayed up, playing the newly-released StarCraft II or the less newly-released Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge on their laptops. With Dan asleep, though, I decided the all-nighter wasn't exactly necessary, and went home to sleep.

This turned out to be a good decision, because when my cell phone woke me at 6 AM the next day, I was informed by my friends that they all stayed up the entire night, they were all dead tired, and they needed someone to come watch Dan while they got some sleep. I showed up to the house, where to keep themselves awake they blasted meme videos at full volume (MENERGY!!!). As they shuffled out the door and into their cars one after another, they told me, "Don't let him look under the sink. That's where the knives are."

Dan woke up.

It was only me and him, in the dead grandmother house. The house was nearly barren. It had a bed in the bedroom, and a small television with a couch in the living room, and in the hall hung—instead of family photographs, or paintings, or an encouraging motto—a giant Rand McNally map of the world, the kind you would find in a classroom, with tiny pictures of every national flag along the bottom. The map wasn't even framed, its corners curled.

In the garage, pinned next to the door, were tiny photographs of topless women on motorcycles. And there were cameras in the walls watching our every move.

"So," I asked Dan, "what do you want to do?"

He said absolutely nothing.

We sat on the couch by the TV, staring forward. Watching the hallway with its giant map that led deeper into the house, where the door to the bedroom hung open in muted sunlight. A fear was building inside me, staring down the hallway, the strange and surreal fear that something awful, the not-dead grandmother maybe, was in that room, that if I got up and walked toward it she would emerge reaching for me, but only once it was too late to turn back.

"I'm the new Jesus Christ," Dan said. "You're all my apostles."

I turned on the TV and we watched an all-day marathon of American Ninja Warrior. We watched for hours, and hours, and hours, and hours.

At some point, the day had to end. Ron returned late in the afternoon with his parents. They let me go, and I went. I never saw Dan again.

The rest I heard secondhand. Ron's parents decided to finally confront Dan's father. At which point they learned that Dan's father had not, in fact, kicked him out of the house, that he had no idea where Dan had gone, that he knew absolutely nothing. Dan had not been talking to his mother or sister, either. His friend from Korean School, Ken, was actually his drug dealer. And when Dan was sent to the hospital, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

That was the end of the final summer. I went to college in a different city, and drifted away from that group, the way you do when you leave high school. Dan, apparently in an asylum of some kind (though I don't think they call them asylums anymore), still sent messages, messages about how he distrusted the pills they were giving him, about how he was being spied on, about how everyone was out to get him. Sometimes the messages were threatening. I'll pay you back for everything you've done to me... The same anxiety I felt that summer would flare up again, I'd imagine him tracking me down at my college and killing me. But gradually the messages slowed, then stopped altogether. Dan started taking his pills. He left the asylum.

The last I heard, he'd joined the army.

II. Modern Cannibals

I didn't know it at the time, but 2017 was the start of a lot of bad things I would inflict upon myself over the next few years. All of those things had the same root cause: Modern Cannibals.

Specifically, the fact that nobody read Modern Cannibals.

Fargo, a story I didn't plan, a story I just sort of sat down and wrote, was an unexpected success. Not only were its numbers unfathomable compared to everything I'd previously written, but the feedback was uniformly positive, often glowingly so. Many comments described it as the best fan fiction ever written, a story that changed the commenter's life. My confidence as a writer soared. All I could think was, If they liked Fargo, wait until they see what I do when I actually try.

I had been working on Modern Cannibals since 2012. For 5 years, I constantly iterated on the story and characters and constantly rewrote the first few chapters. Before Fargo I'd written a draft of Modern Cannibals 60,000 words long, which I scrapped entirely, thinking I could do it better. What I wrote in 2017, I knew was better. It was brilliant, I believed. And because I believed it was brilliant, I was certain it would be a success that blew Fargo out of the water. It's impossible for me to overstate my expectations. I believed, with full sincerity, that Modern Cannibals would not only be a massive hit on the internet, but would break out of the internet. The traditional publishing sphere would be forced to take notice; I foresaw articles in respected publications asking, "Who is Bavitz?" I unironically expected Modern Cannibals to win the Pulitzer Prize.

My thinking probably seems delusional. I had excess faith not just in myself but also in the vaunted Homestuck fandom, which I thought would be an excellent springboard to wider success. (After all, look at Toby Fox and Tamsyn Muir.) Sure, by 2017 Homestuck was a bit past its expiration date, but in 2015—when I started Fargo—Madoka Magica had been, too. Meanwhile, this was the HOMESTUCK fandom we were talking about, nigh legendary for its size and rabidity. If Modern Cannibals was a little avant garde, so what? Homestuck was too, a fact its fans were proud of.

My excitement was uncontainable. As I started posting Modern Cannibals, barely a month after I finished writing it, I felt compelled to start my next story. It is the most compelled I have ever felt to write.

The story was called Useless. It was about Miranda Vanadzorian, a college student who lost her arm and both eyes in an accident. The conceit was simple; Miranda is being stalked by a serial killer, who targets anyone who gets close to her, maliciously isolating her. I got the idea in 2015, the same time I got the ideas for Fargo and Cockatiel x Chameleon, a period of intense personal misery and copious amounts of anime. (For more on this period, read The Making Of: Fargo.) While Fargo was inspired by Madoka Magica, Useless came from a much trashier origin: Mirai Nikki.

It was the trashiness itself that inspired me. My history with horror began, like most children of my cohort, with that dolled-up creature feature, Jurassic Park. During my teen years, my love of the genre developed thanks to SciFi Channel original movies, 80s slashers, and the grotesque torture porn popular at the time. To me, horror needed to be trashy. That was the point, that was what made it work as horror instead of simple tragedy. There had to be something revolting, something that churned your stomach, something that made you not want to watch, something that felt dirty and dingy and rotted. Though not a horror story itself, Mirai Nikki has the tone of one, mixing over-the-top violence with transgressive sexuality. Sexuality works a lot better with horror than you'd think, and it's because of that transgressive aspect, the sense that you're watching something you shouldn't be. It puts you on edge, makes you uncomfortable, but also fascinated, drawn to watch more. That contradictory feeling of "I can't look" and "I have to see what happens next"—that's horror.

Unfortunately, Useless was doomed by the ticking time bomb that was the inevitable non-response to Modern Cannibals. When it became increasingly clear that no, I would not be winning the Pulitzer, no, this wouldn't be a bigger hit than Fargo, and in fact no, it would not even muster a fraction of Fargo's interest, the confidence high that propelled me through the past year finally ended. My ego was mortified. Useless, at 10,000 words, could no longer be sustained by my sense that anything I wrote was automatic gold. I scrapped it entirely.

No, as I stared at the ruins of Modern Cannibals and its pathetic less-than-one-review-per-chapter on fanfiction.net, I had no choice but to interrogate my entire artistic project. I asked myself the question that would come to dominate my creative vision for the next seven years, the question that would be the true originator of Chicago, Cleveland Quixotic, When I Win the World Ends, and even—though it may seem ridiculous now, given the final product—1 Over X. That question was:

III. How Do I Recreate Fargo?

Fargo was successful. Modern Cannibals was not. This despite my belief that Modern Cannibals was the better work. Necessarily, this must mean a work's quality was not the sole determiner of its success. This conclusion alone was earth-shaking; though I knew there was plenty of mainstream dreck, I earnestly assumed cream would float to the top. Modern Cannibals forced me to reckon with the fact this was not true.

(The alternative would be to say Modern Cannibals was bad. I refused that even more. When faced with the question of whether the world was wrong or I was wrong, I knew the answer.)

Okay. So what made Fargo succeed and Modern Cannibals fail?

The first attempt at answering that question—which I would attempt again and again over the years, getting it wrong each time—led to two conclusions. The first was obvious: Genre. Fargo is an (urban) fantasy story, with an emphasis on action and adventure. It slots neatly into a genre popular enough to have its own shelf at the bookstore. Modern Cannibals is more uncategorizable.

My second conclusion was more esoteric, rooted in what I personally felt was the biggest difference between Fargo and Modern Cannibals. I assiduously planned, drafted, and redrafted Modern Cannibals over a period of years. Fargo, on the other hand, popped into my head one day and I banged it out with almost no forethought or revision. While I previously considered this difference to the advantage of Modern Cannibals, its failure made me reconsider. Maybe there was something electric about how organically Fargo arose, a spontaneous sense of discovery that came as a natural byproduct of me, the author, discovering the plot and characters at the same time I wrote them. Perhaps that electricity transferred to the readers, drew them into the work the way Modern Cannibals' designed precision did not.

Perfect! The solution was simple, then. To recreate Fargo, I'd write another urban fantasy story—a dark one, spruced by a horror twinge, exactly like Fargo and its wraiths—with minimal preplanning, allowing myself to organically develop the plot and characters.

So what would my new urban fantasy serial be?

IV. 1 Over X, Drafts 1 and 2 (2017)

1 Over X began life in 2017 as an urban fantasy story.

It's remarkable how, despite its original conception being radically different from what it ultimately became, so many of its core elements appear intact in the initial draft. The main character was Enid Lim, a serious girl obsessed with class ranks, logical in tone. I wanted her to be the exact opposite of Z. Coulter from Modern Cannibals, whose manic voice possibly made the prose difficult to parse. While the name Z. evoked zaniness and abnormality, Enid Lim's name was intended to be generic, old-fashioned, the name of a bore. Enid is a classic grandmother name (and the ninth largest city in Oklahoma), while Lim sounds like Limp or Lame. I invented the name on the spur of the moment, because this story was supposed to be electric.

Enid Lim attended All Saints Academy, a private school in Newport, Rhode Island. The school's name popped into my head immediately (All Saints is the second largest city in Antigua and Barbuda) as a riff on Heavenly Host Elementary, the school in Corpse Party, a horror anime I'd seen recently. I chose Rhode Island as the setting because New England is the traditional horror capital of American fiction, and Maine and Massachusetts had already been done. Choosing Newport, meanwhile, had nothing to do with The Breakers, which at the time I did not know existed; I wanted the story to be set on the actual island of Rhode Island—called Aquidneck, not Rhode—because I had an idea of the island eventually being magically sequestered Umineko-style, preventing escape.

Even some of the supporting cast appeared in the original draft—at least in name. Among Lim's classmates there was a Cherry Corbett, a Weaver, and a "Wintermint." Their personalities were different: Corbett was Class Rank 1 with an airy, detached demeanor, while Wintermint—still Lim's academic rival—was more socially aware and less affected. They still enacted the calculus test score comparison scene, though not as a riff on American Psycho. It was just the sort of thing I used to do in high school too. (I was also obsessed with class ranks.)

Most notably, the draft had the title I would keep throughout the story's long development: 1 Over X. Though its meaning was much different back then.

Despite these similarities, the story was otherwise much different. It begins with Lim waking up in the dorm room of a mysterious new transfer student, Shinozaki, unsure how she got there. Shinozaki (named after the ghost in Corpse Party) claims Lim fainted; Lim is suspicious, but lacks proof to the contrary. Lim returns home (All Saints Academy is a boarding and day school) and gets berated by her Tiger Parent single mother, who has become increasingly controlling after Lim's older brother Eugene attempted to cut off Lim's face and got sent to an asylum.

That night, Lim goes to sleep and has a vivid, lucid dream. In the dream, which takes place at the school, she encounters Shinozaki, who tells Lim the dream is real. She teaches Lim how to summon a weapon, after which they team up and fight a dog monster prowling around the school. When the monster hurts Lim, Shinozaki assures her any wounds will be healed when she wakes up. However, if she dies in the dream, she dies in real life. Shinozaki warns Lim that soon a dangerous entity called the Dummy Man will arrive at the school; they'll need to work together to defeat him.

The conceit is traditionally urban fantasy in the sense that it takes place in a realistic modern setting with a secret underbelly of monsters the hero fights at night. It draws, obviously, on the magical girl genre, which makes sense given my goal was to recreate Fargo, but also takes elements from a horror anime I had watched recently that totally rocked my world: Blood-C.

My goal was to give the urban fantasy premise a horror tone. Other than the monster fights, the Dummy Man is a creepy guy walking around with a ventriloquist dummy; the dummy is the sentient one and the man just a puppet.

The central twist revolved around how Lim acquired her magical powers. To describe it as simply as possible, powers spread via It Follows rules.

It Follows is a horror film in which a woman, after having sex during a date, starts being pursued by a shapeshifting monster that constantly walks toward her. The only way to stop being chased is to have sex with someone else, at which point the monster will chase that person instead. It's one of the early examples of the metaphorical horror craze that would sweep the decade.

In 1 Over X's original draft, powers were spread via sex. When Lim woke up at the beginning of the story in Shinozaki's room, it was because Shinozaki had drugged and raped her, thus giving her powers. Spreading powers this way didn't directly copy them; it transferred half of your powers to the person you had sex with. The only way to get power back was to kill the person you spread them to. Shinozaki had slept with the Dummy Man to steal half his powers, and now he was pursuing her to get them back; unable to beat the Dummy Man herself, Shinozaki slept with Lim to give herself an element of surprise.

The title 1 Over X referred to how the whole of magical power, 1, is divided into increasingly small portions—one half, one quarter, and so on.

There it was! Fargo recreated!

I wrote 16,000 words of Draft 1 and got stuck. After the Dummy Man arrived, I didn't know what to do next. In addition to how powers spread, I had one other twist in mind, which was that Cherry Corbett also had powers. But I wasn't sure how to continue the plot, or how to prolong the Dummy Man conflict once it reached its initial confrontation. Without the overwhelming confidence of Modern Cannibals, I second-guessed every decision. I scrapped the draft and immediately began Draft 2.

Draft 2, which ended up at 18,000 words, is basically the same story as Draft 1 with the scenes rearranged so Lim wakes up in the dream world immediately. This was, in fact, a strictly worse way of telling the story, exhibiting a complete lack of patience on my part. Though I tried to make the plot more complicated, first by better foreshadowing Cherry Corbett (she summons giant bugs) and second by adding a scene where the Dummy Man attacks Lim at her house, I quickly grew frustrated.

I still wanted to make it work. I had made the bad decision of going on Twitter and telling my 10 followers my next book would be an urban fantasy story set in Rhode Island, so I felt like I needed to deliver. Clearly, though, there was a problem. I couldn't just wing it like Fargo; going in without a plan caused me to get stuck quickly, and without confidence every snag made me doubt the entire endeavor. After all, was an urban fantasy modeled on It Follows really a good idea?

So I decided to make some changes.

V. 1 Over X, Draft 3 (2017)

Enid Lim was now schizophrenic.

This development had been It Followsing me for some time. Since that final summer before I went to college, the idea of writing a story about schizophrenia bounced, vaguely, in my mind. Maybe a nonfiction account of what happened to Dan, or maybe a dramatized version. In contrast to the typical Hollywood raving lunatic, I wanted to depict schizophrenia with subtlety, where the distorted worldview made sense rather than being self-evidently insane.

The first two drafts of 1 Over X already contained an element of the schizophrenia plotline. Lim's brother was schizophrenic; in the past, believing she was replaced by a doppelganger, he attacked her with a knife. I originally added this backstory without much intention to develop it. It contributed to the horror tone, strained the relationship between Lim and her mother, and explained why the logical and straightlaced Lim never sought help from the authorities (fearing they'd think her insane too). On reflection, I realized this element had much more potential.

The third draft of 1 Over X began with Lim staring at herself in the mirror, experiencing an auditory hallucination of her mother laughing. She knows she's hallucinating, she knows what it means, but she believes that if she sticks to verifiable reality she can control it. She goes to school.

At school, there's still the mysterious transfer student, Shinozaki, whose plotline is mostly the same: she has stolen magic powers and is hiding in the school from people seeking to get them back. The Dummy Man (renamed Murdock) is now accompanied by a partner, Malmaison, who fights with enchanted cigarette smoke; the duo are presented more as magic cops, though the Dummy Man is still a creep. There's also an unseen character named "Cyan Parfait" who uses their magic to close off the school, preventing entry or exit, and fills it with giant praying mantis familiars that hunt Shinozaki. Though the draft never got far enough, Cyan Parfait would have been revealed as the alias of Cherry Corbett.

The mechanism by which magic works is much simpler. Only people who use magic, or people who are insane, can see magic. In the closed off school, only the four magic users and the schizophrenic Enid Lim are aware of the situation. When Lim goes to her first class, the Dummy Man arrives, claiming to be a substitute teacher. Despite his creepy dummy, nobody except Lim notices anything wrong. Thinking it's a tasteless joke, Lim storms off to report the incident to the office, where the Dummy Man—believing Lim must be a magic user in league with Shinozaki—stalks and attacks her. She barely escapes.

Lim's ability to see magic places her in increasingly dangerous situations, as the other magic users suspect she must be the mysterious Cyan Parfait. Rather than fighting back with magic weapons, like in the previous two drafts, Lim is virtually powerless. She navigates magic battlefields and evades giant praying mantises, all while increasingly questioning her sanity. This change emphasizes the horror element of the story over the urban fantasy, moving 1 Over X away from Fargo in a new direction that subsequent drafts would expand upon.

Shinozaki is more obviously not Lim's friend this time. To compensate—and to provide more warm bodies to terrorize—I gave Lim a real friend, the aforementioned Wintermint. Still an academic rival, Draft 3 Wintermint is more empathetic. In one scene that would carry to the final iteration of the story, she expresses understanding of Lim's mental health struggles and offers to earnestly support her. Lim later helps keep her safe from the monstrous insects plaguing the school, since Wintermint cannot see the danger.

The draft isn't bad. Rereading it, it still has potential. I feel the same about Draft 1. The reason I kept scrapping these drafts was not my writing. It was because my confidence was broken and because I insisted on not planning the plot in advance to imitate Fargo. After 20,000 words, I got stuck again and abruptly gave up. The draft ends with a bizarre sentence, one I do not remember writing, one that is not something I would write. I suspect I heard it somewhere, though where I do not know. It's a baffling end to 1 Over X, at least for the next three years, since this time I would not immediately start another draft. The line reads:

sex is weird my mind just goes haywire and weird memories and phrases pop up and idk

VI. 1 Over X, Draft 4 (2020)

The years following 2017 took a physical and mental toll on me. It was entirely due to my own bad decisions, made in response to my wounded ego. No one decision was too severe, but combined they crushed me.

Failing to recreate Fargo in 1 Over X, I decided on a more straightforward approach: Fargo's sequel. Under ordinary conditions, the effort of writing Chicago would not have been a big deal; I've written longer works in shorter time. But I wrote it concurrent to a bad relationship I felt duty-bound to stay in, and constant spam from a hate mailer I was too prideful to ignore, and a stupid drama-filled fan fiction contest I sought to dominate to feel better about myself.

By mid-2019, when I finished Chicago, I was decimated by fatigue. There were times I was convinced it wasn't possible for me to finish. I named Chicago's final arc Hell Arc because that was what I felt like. My energy was gone. I felt physically weak. I developed stress-related health issues. I was lethargic, my brain permanently fogged. I thought my mind was degenerating.

I worried I had become like Andrew Hussie, permanently burnt out, incapable of creating anything unless heavily assisted by amanuensis. I wasn't sure if I would be mentally sharp enough to write ever again.

COVID helped, since I got to work from home. I dedicated myself to recovery. No longer needing to drive into the office, I had more time to read and exercise. My relationship, though still troubled and isolating, weathered its worst period. I turned off anonymous asks to reduce my exposure to my hate mailer, and limited my participation in the fanfic competition. None of these issues fully went away until 2024, but the improvement was massive. By late 2020, I attempted to write again.

I couldn't do anything too complex. I still felt mentally weak. I decided to write a simple story, maybe 70,000 words max, hewing to a well-trodden genre. I scoured my old ideas (since coming up with a new one seemed impossible), and found one I thought might make for a simple, uncomplex, unambitious return to form. That idea was Cockatiel x Chameleon.

I won't go into detail here, but I originally conceived of Cockatiel x Chameleon as a straightforward romance with minimal complications. That was the version I attempted to write in 2020, and combined with my general weakness it was atrocious. After 60,000 words I trashed it. Okay, I thought, romance isn't my forte. What if I wrote something more intuitively up my alley, a genre I actually enjoy? Something like horror.

So I returned to 1 Over X.

Draft 4 of 1 Over X sheds the urban fantasy element entirely. It is now solely a horror story. Its main point of inspiration came from watching the YouTuber ManlyBadassHero play a game called Kio's Adventure. The game is a senseless parade of inexplicable gore and torture inflicted upon teenage girls, mingling grotesque violence with rancid sexual material to create the exact stomach-churning trashiness I consider the essence of horror. This despite the game's obvious non-budget and laughable dialogue.

The plot of Kio's Adventure is that Kio and her friends are eating in an air conditioned Mcdondon when everyone in the entire city (world?) is transported to a hellish version of reality. No explanation is given why. Kio's friends are hooked up to torture devices; Kio must navigate an evil world of traps and monsters to attempt to save them. Corpse Party, which already (in OVA form, since I never played the game) significantly influenced 1 Over X, at least used the excuse of an occult ritual to deposit its characters in Hell School. Kio's Adventure dispenses with pretense.

I saw it and thought, look how easy it is to write a horror story! You don't need to think at all. That was exactly what I needed in my enervated state, the story I could write without thinking.

Draft 4 established many elements that would persist to the final version of the story. All Saints Academy was now a boarding school exclusively, and Lim lived on campus with Tate Wintermute as her roommate. (Though I renamed Wintermute in my mind, her name never actually appears in the draft; Lim only refers to her as her "roommate.") Wintermute's character is similar to her final version, a haughty rich girl whom the other students dislike. Cherry Corbett is now a crude jock. Ryan is introduced, though her first name is Gina and she's a jock like Corbett. Ryan and Corbett are always together, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern style. The only difference between them is Corbett is fixated on sex and Ryan is fixated on violence. There's also a Holtzclaw (first name Olivia), though she has Amy Weaver's drug dealer personality. I sought to create simple, stock characters, upon whom incredible violence could be inflicted.

The story opens identically to the final draft. Enid Lim, unable to sleep due to Wintermute's moaning (and auditory hallucinations of her mother laughing at her), goes for a walk to a corner of the school where she can use the internet. En route she discovers a hole in the wall that shouldn't be there. Lim retains her backstory with her brother, but this time I intended to reveal she invented the story out of fear of his schizophrenia. This change drew more authentically upon my experience with Dan, who was never dangerous, though in my anxiety I once feared would become so.

Otherwise, the story is much different. On the other side of the hole, Lim doesn't meet herself, but a freshman performing an occult ritual. The next day, Lim witnesses the same freshman kill herself by jumping off a school building.

The story would have two distinct halves. The first half would be slow, atmospheric, ambiguous. It would build tension and unease. Then, at a certain point, the ritual that the freshman performed would be complete, and the entire school would be transported to a Kio's Adventure-style Hell Arc, kicking off a gory second half as characters are dispatched one by one.

Ultimately, I planned for Lim, Wintermute, and Corbett (Ryan having succumbed to madness and transforming into a murderous fiend) to reach the hole in the wall, which they think is the only way out. The hole is closed. Wintermute, less sympathetic in this version (more like Ursula Yocum, a character that keeps unexpectedly surviving), gets the idea that Lim's schizophrenia is the true cause of everything. Killing her, she thinks, is the only way to end it. Corbett initially stops her, but Lim—believing she is being punished for the lie she told about her brother—acquiesces to being falsely condemned for her own mental illness. After Wintermute sacrifices her, the hole opens up. Corbett and Wintermute escape as the only survivors.

The concept was simple, a single parabola of buildup and release. And the tone I set was effective enough. I liked what I wrote, even then. The problem was I remained too physically and mentally drained. After 10,000 words, the idea of writing an entire novel daunted me. I couldn't do it. Like the three drafts before it, I discarded it.

I told myself I would return to it in the future.

VII. The VVitch

Four years passed.

By 2024, I had written two more novels (Cockatiel x Chameleon and Cleveland Quixotic). At the beginning of the year, my seven-year relationship finally ended—ended amicably, even. In June, I finished the first draft of my next novel, When I Win the World Ends. It seemed as though I had completely recovered.

Things weren't exactly great, though. After my relationship ended, I looked around and realized I had slowly become isolated from everyone around me. Friendships from before the relationship were completely gone, new ones sparse. I was never good at making friends, and not knowing anyone makes it harder to know new people.

I wasn't outright miserable, but I felt resigned. My fate was to be alone, and that was okay. My stories were never going to be as successful as Fargo, and that was okay. The few people I did talk to were aspiring authors who looked up to me, and I thought that by mentoring them, they might achieve the success that eluded me, and help push web fiction forward in a way I was never able to. I wasn't happy, but it would do.

During the editing process for When I Win, I decided to add Sabrina to the story to pay off some earlier foreshadowing and give a climactic chapter more punch. The concept for Sabrina's character came quickly and naturally as a somewhat autobiographical representation of myself, an isolated 30-something with zero prospects for future connections with other people, eluding outright misery but foreseeing her own doom. This concept compelled me so much I didn't want to limit it to a single chapter in a larger story. So, between editing sessions, I wrote a short story that revolved entirely around Sabrina.

The details of the story aren't important to 1 Over X. What matters is the style. Since Sabrina was such a personal character, I got the idea to write her story not in close third person past, but first person present.

This may seem like a trivial difference, but to me it was a radical departure. I have written many novels. All of them use third person, past tense. First person seemed too singleminded. It emphasized the speaker above all else, and I preferred ensemble casts with prominent minor characters over stories where the protagonist was the center of attention. But since the Sabrina story was a short story (a type of story I rarely wrote), it seemed appropriate.

Sabrina's narration was sedate, logical, and matter-of-fact. I found it easy to write, and even pulled off a few fun tricks with it, like using Sabrina's telepathic powers to convey the thoughts of other characters in the narration and slowly blend them with Sabrina's own thoughts. Before long, I started thinking how I might use this style for a more ambitious project. I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to write after When I Win, though I had a few candidate ideas.

One of those candidates was 1 Over X, which remained in the back of my mind since the failed 2020 draft. Immediately it seemed like the best fit. Not only did Sabrina's voice have the same calm, rational tone as Enid Lim's, but a first person perspective would enable more interesting tricks like those of Sabrina's telepathy when applied to a story about someone with schizophrenia. I also thought a closer, more claustrophobic tone would better align the reader's perspective with that of the character, which would increase the horror.

Convinced, I decided to make one more stab at the story I had been trying and failing to write since 2017.

VIII. 1 Over X, Draft 5 (2024)

My original goal was to begin the draft as I posted the completed When I Win. I expected, as in 2020, that 1 Over X would be an "easy" story to write, a relaxing diversion after its assiduously planned and plotted predecessor.

Unfortunately, I got sick.

I'm not someone who gets sick often. I never even got COVID. I was a varsity athlete in high school and had not visibly lost my physique since then. But for years my health had slowly declined, something I only noticed in retrospect. I shrugged off warning signs as anomalies, or merely psychological conditions brought on by stress. The years of debilitating fatigue, for instance, I figured were due to "burnout" from working too hard. It's possible stress and working too hard did in fact play a hand in it, but there was more to the story.

About a week before I started posting When I Win, I became ill with a nasty chronic ailment that would persist for months, go away, and then come back. I went to three different doctors—including a specialist—and had a million tests done, but they found nothing diagnosable. Though it's a relief to learn whatever you're suffering from isn't cancer, it's frustrating to lack a clear cure. With no other options, I assumed my problem was general poor health.

In some ways this illness was a good thing, because it caused me to get serious about my health. I improved my diet and began exercising daily, and though progress has been slow, there has been progress. The periods of illness have become shorter, less severe, and longer apart.

I feel bad wasting your time with such pedestrian issues of health, but it's undeniable the onset of this illness significantly impacted my ability to write 1 Over X. Rather than beginning it in August, as I intended, I wasn't able to start Draft 5 until October, when my symptoms finally subsided (for the first time).

And even then, Draft 5 was basically nothing. It is by far the shortest draft, totaling a pathetic 886 words. Under most circumstances I wouldn't even consider it a draft. But it is unique in one particular way, which is that it is written not as a novel but as a script for a visual novel.

I described the Sabrina story as definitively convincing me to write 1 Over X in a certain way, but like most narratives that's tidier than reality. In truth, it presented a compelling option for the story, but there were other options available. Since Cockatiel x Chameleon—where I first considered commissioning light novel-style art for key moments and characters, before deciding on the classical art that begins each chapter—I have thought about ways I could draw more readers via other forms of media. People just don't gravitate to pure text the way they do a video, a picture, or a game.

And horror is so much easier to make effective in visual format. You can just flash a spooky image on the screen and play a sound effect and scare someone, whereas purely textual horror must be more cerebral. The idea of doing 1 Over X as a visual novel seemed possible. At the very least, I thought, I could write a script and use it to generate interest—and artists—to create an actual visual novel.

Other than being in script form, Draft 5 is similar to the beginning of Draft 4 and the beginning of the final draft. Lim can't sleep, leaves her room to use the internet, discovers a hole (at which point the draft ends). The only notable addition is something I describe in the text as a "Phone Minigame," which would have involved Lim at the edge of the school pulling up her phone to access a social media site. Players could scroll through the feed for an absurdly long time, finding increasingly bizarre and disturbing posts the deeper they delved. They could exit the feed at any time, at which point the story would continue.

This was the first of what I expected would be many attempts at using the visual novel medium in creative ways, but it also killed the draft. When I tried to write the social media feed itself, I immediately got stuck. For my idea of infinite scrolling to work, I needed thousands of words of fake tweets. The task daunted me, especially since it would distract me from the actual narrative I intended to write. I figured I could skip it and write it later, so I put a placeholder, but I've always hated writing a story out of order, and skipping a part signals to me I'm not actually serious enough about the story yet. (In the first draft of Cockatiel x Chameleon, I initially skipped over one of the pornographic scenes, and that also caused me to doubt the project.)

Given I was testing an experimental script style, my seriousness was pretty shallow. Maybe a visual novel wasn't the way to go, I thought. It was outside my area of expertise, and who would do the art and music anyway? Tepidly, I scrapped the draft before it really began. It wouldn't be long before I started another.

IX. Last Minute Influences

Drafts 6 and 7 together make up the "final draft" of 1 Over X. Draft 6 covers everything up until Lim and her friends reach The Breakers in Chapter 9. Then I took a short break, made some substantial revisions, and continued with Draft 7, which covers the rest of the story.

Since I've finally started discussing the version of the story the readers are familiar with, I'll go into the more immediate influences on it. While It Follows and Kio's Adventure helped mold the basic details of earlier drafts, and some of what came out of those earlier drafts stayed in the story, the final version of 1 Over X was more significantly impacted by several things I read or watched in the year leading up to writing it.

(This is typical for me. For example, though When I Win was influenced by a lifetime of interests, much of the ultimate shape of the story came about in response to Haruki Murakami's Underground, which I read only a few months before I started writing.)

In February 2024, I reread several Shakespeare plays, including Macbeth. Before, I'd considered Macbeth inferior to Hamlet and King Lear, but this time I appreciated it much more. In my college Shakespeare class a decade earlier, my professor put especial emphasis on the phrase "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" spoken by the witches. In context, the line makes obvious sense; the witches find what other people find fair to be foul and vice versa. My professor pointed out, though, that the line is complete nonsense when read on its own. It is paradoxical in a tautological way, emphasizing the inversion of the natural order that occurs after Macbeth takes the throne. In the intervening years, I had seen a random post on Tumblr discussing how JRR Tolkien despised the ending of Macbeth, where the prophecies for Macbeth's downfall have anticlimactically mundane explanations. (According to the post, this is the reason for the Ents—an actual walking forest.) My reread caused me to connect these two points—the paradoxical, nonsensical beginning and the banal, mundane ending—and reach the thesis of Lim's essay on Macbeth in the story. This thesis would guide much of 1 Over X's plot, including its ending where Corbett seemingly stops the madness by sealing the hole with metal plates and construction equipment.

In May 2024, I read American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis for the first time. I had previously seen the movie, and also previously read Less Than Zero (twice). Though I thought Less Than Zero was kind of awful, I found American Psycho significantly more compelling. It is the main influence on the first person present perspective used in the Sabrina story and later 1 Over X. (American Psycho also opens with a perspectival "trick"; for the first few pages, the story seems to be a third person account of a different character, before Patrick Bateman slowly fades into existence.)

American Psycho and a recent reread of Less Than Zero made me contemplate Ellis' impact on contemporary American literature, where he wields outsized influence via acolytes like Ottessa Moshfegh and Tao Lin. He wrote Less Than Zero as a college creative writing workshop student, and as such the college creative writing workshop crowd tends to adore him. More than that, though, Ellis is a signifier of a much larger shift in focus for American letters on the whole. The big names of the 90s and early 00s were authors of what would be pejoratively named "hysterical realism," a term coined by critic James Wood in a review of Zadie Smith's White Teeth. To Wood, hysterical realism meant big, bombastic works, with hundreds of characters spanning different countries and time periods, works where "information was the main character." Authors like David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie, Roberto Bolaño, and late-career Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo all fit this mold. To Wood, these works were abject failures because they failed to depict the detailed character work of the realist novels of the 1800s. To me, these works were the natural attempt to reflect the world in the Age of Information. Ours is a globalized world, a world where we must, in fact, grapple with an explosion of cultures and encrusted historical epochs, where the news buzzes constantly with ridiculous headlines cherrypicked from the 8 billion souls inhabiting the planet. If "information is the main character" of these works, that is only a failure insomuch as these works are failing to identically replicate works from a much different time.

Hysterical realism would fall out of fashion in the mid-00s. Wallace and Bolaño died tragically young, Pynchon and DeLillo got old, Zadie Smith had her feelings hurt by Wood's essay and pivoted to a different style, and Rushdie got fatwa'd. What replaced the attempt to grapple with the Age of Information was instead, in my view, a retreat from it, a literary white flight into the gated community of the self, specifically the self of the increasingly isolated and elite literary caste. The true signifier of this shift was not Ellis, whose most notable works predate it, but Karl Ove Knausgaard, famous for his interminably long series of "autofiction" (autobiographical fiction) novels where he places his life under a microscope, delving into its every banal crevice, seeking truth only in his immediately perceived reality and psychology. It is a rejection of anything other in exchange for infinite fascination with one's own self.

Knausgaard caused a trend, though he did not originate the idea; Bret Easton Ellis was writing in much the same gated community style decades earlier, with the added punch of the lurid drugs-and-sex lifestyle of the rich and famous. (Even Ellis is not the true originator; his own Less Than Zero is a close imitation of Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays.)

All this is to say that American Psycho caused me to contemplate the direction of literature as a retreat from reality rather than an attempt to grapple with and understand it, an emphatic celebration of the self at the expense of everything else. This, too, would become a core concern of 1 Over X, not only through Less Than Zero's literal appearance in the story and the creative writing workshop satire, but in the conception of All Saints Academy as a "closed circle," where the daughters of the rich and influential are contained without interference from anything outside. In previous drafts, I conceived of the school being magically "closed off" for purposes of the plot; now, the school was closed off by default, and for a reason beyond pure horror.

The last major influence is Valle Verde, an analog horror series I already wrote an essay about in July 2024. You can read my essay for a more detailed explanation of what I took from it, but my thesis is similar to what I got from Bret Easton Ellis: An attempt to flee the chaotic, bombastic Age of Information by changing postmodern noise into a riddle that can be solved by a cloyingly simple narrative. It even corresponds to my interpretation of Macbeth: "fixing" an inverted world by disappointingly mundane means.

That was the thread. How do people grapple with the endless deluge of information brought upon by the internet? If hysterical realism is a story where "information is the main character," then 1 Over X would be horror where "information is the monster."

X. The Outline

In November, shortly after the failure of Draft 5, I decided to do something I never do and write a chapter-by-chapter outline of the story. I forget exactly what prompted me to do this. Possibly it was nothing more than how many drafts had already failed due to lack of planning. (Usually, when I write a story, I keep everything in my head, with the justification that if I forget it, it wasn't worth remembering.)

The outline is not a perfect representation of what happens in the story, especially in its later parts, but it did codify many aspects of the plot. I used the opening of Draft 4 as a basis, but decided to abandon the Corpse Party-like satanic ritual that initiated the horror in Draft 4 in favor of a plot that emphasized the inside-outside dynamic of the "closed circle" of the school. I felt this would better capture my thoughts about the interiority of art and its refusal to interface with the world at large.

As such, the overall structure of the plot changed from Draft 4's simple "build tension, release tension" to a twin-peaked structure. Lim and friends would leave the school through the hole in the wall, experience some crazy stuff at a party in town, and return unwittingly bringing back the horror of outside, which would then run rampant throughout the school.

Similarly, I conceived of doppelgangers being the primary vector through which the horror would be delivered. Earlier drafts already flirted with this; from the backstory of Draft 1 Lim's brother thought she was a doppelganger, while in Draft 4 Ryan would have been transformed into a maniacal, murderous form of herself. Here, the idea carried more weight in the context of the internet/information theme. Similar to Royce Ru's speech about The Enigma of Amigara Fault in Cockatiel x Chameleon, the doppelganger would be a deranged version of someone that emerges once strained through the solipsistic and information-dense filter of the internet.

Originally, my idea was that Lim and her three friends would leave the school and go to a random house party in Newport. They would be attacked by some male partygoers and flee, with Ryan being replaced by a doppelganger in the commotion. However, when I mentioned the setting of my story to a friend who lives in Connecticut, he remarked that he went to Newport often for the summer, and that I should look into the Gilded Age mansions the city is famous for. This is how I learned about The Breakers. (My friend also told me about the abandoned plot of land with the ominous, graffiti-strewn wizard's tower—which is a real place—as well as the tunnels that connect the town's mansions.)

The outline covers the story's first two arcs mostly accurately to the final version. It established the four boys and the Gorehound, which I designed to maintain the plausible deniability of it being a Halloween costume as long as possible. I wanted The Breakers sequence to play on Lim's schizophrenia, to make her constantly doubt the things around her, even as they became increasingly real. That was the main goal behind the headless body Lim encounters, which could easily be either Ryan, Corbett, or a mannequin.

The story after The Breakers had a less clear vision. What appears in the final story as Part III Part I was in the outline only a couple of vaguely-described chapters, with Miranda Van Zandt and Prue Malheur absent. Part III Part II opens similarly in the outline to its final form, with a second Wintermute appearing and being taken to the office. One of Draft 3's biggest horror scenes is when Lim goes to the office to report the Dummy Man, only for him to attack her, and since then I always wanted to do a big horror scene in the office. In Draft 4, I planned a scene where the principal attempted to muster the faculty to protect the students, only for everyone to get slaughtered by monsters. The iteration that appeared in the outline was similar, except now the monster was Wintermute's doppelganger.

I also knew I wanted to write an homage to the spider scene in Blood-C, one of my favorite horror works, so I planned the scene in which Noël D'Addario tries to warn everyone in the dorms before the Gorehound appears. In the outline, the scene has a metafictional bent, with D'Addario seemingly wresting narrative control from Lim via Scream-like horror meta-awareness. This concept would ultimately develop into Lim's increased omniscient perspective in Part III Part II.

The biggest difference in the outline is what happens after. Lim and the real Wintermute flee by themselves through the school, fighting and killing Wintermute's doppelganger before Lim's doppelganger arrives and kidnaps the real Wintermute. Lim would then join Corbett, who musters a group of survivors (including Ryan) to seal the hole. At the story's climax, the other doppelgangers attack Corbett's group at the hole, into which water from the storm is draining. Lim and Ryan fall into the water and are washed out of the school before Corbett successfully seals the hole shut. Trapped outside, Ryan sobs, "devastated at her ejection, surprisingly vulnerable." Lim finds her own doppelganger in the wizard's tower, torturing Wintermute. Jealous of their friendship, Lim's doppelganger executes Wintermute; the story ends with a devastated Lim being cradled and protected by her doppelganger as the evils of the outside world close in on them.

I didn't immediately start writing the next draft after I finished the outline, because Fargo's 10th anniversary was coming and I had the idea to release an edited version, Fargo DX. I spent much of the next few months on that, only to realize it was a larger undertaking than I expected. Not wanting to delay my next novel any longer, I pivoted to 1 Over X's sixth draft in the last week of 2024.

XI. 1 Over X, Draft 6 (2024-2025)

Draft 6 covers the story up until Chapter 9, the arrival at The Breakers. Most of this early part was actually easy to write, since it cleaved close to my outline and contained iterations on several scenes from previous drafts, such as the American Psycho business card riff. By this time I also had a strong grasp on the characters of Lim, Wintermute, and Corbett. Of the core cast, only Ryan was tricky, since I changed her a lot from her jock personality in Draft 4 to better encapsulate the self-contradictory reactionary postmodernism I saw in Valle Verde.

My goal with the characters, both major and minor, was for them to feel anonymous and interchangeable, names that the reader would struggle to keep track of. I was borrowing this technique from Bret Easton Ellis, whose novels are stuffed with generic first-name-only non-characters (and which he parodies in American Psycho when everyone keeps confusing Patrick Bateman for other people). I felt this technique would be good for horror. In my opinion, horror works much better when characters feel expendable. In fact, I think traditionally good character writing can detract from horror rather than improve it.

Despite the injection of new themes, my foremost goal was for this story to succeed as horror. I was less concerned with plot, which I also think can detract from horror, and more about feel and tone. Blood-C remained my aspirational focus: gradually building tension culminating in explosions of horrendous violence. To accomplish that, I struggled against my impulse to constantly keep the story moving forward. The early part of 1 Over X was designed to be slow-paced, though writing it I constantly worried it was too slow-paced. I had recently read The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere by Lurina and was emboldened by that story's willingness to spend unlimited amounts of time as its characters walk to the location where the story is actually set, discussing along the way philosophical ideas about death. The chapter in which Lim and friends walk to The Breakers and argue about the purpose of art takes a cue from that story.

I also wanted the order in which characters die to be surprising, which I think is essential to good horror. I deliberately set up Corbett to seem like the "most expendable" of the four friends, a crudely one-dimensional jock whom Lim has little interest in and thus seems ancillary to the action. When the headless body appeared, the reader would be inclined to believe it belonged to Corbett, an inclination bolstered when Ryan's doppelganger arrived shortly afterward. Then, over the course of the story, the very aspects of Corbett that make her seem like a cannon fodder background character transform her into an archetypal action-minded Final Girl.

This trick borrows from Modern Cannibals, which also features a long passage where four friends travel to the story's main setting. Corbett fills a similar role as Cal, who is signaled as vestigial on account of the primary perspective character's dislike of him. Modern Cannibals also leans into a slasher horror mindset during its road trip arc, with Kiki quipping that Cal is the type of person who dies first to increase the tension later when Cal confronts Maximillion and seems actually in danger of dying.

As someone who loves slasher movies, playing with slasher clichés was the fun part of writing. By far the most difficult part to write was Chapter 2, also known as the Twitter chapter.

I knew this chapter would be difficult after attempting it in Draft 5. My approach this time was more methodical. In my outline, I listed potential topics the tweets should cover, which gave me a clearer direction to focus my efforts. Even so, Chapter 2 was a nightmare that would receive more revisions than any other chapter.

My first attempt, I wrote tweets with the mindset of "throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck," telling myself I had plenty of time to make changes and that it would be good to at least give myself a base to stand on. I prowled Twitter for inspiration, which actually only discouraged me because no matter how deranged I tried to make a fake tweet seem, real tweets always had me beat. I succumbed a few times and simply put real tweets I found in the story—the Novak Djokovic anti-vax tweet and the "Pickleball is a microcosm of everything wrong with modernity" tweet are two examples—but I limited how often I did this, preferring to use original tweets.

I asked for help from my friends. The Fargo-level success of When I Win the World Ends elevated my profile in the web fiction scene, and a few notable webfic authors took note. Due to this, I was able to become friends with the aforementioned Lurina, as well as expand my acquaintance with Remy (author of Chili and the Chocolate Factory) into daily correspondence. Both of them helped author tweets for me. Lurina created most of the Random Fantasy Prompt tweets, including a couple I didn't wind up using. Remy, meanwhile, gave me an early draft of the Smile 2 review tweet, which I later rewrote and expanded into its current form. (At the time, I had only seen the first Smile, not Smile 2. Remy had also not seen Smile 2.)

Between these and the tweets I wrote myself, I was able to put together a passable first draft of the chapter. It was still missing key tweets that appear in the final draft, but I was willing to move forward under the motto that had become a mantra while writing When I Win—"I'll fix it in post."

More crippling were my persistent worries the story was too slow-paced. It was these worries that caused me to stop writing when Lim and friends reached The Breakers, the first of two major pauses where I reassessed the story's overall direction and tone before proceeding. I don't usually pause like this when writing a draft, preferring to barrel to the end and fix problems during editing. The pauses were more a byproduct of the self-doubt that plagued this project since 2017. Now, I was worried either that my story wasn't "horror" enough or that it was a mistake to attempt to write horror at all. The success of When I Win made me want to expand on that success, and I knew a surreal horror story would not help do that. At the same time, my illness returned, less severe but still a detriment. I distracted myself from 1 Over X by writing the essays I posted over the course of 2025. Ultimately, though, I always returned to 1 Over X, making slow progress but progress nonetheless.

After the first pause, I reread everything I wrote until then and made substantial revisions, mainly to shorten the text so it wouldn't feel so slow. I cut at least 20 percent of the word count, then began writing The Breakers.

XII. 1 Over X, Draft 7 (2025)

The pause did give me the opportunity to do something important: research The Breakers. I knew the basics from what my Connecticut friend told me, but since a significant chunk of the story would be set inside it, I wanted a better idea of its interior and layout. To this end, I decided to watch YouTube video tours of the premises.

My timing was, as Aracely Sosa would say, serendipitous. Only a few months earlier, the YouTuber Erik Van Conover posted a video titled Touring The Most Expensive Gilded Age Mansion in America, a 47-minute tour of The Breakers with professional quality filmmaking, rather than the cellphone camera tours that made up most of my other options.

While the video did give me the important basic information about The Breakers necessary to write my story accurately, its impact was far, far greater than I ever could have expected. I heavily recommend anyone who enjoys 1 Over X to watch the video in its entirety, and it'll quickly become clear why. Erik Van Conover, unbelievably, is not a real person, but a character from the story 1 Over X, somehow manifested into reality. (The "Van" in his name is completely fictitious; his real name is just Erik Conover.) Throughout his tour he cannot help but let slip occasional references to the "spiritual" nature of The Breakers' construction, culminating in a digression where he discusses "sacred geometry." He is, of course, utterly wrong about even the basic facts, constantly making the error I would put into the story in which he points to any flower he sees and describes it as "the flower of life."

The video was also helpful for identifying which of the nine Muses is missing from the Morning Room in The Breakers. Though it is easy enough to learn online that only eight of the nine are present, no source I was able to find after extensive searching tells you which is missing. Thanks to this video's high resolution, though, I was able to sleuth it out by searching the Muses that were present in the background and determining the missing one by process of elimination.

A few months after making this video, while I was writing 1 Over X, Erik Van Conover would have a psychotic break, hit a police officer with his car, and be arrested and put on trial for attempted murder. He decided to represent himself in court, during which he argued that everything was a conspiracy to destroy his reputation because of its prominence as a YouTuber.

Around the same time, I read Là-Bas by the French author Joris-Karl Huysmans. The novel, written in the late 1800s and part of the so-called "decadent" movement, is blisteringly condemnatory toward modernity, with its main character (a thinly-disguised version of the author) stating that the poorest, most degenerate peasant of the Middle Ages lived a more spiritually fulfilling life than even the well-to-do of the present day. The confidence with which the protagonist considers himself superior to the riffraff of his time is counterbalanced by his genuine credulousness when it comes to occult hucksters; he quite seriously considers seances, spirits, and homeopathy, seeing in them an enlightenment beyond the decrepit rationality of so-called bourgeois sensibility. (The real Huysmans was likewise taken in by a fraudulent priest who promised to protect him from the evil spells of satanists. Later in life, the atheistic Huysmans converted to Catholicism and joined a monastery.)

The world of fin-de-siecle Paris that Huysmans depicts seemed, to me, a mirror of the world I depicted in 1 Over X, with its own seemingly educated and enlightened people all too happy to toss themselves into the arms of pseudoscience and pseudospirituality despite only a piecemeal comprehension of the history they claim to extol. As such, I quickly incorporated elements of Huysmans into my own story, with much of Ryan's doppelganger's dialogue modeled on its ideas. By the same token, the sacrificial crucifixion of her own headless body that Ryan's doppelganger shows the others is modeled on a description in Là-Bas of the Isenheim Altarpiece, a painting of the crucifixion by Matthias Grünewald. Huysmans glorifies the painting's decrepitude, its disgusting and decaying Christ, because for as much as he craves spiritual uplift, he is at the same time obsessed with the grotesque and rotting. This contradictory mindset too worked its way into Ryan.

Meanwhile, the actual layout of the sacrificial chamber—the first fictional room I injected into the otherwise accurate depiction of The Breakers—was modeled on the holes in the ground that appear in Kane Pixels' Backrooms videos:

Otherwise, this arc mostly adhered to my outline, which covered the setpiece murder and the escape from the Gorehound in detail. I deviated only in minor ways, such as by adding the torture chamber under the house; in the outline, the scene played out similarly, but in the kitchen instead. Even the short chapter at the end of the arc was in the outline, conceived as "Lim having a nightmare that something is coming through the hole into the school." At this point, I had not divided the story into seven-chapter parts, so such a short chapter helping each part have the same number of chapters was a fortunate coincidence rather than something I did to fill a quota.

As I mentioned before, my outline became increasingly vague after The Breakers. My lack of certainty in the events of the plot combined with my lack of confidence that I was writing good "horror." I obviously cannot be scared or even unnerved by my own writing, so I had no idea whether what I wrote hit the correct tone. Once again, I paused writing the story.

XIII. Part III Part I

For a couple of weeks, I reread what I had written, reassessed my outline, and discussed the story at length with Remy and Lurina. Lurina and I identified that the first part of the story was focused on literature, while the second part was focused on film. The path forward, then, seemed to be to delve into yet another medium, one that had already seen its influence cropping up across the story: the web original world of analog horror.

This decision solidified several ideas I had considered but never formally included in my outline. First was that I should actually show the content of the meta-film Gorehound III. I introduced the film as part of Noël D'Addario's character, anticipating when she later hijacks the narrative. Lim believing she is being stalked by its monster was inspired by someone I knew who told me they were paranoid Art the Clown from the Terrifier franchise was stalking them, even though they hadn't seen the film. (This person would also tell me their parents once hid their cellphone in the microwave to protect them from 5G, an anecdote that also appeared in 1 Over X.)

I've enjoyed writing stories-within-stories since Faerie Endless in Modern Cannibals. The contents of Gorehound III I envisioned as a cross between a traditional splatterhouse slasher and an ascended analog horror film like Skinamarink. The film's description includes references to the Kane Pixels Backrooms videos (the freeze frame when the first Entity attacks), The Shining (the boiler explosion finale, which is in the book but not the film), Blood-C (a character being ripped in half by the vulva), and The Curse (the description of far away camera angles). Miranda's interpretation of the story includes a classic analog horror satanist conspiracy, the type favored by both Valle Verde and Joris-Karl Huysmans.

Miranda is not in the story's outline, though her name does appear in an early list of students that predates the outline. I was not certain what role she would have until late in development, though I did write both her tweet and her appearance as a sheeted ghost during Draft 6, fully aware it was her. I wanted the school to seem "different" when Lim and friends returned to it after The Breakers, which I planned to accomplish by introducing important characters who did not seem to exist before. This trick is borrowed from the otherwise uninteresting Draft 2, where Corbett appears only near the end of the draft.

As for Miranda herself, she has a much different history than most of my characters. Her name evokes Miranda Vanadzorian, the main character of 2017's Useless, but she is otherwise nothing like that character. Instead, Miranda Van Zandt is a character I played in a tabletop RPG campaign in 2020. The campaign was for Chronicles of Darkness, specifically a homebrewed version that enabled parties of various different supernatural creatures (you're usually supposed to have only one type in a party). Miranda was a demon, which in the world of CoD is a mechanical component that has broken off the God-machine. To avoid angels that still work for the God-machine, they take human disguises and blend into society.

For her picture, I used an image of Delthea from Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia. The description of her appearance in 1 Over X is unchanged.

Miranda was a teenage girl from a wealthy family, which is what initially made me think of putting her in the story. At first, my goal was only to reuse her name, which had a New York old money Dutch sound to it (compare to Van Patten in American Psycho, or the Vanderbilts of The Breakers fame). But during the campaign, I played Miranda as obsessed with Five Nights at Freddy's and MatPat lore videos, which helped her express occult interests without arousing suspicion. Now that the analog horror elements of 1 Over X were becoming prominent, I decided to include a more intact version of Miranda. Her introduction, in which she browbeats Lim into accepting her transfer student story, evokes the mechanic in CoD by which demons alter reality by changing the perceptions of the humans around them.

(I would caution against interpreting Miranda in 1 Over X as a literal demon, though it does fit nicely with the katabasis motif of the chapter titles when Lim and friends leave and return to the school.)

The tennis chapter was heavily inspired by the 1973 anime Aim for the Ace! Lurina got me and Remy to watch the first episode of it, claiming it was essential watching to understand Hideaki Anno's Gunbuster, but Remy and I liked it so much we insisted on watching more despite Lurina's protests. I had already decided on tennis as Corbett's sport in previous drafts, but Aim for the Ace! guided the structure of the tournament and the aesthetic of the endless mannequins who populate the background of The Breakers. For a time, Lurina attempted to design a cover for 1 Over X using an image from Aim for the Ace!, but I ultimately decided against using it:

The strange plants that start to appear in the garden near the end of this part were taken from À Rebours, another novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans. In it, the main character retreats fully from society, focusing instead on sensual pleasures that titillate his preference for the decaying, decrepit, and fake. As part of this mission, he cultivates several bizarre plants, including those I eventually put into 1 Over X. Miranda's name being similar to Nepenthes mirabilis is a coincidence I ran with, as was her name originating from The Tempest. When I came up with the character in 2020, I took the name from a character in Fire Emblem: Thracia 776.

The last few sentences of the arc, in which Lim reads her story to the class, leaving it ambiguous whether what follows is part of her story, was inspired by the 2018 Korean film Burning, which has a similar conceit to its ending.

XIV. Part III Part II

The final part was by far the most difficult to write, and it initially came out awful. Six of its seven chapters would receive substantial revisions and rewrites during the editing phase, and the only one that wasn't revised was the first (Chapter 22), when Weaver and her friends go out for a smoke.

Chapter 23, by contrast, was a brick wall. Ironically, the basic conceit of the chapter existed in my mind since Draft 4 in 2020: the school authorities attempt to wrangle control of the school when it's still unclear what's happening, only to be killed as monsters overrun the office. For some reason, though, I floundered when I actually had to write it.

Wintermute's Alternate was the main issue. Unlike Ryan, whose Alternate was modeled on Huysmans, she lacked a clear concept. (The scene in Chapter 13 where she appears in the dark tunnel under The Breakers did not exist until the editing phase.) In my plans, the doppelgangers were supposed to be "extreme" versions of the characters they replaced, distorted by the internet. What did a distorted version of Wintermute look like? What made her murderous, while Ryan wanted to fit in? I fumbled my way through the scene, hitting the plot beats but failing to make them land. In the middle of writing the chapter, I was obliged to travel out of state for a few days. When I returned, I had the concept of Wintermute's Alternate talking like ChatGPT (I already placed the hints that Wintermute was a robot earlier in the story), but while this was a concept it didn't resolve the other issues. Days passed and I became increasingly frustrated. Eventually there was nothing to do but drop my tried and true phrase, "I'll fix it in post," and move on.

I started saying "I'll fix it in post" a lot during the remaining chapters.

Chapter 24, which I envisioned as the "Blood-C chapter," frustrated me because I felt like I wasn't hitting the brutal highs of Blood-C. Chapter 25, in which Miranda explains the story MatPat-style, was a great idea I got shortly after introducing Miranda, but her theories themselves came out ramshackle. One of my concepts for the story ever since I added the information-derangement angle was for it to feel like several different horror storylines occurring at once: one with doppelgangers, one with the Gorehound, one with occult rituals, and so on. Miranda's theories would disentangle these storylines and present each as a distinct theory, while mostly failing to account for whichever storyline her theory wasn't currently about. In actual practice, though, these storylines were knotted together too tightly, and the theories lacked the punchy clarity I strove for.

I was getting tired. I had been writing this story for seven months. I had been writing it for seven years. The finish line was in sight, and I just wanted to be done. Chapter 26 lacked impact. I'll fix it in post. Ryan's speech at the table in Chapter 27 was middling. I'll fix it in post. The final chapter, 28, was strangely organized; Lim kills Wintermute long before Corbett closes the hole, so while one half of the climax concludes, the other continues. Oh well, I thought finally, I'll fix it in post.

What mattered on August 2, 2025, when I wrote the words The End, was that I had written it. Before, I abandoned draft after draft, attempt after attempt. Multiple times I considered the concept dead and buried. Now I had a finished draft.

The hardest part was done. Or so I thought.

XV. I Fix It in Post

I finished the draft at the beginning of August. I gave myself until Halloween to edit it, a generous three months. It only took two months to fix When I Win in post, and that was a story that also necessitated rewriting several chapters, so I thought I was being conservative. Instead, I wound up working full tilt until a couple of days before release.

My first editing pass focused exclusively on improving the prose, which led to cutting about 7,000 words (on top of the 6,000 I cut between Draft 6 and 7). Unusually for me, all subsequent editing passes would add words, until the published version of the story was actually longer than the draft.

The difficulty, I realized during my first readthrough, centered on the same issue that made Chapter 25 (Miranda's theories) so challenging. I mentioned that I wrote Chapter 2, the Twitter chapter, with the mentally of "throwing spaghetti at the wall." To an extent, that mentality pervaded the entire story. Following my goal of presenting a complex mishmash of information that seemed like multiple different horror stories tangled together, I wound up including tons of moments that were inexplicably random when viewed in the context of the entire story. What, exactly, was the narrative underlying all the noise...? To an extent, I wanted that question to remain enigmatic. But the question would only be compelling, would only drive people to try and answer it, if there was an underlying sense of logic that guided events, if everything could at least be sorted into similarly-marked bins, if not assembled into a perfect structure.

As I wrote the final few chapters, I read Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, another story about attempting to construct meaning out of endless snatches of occultism and conspiracy theory. This novel would have a significant influence on how I constructed meaning out of my own story, which I was in some ways doing retroactively after I wrote it. I created a spreadsheet that listed every theme or motif present in 1 Over X, organized by type:

Thinking about it this way, it became easier for me to draw connections between the various random elements in the story. Notably, three of these "bins" corresponded to Miranda's three theories: occultism, technology, and fiction. The most important bin, though, seemed to be identity, which also encompassed the bins of sexuality, politics, and health. I decided the most important motif, the one that defined not only the formal style of the work but also its ending, was solipsism.

Solipsism itself was a topic of interest to me due to the essays I wrote earlier that year on internet fiction like Sword Art Online and Solo Leveling, and that interest bled into my other thoughts about the internet's propensity toward incomprehensibly limitless amounts of information. It made sense as the core concept at the center of 1 Over X, so I guided my editing efforts toward making that more apparent.

I found in Miranda's theories of the occult, technology, and metafiction a bent toward solipsistic godhead, either in the form of the philosopher's stone, the singularity, or the omniscience of the author-god. Each theory had a major character that represented it, too: Ryan with her rituals, Tate and the implication she was a robot (which was, at that time, a throwaway oddity I added on a whim), and Miranda's seeming externality to the story. It was Miranda and the metafiction angle that existed most obviously in the draft, so during editing I would significantly alter the Ryan/occult and Tate/technological aspects to mirror Miranda.

Specifically, something I noticed about Miranda's theories was that they became increasingly centered around Enid Lim. In the occult theory, Lim doesn't factor at all; everything is being done by nefarious elites, and Lim is at best only a victim. In the technological theory, Lim is the "ultimate AI," but her training is dependent on Luc and Tate Wintermute. Lastly, in the metafiction theory, Lim is the omniscient arbiter of the world, dependent on nothing and nobody. It was as though Lim slowly corrupted Miranda—a representation of the story's external audience—to seeing the world as centering around Lim.

This realization clicked everything else into place. I had struggled with the exact nature of the Alternates, viewing them only as generically more extreme versions of their originals. Now, I realized they should be corruptions that were changed to become focused solely on Enid Lim.

I went through the entire story, tweaking Ryan's Alternate's dialogue so she viewed Lim as God and rewriting her speech at the table in Chapter 27. Likewise, I rewrote most of Chapter 23 and 26 so Tate's Alternate was slavishly devoted to Lim (like an overly-accommodating LLM) and added the scene with her in the tunnel to Chapter 13. The change to Tate's Alternate also added a logical reason why she kills Dr. Avenarius, because she believes she is helping Lim hide her insanity.

After this, the hidden plot underlying the story became clear to me. Ryan didn't become an Alternate by random chance; it was done by Lim's Alternate, who—as a version of Lim utterly devoted to herself—sought to fulfill Lim's wishes by making the world revolve around her. I added a moment where Lim sees her Alternate next to Ryan the last time Ryan is seen alive to make the order of events clear, and also changed the scene in the sacrificial chamber. Originally, Eric was attacked by a generic shadowy figure, another piece of spaghetti on the wall. Now, Lim's Alternate attacked him. It was perfect. It even fit with Miranda's theories, as Lim's Alternate is the only element of the story Miranda doesn't seem to know about, a lack of awareness I emphasized by having her dramatically name Luc Wintermute as the first Alternate instead. These ideas also enabled me to organize the work into its alchemically-titled four parts, charting Lim's development to the godhead of alchemical perfection.

I made other, less intensive changes. Originally, in Chapter 27, Corbett and her goon squad are attacked by an unknown Entity in a school building, which takes Joan St. Cuthbert; I changed this scene to instead use the plants creeping into the school. I added the subplot about Halicarnassus Brown's dog, Apollo, and his castrated statue, to more plausibly explain the Gorehound as a human-canine alchemical hybrid. (Lurina helped come up with the dog statue, though her idea was that the statue was removed because "the students kept putting funny hats on it"—I was the one who came up with the realistic dog penis.) Extrapolating off the scene in Chapter 23 where Miss Syrene tries to open the front gate with an oddly archaic key—another random detail I added on a whim—I created an overarching key motif/subplot, which included the addition of Tate Wintermute's locket, Miranda's Hellraiser-esque puzzle box, and the lock on the closet door that Lim ultimately uses to seal herself away. On top of general improvements to the most dramatic moments to make them more visceral and shocking, I felt by my third editing pass, less than a month from the slated Halloween release, that I had polished the work into a cohesive shape.

I expected I was done. I sent the work off to some friends for feedback and started planning promotional material for the story. I had an idea to do a little ARG, which would start with an essay I would post to my Tumblr analyzing Smile 2 (which I watched for the first time with Remy and Lurina during 1 Over X's editing phase). In the essay, I would link to a different essay, on another account, supposedly by Noël D'Addario and analyzing Gorehound III. D'Addario's essay would then link to a YouTube video by Miranda Van Zandt, analyzing my story 1 Over X. I planned for the video to be narrated by my ex-girlfriend.

Then the feedback came in.

Other than Remy and Lurina, to whom I had extensively discussed my vision for the story, and Avunvain (author of Questing Beast), who is often a more challenging stylist than even I am, the unanimous response went like this:

I don't get it.

Nobody understood the story. They were befuddled by everything, especially the ending I had just added, where Wintermute describes being attacked by her father. One reader said, "I feel like a dog watching two people have sex." Another reader said they gave themselves a migraine trying to understand what the story was about, even after I gave them hints. All in all, four different readers failed to get it.

By this point, I was low on energy. The effort of writing and rewriting had taken a lot out of me, and once you start looking ahead, thinking you're done, it's miserable to try and go back. But I had to go back. I scrapped my ARG idea, electing to focus on improving the work itself. I needed to make the story clearer. Surely it would only take one more piece, one more element that signposted where to look.

After scouring my mind, after discussing it with Remy and Lurina, I came up with that piece. It was Prue Malheur.

Prue Malheur was in the story since the original draft, though in a more minor role than I originally envisioned. I wanted her to be, like Miranda, a weird character who pops into existence in the back half of the story. But after her introduction at the tennis tournament, I failed to integrate her elsewhere. If there was something I hadn't yet tapped to its fullest potential, it was her.

First, I wrote the scene in Chapter 21 where Lim speaks to Malheur in the dining hall. Not only did Malheur emphasize a different way of thinking about the story, a way that put her in direct opposition to Miranda (paying off a comparison I already seeded simply by introducing Malheur and Miranda in similar ways), but I also added the plotline about Lim's father and Luc Wintermute. I did this primarily because some of my confused readers felt it was random that Luc Wintermute had such a significant role in the final chapter, so I wanted to increase his presence in the story.

Then, I significantly expanded Malheur's role at the table in Chapter 27. She was there before, though without really doing anything. Now, her twofold appearance there gave her a reason to discuss ways to escape Lim's solipsistic orbit. I also added a speech Lim gives, in which she has a moment of clarity and understands that she has wanted everything to be about her all along. Remy suggested I add it, comparing it to a speech near the end of American Psycho where Bateman explains his own failings as a clear thesis to the audience.

Then it was done. I didn't have time to make more changes; Halloween was days away. I had to hope my final round of edits fixed the issues.

XVI. The Readers

The readers were better than I ever could have imagined.

When I sent the edited draft to my friends to review, I also sent the copy to Benedict, author of Cordyceps and many other works. Before I met Benedict, before I read any of his work, I knew of him from the comment section to Almost Nowhere by Nostalgebraist. In a work in which the characters themselves read and comment on the work, Benedict's constant longform analyses of every plot development made him seem to become a character itself, part of the work rather than a simple reader. After Benedict read the first three chapters of my draft, giving responses similar to those he left on Almost Nowhere, I stopped him from reading the rest. I decided I would rather he read the story as I released it and leave comments that might spur the other readers to speculation and analysis.

This turned out to be unnecessary. The readers were already willing to turn out en masse. 1 Over X, despite not having an exceptional view count, is by far my story with the most comments. I feel strongly that those comments are integral to the experience of the story, and encourage any new readers to read them as well.

In my essay on Valle Verde, I discuss how the story uses challenging postmodern techniques to conceal its core narrative. Despite the aggressive difficulty of the text, though—and the text of countless ARG/analog horror works like it—legions of fans turn out to disentangle every little detail and construct a coherent story. The obscene success of MatPat alone points to the hunger millions have to make sense of the insensible, to simplify difficult narratives. My hope had been to use that story-solving impulse to force readers to close read my text, not for basic plot details, but to better understand it on a deeper level, to engage with it as literature. I'm more than pleased with the results.

So thank you, readers. Thank you, everyone who left a comment. Thank you also to Remy and Lurina, and the other people I asked to read the story prior to its release: Avunvain, Juli, Pigoseg, 7th, and Somebody's Little Sister.

I hope you all enjoyed.

XVII. Names

This story has a ton of named characters, and it has names I created as far back as 2017, leading to possibly the most interesting list of name origins of any of my stories. Here they are:

Enid Lim: Enid from the city in Oklahoma and a character in Berwick Saga. Lim from David Lim, a League of Legends esports coach.

Eric Lim: Eric from Erec and Enide, a poem by Chrétien de Troyes.

Tate Wintermute: Tate from a character in Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade (now localized as Thea). Wintermute from unknown origin.

Cherry Corbett: Cherry from the main character of an anti-drug PSA storybook the teacher read to me in first grade. Corbett from a character in Saw III and a random enemy in Final Fantasy V.

Siobhan Ryan: Siobhan from this video. Ryan from no particular origin.

Prue Malheur: Prue from a character in the TV show Charmed. Malheur from Malheur County, Oregon.

Spirit Labuschagne: Spirit from no particular origin. Labuschagne from Marnus Labuschagne, an Australian cricket player.

Nadine Block: The oldest name in the story; it was the name of a character in Useless. Nadine from a student at my elementary school. Block from a character in The Trial by Franz Kafka.

Zinnia Fitzpeter: Zinnia from Panuwat "Zinnia" Chaianan, an obscure Thai League of Legends esports player. Fitzpeter from no particular origin.

MacKenzie Fayerweather: MacKenzie from no particular origin. Fayerweather from a list of early settlers in Massachusetts.

Lulu Paraiso: Name suggested by Avunvain.

Amy Weaver: Amy from a character in Sonic the Hedgehog. Weaver from a user on Nintendo's official Nsider forum in 2006-7.

Miranda Van Zandt: Miranda from a character in Thracia 776. Van Zandt from Van Zandt County, Texas.

Noël D'Addario: Noël from a user on a Madoka Magica Discord server. D'Addario from Noah "Decoy" D'Addario, an obscure Canadian League of Legends esports player.

Firenze George: Firenze from the Italian name for the city of Florence. George from Regina George, a character in Mean Girls.

Tam Bell: Decline to state.

Velouria Roseingrave: Velouria from Velouria "Viki" Baty, an obscure French League of Legends esports player. Roseingrave from a list of British politicians.

Tianne Devers: Tianne from Tian, the Chinese word for heaven. Devers from no particular origin.

Christine Rosenkreuz: From Christian Rosenkreuz, mythical founder of the occult Rosicrucian order.

Myrtle Lovejoy: From no particular origin.

Meredith Johannes: Meredith from no particular origin. Johannes from Johannes Trithemius, German occultist.

Stella Morgen: From Stella Matutina (Morning Star), an occult order.

Phebe Stuyvesant: Phebe from Cornelius Vanderbilt's mother, Phebe Hand. Stuyvesant from Stuyvesant Fish, a member of New York high society during the Gilded Age.

Joan St. Cuthbert: Joan from Joan of Arc. Cuthbert from William Cuthbert Faulkner.

Mel[pomene] Goldthwaite: Melpomene from one of the nine Muses—note that Lim only assumes her name is Melpomene—specifically the one that is most prominent in the video game Disillusion ST. Goldthwaite from a list of early settlers in Massachusetts.

Lethe Marie Claypoole: Lethe from the mythical river. Marie from no particular origin. Claypoole from Alice Claypoole, wife of Cornelius Vanderbilt II.

Simone de Vril: Simone from the film S1M0NE starring Al Pacino. Vril from the occult novel of the same name by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, now more famous for his bad opening sentences.

Agatha Speer/Speare: Agatha from Agartha, a legendary subterranean kingdom. Speer from Albert Speer, Nazi architect. Speare from William Shakespeare.

Wicke Holtzclaw: Wicke from a character in the video game Eternal Return. Holtzclaw from John "John" Holtzclaw, an obscure American League of Legends esports player.

Valerie Soranus: From Quintus Valerius Soranus, a Roman poet whose only surviving couplet describes the god Jupiter as hermaphroditic.

Liz Bennet: From Elizabeth Bennet, the protagonist of Pride & Prejudice.

Lolita "Lol" Lorillard: Lolita from the novel of the same name by Vladimir Nabokov. Lorillard from the Lorillard family, a New York old money family known for founding one of America's oldest tobacco companies.

Ursula Yocum: Ursula from a character in Fire Emblem 7. Yocum from a student at my high school.

Ana[psychia] Gray: Anapsychia from a Roman letter writer. Gray from no particular origin.

Azusa Kennedy: Azusa from the city in California and Azusa Nakano, a character in K-On! Kennedy from John F. Kennedy.

Patricia St. Martin: From Patricia Martin, a character in Lucky☆Star.

Clio Fish: Clio from one of the nine Muses. Fish from Stuyvesant Fish, a member of New York high society during the Gilded Age.

Freyja Mason: From Freemason.

Bridget and Klein Schermerhorn: Bridget from a character in Guilty Gear. Klein from a character in Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade. Schermerhorn from a prominent old money New York family.

Zuleika Frelinghuysen: Zuleika from Zuleika Dobson, a novel by Max Beerbohm. Frelinghuysen from a prominent old money New York family.

Julia Evola: From Julius Evola, an Italian fascist occultist.

Miss Syrene: From a character in Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones.

Dr. Avenarius: From Richard Avenarius, a Swiss philosopher.

Sirisha V. Sharma: Sirisha from someone I know. Sharma from a list of common Brahmin surnames.

Machiavelli: From a student at my elementary school. Their first name. (Their parents, apparently, were nightmares.)

[gazemaizeisdead]

Fargo DX has begun!

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of its final chapter, great writer @weaselandfriends (Bavitz, author of Modern Cannibals, 1/X, Cockatiel x Chameleon) just started republishing a remastered version of his classic Madoka Magica fanfic Fargo as Fargo DX on AO3/Royalroad. If you've seen Madoka Magica and never read Fargo before, I strongly recommend it; I'm not even a particularly big fan of Madoka as a property and I love this story to bits, and though I've yet to reread the rewrite myself, based on everything he's told and shown me about it I fully expect that it'll be even better than the original.

Fargo was Bavitz's first story published under that name, and has done tremendously well for itself in the time since, especially given that it was posted more than a few years after the Madoka fandom had begun to wither away. (It carries the honorary distinction of having a tiny amount of recursive fanfiction about it, or at least fic written by someone who really hated the main character a lot and included them in a story they wrote to shit on them.)

Fargo's is one of the best revenge stories I have ever read, and until this rewriting of the story, it's only had one big issue that would prevent me from recommending it more strongly than I already do: some of the fight scenes — especially those in the first of three arcs — went on for way too long. Coming back to this after another six (excellent, long, complete) novels, Bavitz told me he's changed almost none of the central narrative while tightening up the language and cutting up a lot of prosaic fluff, which is exactly what a lot of the story needed. According to him, he's cut out 50,000 words from the original 336,000, about ~15% of the original story! (Even as a much more novice writer, I can tell you that this is type of stuff is both the hardest and probably most important part of editing in general. They say kill your darlings and people think it refers to characters or scenes or plotlines, and it does, but often it more is talking about this, which can be just as if not more painful to work through:

He's also changed some extremely minor plot errors (there's an infamous scene where a character boils water incorrectly he fixates on a lot when talking about Fargo, which I find really funny), but it's mostly just tightening up an already awesome story.

Seriously, read it! Even if you were part of the wave that read it back in 2015 - 2016, it's worth a reread, especially now that the kinks of it being his earliest published work have been ironed out. I linked it twice in the same post! I wouldn't do that if I didn't love it.

Note 1: On Royalroad, to maximize metrics, Bavitz has made the excellent decision to rename the story Magical Girl Machine Gun (three times!) which I adore. He mentioned the idea of doing this to me awhile ago, and I initially thought he was kidding, so it was a pleasant surprise to find out that he’d actually gone through with it, the madman. I think I’d like to see more webfic/fanfic authors do this type of thing generally, have alternate titles for their stories for different websites (the same way that tradpub authors and people in other mainstream mediums will have different titles for different countries. Curious if anybody knows any other examples of this specifically in the online sphere, I can’t think of anything.

Note 2: It’s lame as hell when authors shill other author’s stories just because they hang out or are friends, this is not one of those cases, and I can say that confidently because I loved this story before I ever spoke to Bavitz and have reread it twice since my first time.

Note 3: The sequel to Fargo, Chicago, kicks even more ass, and is the prize you get for finishing it. (Bavitz says that you don't have to read Fargo to read it, and some people have done that actually, though I think this is a case where you do get a lot more out of it having finished the first book.) When I shill Chicago, I describe it as the Great American Fanfiction, and I really don't think I'm overselling it with that promise. I will add that your liking Chicago is moderately contingent on you finding political stories interesting and enjoying moderately confusing but excellent battle scenes, both of which I do very much. Chicago will never receive a rewrite, says Bavitz, as it does not need one; I couldn't agree more.

Note 4: With this rerelease, Bavitz joins a tiny fraction of webwriters who actually did go back and... edit an old fanfic they finished...

I hope to join this powerful club, one day...

[alexanderwales]

I had the idea to do a "Letterboxd versus" where you feed a program two Letterboxd usernames, then it spits back some basic analytics about whatever movies those two users have both given a rating for. Who's harsher? What movie is most divisive between those two people? What's a movie I hate and you love, and the opposite? How large is the zone of agreement? What does the zone of agreement look like?

This seemed like a perfect project to vibe code, since it could just be a python script that wasn't hosted anywhere, all you need is to scrape the data and then present whatever is interesting about comparing these two things.

And immediately I ran into problems, because Letterboxd is protected by Cloudflare, and does not like people poking at their data, and when Claude runs into failures, he just ... guesses wildly? Writes a scraper without being able to see the page in question?? Does not inform the user of this??

Anyway, this was pretty frustrating, and any idea I had of doing this at scale was completely abandoned, mostly due to Cloudflare (plus it's arguably not nice to scrape someone who doesn't want to be scraped, though in this case it was my data and that of one other user for testing purposes). The final solution Claude came up with to bypass Cloudflare is to open up a visible Chromium window, since headless wasn't working. It's ugly as hell, though I've hand-written some ugly scrapers in my time. The program has been run only once, with my 2026 movies and those of @weaselandfriends. It probably won't be run again, mostly so I don't get in hot water with Letterboxd. They do have an API, but it's very closed, requiring an email, and this sort of project is explicitly something they would decline at this time (part of a long laundry list). But here are the results, if you're curious:

⚔ LETTERBOXD VERSUS ⚔

alexanderwales vs La_Belette

📊 Overview

Films rated by alexanderwales: 161 Films rated by La_Belette: 1,492 Films in common: 20

🎯 Agreement

Exact same rating: 4 (20%) Within half a star: 8 (40%) Average difference: 1.10 ★ Pearson correlation: 0.35

alexanderwales averages 3.55 ★ on shared films vs La_Belette's 3.00 ★ — alexanderwales is the more generous rater.

🥊 Biggest Disagreements

(ed: my ratings first)

Megalopolis (2024) — ½ vs ★★★½ (gap: 3.0)

The Last Stop in Yuma County — ★★★★★ vs ★★ (gap: 3.0)

Jennifer's Body (2009) — ★★★★½ vs ★★ (gap: 2.5)

One Battle After Another — ★★★★★ vs ★★½ (gap: 2.5)

Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc — ★★★★★ vs ★★★½ (gap: 1.5)

Good Time (2017) — ★★★★★ vs ★★★½ (gap: 1.5)

🤝 Perfect Agreements

★★★★½ Perfect Blue (1997)

★★★ Mank (2020)

★★½ Smile (2022)

★½ The Loft (2014)

[where-your-eyes-dont-go]

1 Over X is a story that invites you to view it with several different lenses of analysis. It's also a story that makes sure no matter how you're analyzing it you'll sound like Eridan Obama copypasta. No way to avoid saying shit like "After confronting Ryan (the reactionary longing for an imagined golden past) and shutting out Miranda (the explanatory projects of modernity),"

[winterorbisthedevil]

Part 1, due to the Tumblr image limit. The bibliography is in part 2, available on the blog. Correction: There are 2.5 sexist comments in the story, rather than 1.5. The other is Domino referring to fake suicide attempts as "'girl try to kill herself'" (c14).

[escherflesh]

The Limit Of All Human Knowledge

[eikopilled]

you should read 1 Over X if you like horror/really strong prose/strong themes/general high quality writing. bavitz is an author who's almost never gone wrong for me and this is a straight banger already---get on the train while its still going

it's about X the everything app, and also about schizophrenia, and about horror (the genre), and about horror (the feeling), and about alchemy, and pumpkins

it's one of the most claustrophobic things i can remember reading and the character dynamics are as strong as theyve ever been in a work by bavitz.

bavitz loves to create mirrors and foils, characters with an absurd amount of parallels to each other, positioning everything in these thin rickety structures and then tapping at their bases until they all fall down and blend together; he likes to look at you as an author and ask you to think about the work. rare is the didactic bavitz work

1 Over X works this theme of mirrors parallels symmetries into the work itself; 1 Over X is about 1 Over X (the book inside the book) but it is also about 1 Over X by Bavitz himself. ive had genuine moments where ive questioned what is actually part of the work, on what level its reality is 'real;' the mixing of reality and fantasy common to Bavitz's pieces takes on a different and altogether more horrific hue in this light as you suddenly become never quite sure what is actually real, what is happening; it is about itself in such a very interesting way and i think everyone who's a fan of good stuff in general should take a look (at it or at the rest of his catalogue)

[lesbianboyfriend]

"What if," she says morosely, "there's nobody? There's nothing. You're yourself and everyone is everyone else. This impermeable wall between you. Oh, God. Nobody understands. Nobody ever will. We're shouting into the dark. There's no such thing as love. It's delusion. Am I the only one who gets it? Love! It makes me sick. Happy people only make me sicker. Ignoring reality. Projecting themselves onto this other person to tell themselves they're the one. Soul mates. Unnggckh! Only stupid people believe that. Stupid people have simple souls. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate this stupid world. I hate myself. I hate myself for having a soul nobody else will ever have. I hate being alone. Why can't everything be simple? There are just so many things. So many parts and pieces. The sum of all human knowledge in a single stupid"—she holds up her phone—"library. And it hurts to even try. That's the worst part. It hurts to even try to make enough sense of it so you can find someone else who makes the same sense of it as you. Nobody understands me. I don't understand anyone. And it keeps getting worse. Oh, God. It gets worse and worse."

1 Over X, Bavitz