Jan 19, 2025
To:Steward McOy
I don’t know if I can make a comment to hold a candle to the complexity of yours.
Parallel in Two is a story crafted only with passion and coffee. My goal was to create a plot line with a depth unheard of in other entries—stuff like complex lore and lots of mostly-real science. So I’m glad you think it shone through a little.
The ARG was actually thrown together by me and my little brother, who’s more of a coder than I am. We had very little time and we wanted it out on a VERY specific date: 12/24. (This fraction, simplified, is one-half, a recurring number all throughout this story.) Our time crunch is the reason we couldn’t do anything more spectacular with the website—I had much bigger plans for things more than just file documents. Interactive charts, several accounts for other scientists, wayyy more lore. Unfortunately, we just didn’t have the time for it all, so the only code which does anything out of the ordinary is the one in the synopsis, which I had him code before anything else.
I don’t expect this story to win, or even to make finals. I want it to! But I don’t count on it and never did. I wrote this book because I wanted to, so badly. The contest was an opportunity for me to try it out. So I won’t cry if it doesn’t get adapted or doesn’t gain a community, because hell, I’m eighteen years old and if I can do something like this now, imagine what my future will be like. (I fully intend to pursue creative writing and illustration as my career.)
The way the second act works is surprisingly simple. Every chapter alternates between two similar parallels, slowly unfolding ever-so-slightly differently until the Transversal goes off, where they’re revealed to have gone in entirely different directions. It was LOADS of fun to write in all the tiny little details—for example, the very first chapter of Act II, Arufa learns that Ghiles is a doctor, not an agent. But in the second chapter, she still calls him Agent Ghiles, and in the third she calls him Doctor again. Tiny things absolutely NO ONE would notice.
I also toyed with some clever word use. Near the ends of the Collapse chapters, Marsia’s death uses the word ‘dexterity’ and Arufa’s uses ‘sinister’. The words mean nothing on their own, but derive from the Latin for ‘right’ and ‘left’ respectively, correlating to each other’s timelines and to their brain sidedness. Even further, the cover shows Arufa’s body predominantly in the right side, where her head is closer to the left—to symbolize how she’s trapped in Underside (the right brain) but in her mind she’s left-brained. Obviously vice-versa for Marsia, you get how they work in parallel at this point.
As I stated in another comment, I think my ideal length for this would be closer to double, around 128k. (Get it. It’s a power of two.) I’m confident the two worst parts of the novel are the fabricated emotional connection between Arufa and Marsia, and the fast and furious pacing. I feel very bad about Ghiles, too, knowing how much better I could have done with his character. He’s my favorite from this fic, I think, and I wish I’d had the word count and/or foresight to establish his character earlier on.
I wanted to spend way more time in X2, but unfortunately, halves are halves, and the second act wouldn’t have had any impact at all were it compressed to a measly 10-20k at the end of the novel. I really think most of my personal obsession with this thing comes from how wildly the MCs’ characters change afterwards, and in order to make that work, we’d need way more time to get to know them. So again with the word count thing. :(
To be honest with you, I think you’re one of the last people who will read this novel. Maybe Otk will lock in and read it? And I think once I finish Chrono Knight, Katsu will read me back. But that’s about it, and that’s okay. Judges be how they will, this novel is for the dedicated minority, and in the end, if I can inspire just one person to try something like this on their own, I think it was worth writing.
Thank you for taking the time to read the novel to completion! It means a lot to me that you took a few days to just try to wrap your head around my strange, autistic brainchild. I don’t know how much you enjoyed it, but being real, if you’re here, you probably liked it a little, at least. If there’s one good thing about this novel, I’ll take it and run to my next project with haste. Which may or may not use the events in this novel as a basis depending on whether I win (unlikely). Either way, glad you checked it out, and happy writing!
(I’ll send you one more file code that was super duper hard to find over DMs. I think you’ll enjoy it, maybe.)
Thanks for everything!
— Kimbrough
