Undestiny

"Undestiny" was written tonight, immediately following my completion of my NaNoWriMo project for this year. I'm not really sure how to introduce it, since it's not... really... a... short... story...

Just... yeah. Welcome to my world, I guess.

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Undestiny

Day One

It was only a child, yet it was a beginning. There was nothing surprising about this child, not like other stories. So many great tales begin at the birth of a chosen child, and from the beginning, the greatness of the baby is made known. There is something about the cry of a child of destiny that sets it apart from other newborns. As for this child, it was only a child, indistinguishable from any other by cry or look. It was only a child.

I decided early on that there would be nothing to set my main character on the path of destiny from the very beginning. No special events at birth, no demonstration of unnatural power in the newborn babe, no loss of mother in childbirth. Granted, there were many books I enjoyed reading that had those kinds of things in them, some special circumstances surrounding the birth of the hero that would all come to the forefront later in life and be completely obvious then, proving to a doubting character that he was, indeed, the chosen one.

Hell, why even bother with there being a “chosen one” anyway? It’s been done to death. I suppose there has to be one, though, or else anyone can fit the job. If the regular people didn’t know what to expect, then just anyone could speak up and claim to be the one doing… whatever heroic deeds needed doing. People will cling to anyone who seems to know what he’s doing, who seems to know what’s going on, even if it is just an act.

Unless… someone just fell into the middle of the action and did the deeds without knowing it. Then what? Does that mean he was chosen anyway? Or was it simply chance? I scratched my head and took a bite of the now-quite-melted candy bar next to the keyboard. After years of writing, I’ve developed a taste for melted candy bars. There’s nothing like them. I licked the chocolate off my fingers, poised my hands over the keyboard, and thought some more.

Of course, at that point I had lost my train of thought, because I wound up searching the interweb for funny pictures of cats, and then my own cat distracted me, and then my neighbors started shouting obscenities in the walkway between buildings of the apartment complex. They always do that at the worst possible times. Fine, I’ll go to the bathroom while you finish your little curse-fest and go back inside. Kay? Kay.

Day Two

A child… but not a chosen one. Just a birth. But then won’t that make readers believe what they’ve been fed through the media a hundred times, that writing about the birth of this particular child means something? “Everything is there for a reason,” has been a mantra of mine for years. If I went back and read something about a birth like this, I would expect it to mean something.

Okay, scratch the birth process, and go ahead and skip the whole normal-seeming childhood peppered with strange occurrences, because that would make me expect the same thing. Predestination is not something easily worked with… well actually, it’s really easy to do. I guess that’s why so many people have done it. Well, I’m not going to. I need some time to think. I’ll go get distracted again.

Day Three

Okay, there’s a man, not a child. His childhood was exceedingly normal and boring… but way, that might be cause to suspect. Who really has a normal childhood? Damnit!

Fine. He’s always been pretty boring until something very strange happened! Aliens invaded… no. That’s been done. His parents die. Okay, that hasn’t been done to death. Yeah, right. Um…he loses his… no. He gets a… no. A truck full of toxic waste… no, he’s not a superhero.

This is getting frustrating. Everything has been done. More than once. Everything. It’s practically impossible to really have an original thought.

Oh, hi kitty. Be right back.

I’m back. My cat went away. By went away I mean decided to lie down right next to me and attempt to hit the delete button at every opportunity. Cats are not very good at constructive criticism.

So where am I now? No surprises at birth, because it’s been done. I don’t want to do a completely uneventful childhood, but any events that might make it interesting have already been done. So… we’re at square one. I have a character. And he’s just… going about normal life, until he suddenly finds himself doing deeds foretold long before he was born, even though he’s not the one foretold to do them!

Yeah, right. Foretold deeds have been done and done and done, too. So no prophecies. He’s just… doing deeds that… will save the world. Because the world needs saving.

Right. Every world has some huge cataclysm about to happen unless someone-- not a child of destiny, mind you-- steps up and does something. And that person just… falls into doing it, because that’s totally believable. I can just see that under-enthusiastic lady from the gas station on the corner suddenly finding herself saving the world even while she goes about her regular, everyday life. It would be a far-fetched set of circumstances indeed that would draw her into a world-saving endeavor. You know what, I’ll do this later. Where’s my candy bars?

Day Four

I’m really going to write today. I promise.

So we have a John Everyman with no surprising childhood, nothing special about him at all, and then… something… and happily ever after.

You know, what? I’ll deal with him later. World-saving. Let’s deal with that. Every world has a problem, right? Like our own. We totally have Armageddon-inducing problems right on our doorsteps. Like, if someone doesn’t do something, we’re all going to die in a year, because… we just are. That’s the way events have been playing since the beginning of time, all just looping and spiraling and shooting straight to right now, this moment, when if something certain doesn’t happen, everything just… poof!

I’ll believe that when I see it. Real life doesn’t have those villains, not like the media paints them anyway. I mean, a real life murderer is one thing… but for all the murderers in the world to be part of one big plot to overthrow all the governments of the world at exactly the same time, and then there will be a big coup while no one normal knows what’s going on…

Stupid interweb. I just got distracted again. Apparently I had mail. Heh. Heh heh. Now my train of thought’s gone again. Damnit!

Day Five

I am not dealing with this today.

Day Six

Nope.

Day Seven

I will write something eventually, I swear.

Day Eight

Day Nine

Day Ten

Okay, I’ve decided. I’m writing. And guess what! It’s going to be just like everything else out there: full of clichés and ideas that have been chewed up and spat back out by Earth’s media for decades, centuries! It’s going to be the same old ideas tossed together in the same old ways, with the same old characters facing the same unbelievable problems that we’ve all come to expect.

But guess what? It’s going to stand apart, because I wrote it, and no one’s written like me before.