Hey all! Interviewing Leather and Patreon news!
So, I started writing the first short story for Patreon. Once that was finished, I’d move on to the first Banter Latte tagged content, then another short story, and so on. The story was a prequel to “Interviewing Leather” the novella, about the last days of Dynamo Girl. I figured it’d be somewhere around 8,000 words.
33,000 words later, the Dynamo Girl novella is up as a beta draft for Patrons at the $5 and above. It’s actually not that much shorter than “Interviewing Leather” itself.
The plan’s still the same, mind. Next on the platter’s Lovelace½ #13 — which will be on Banter Latte after the beta hits Patreon for a review. That’s going to be a lot tighter — something over 5,000 words because that’s the deal, but this is going to be serial post length.
For the record, “Cannon” was written somewhat that way as well — it could be seen as an 11-part serial as easily as a novella.
My hope with the story was to add — here’s that word — perspective to Leather’s original crossing of the aisle from hero to villain. We knew how she described it — that at the end of the day she was more concerned with getting good press than doing good deeds. And I wanted that to continue to be valid… but even at the time I knew the story was a lot more complicated than that. Everything Leather told Chapman was truthful from her point of view, but that doesn’t mean it was accurate. I didn’t want to invalidate what we know — but maybe recontextualize it.
One can see Deej’s journey to Leather exactly as we saw it before — a hero who couldn’t hack it going bad. Or one can see it as a person pushed way beyond their limits. Was she right to cross the aisle? For that matter… how could it have been different?
I also wanted to answer a couple of other questions… like why two supervillains were in Bay City — a New Jersey city of like 11,000 people — in the first place.
In all this, we ended up getting a back door origin story for Dynamo Girl, which led into an origin of Leather. Also, Dynamo Girl misidentifies a candy and/or cow massage cream as a gum.
One reader’s described it as “painful to read,” and that makes sense. It’s a tragic story. But I think we got to see some of the joy of Dynamo Girl, as well as the pleasure Leather takes in her own life, too.
The draft can be read today with donation. The final story will be in the published anthology. And even though it’s much longer than anticipated, the plan is to meet the obligations of the patronage, so there’s lots more to come in Folio #1.
Next up? Andi gets to stop riding that bloody bicycle.
