| abstract
| - A Short-Lived Dream was a one-shot collection I had decided to create even before The Heels of the Unknown was completed. In the weeks and months after finishing THOTU, I began working on ideas for a new one-shot collection. For a while, I had a few ideas floating around in my head and no real plan for how many stories, which themes, or what kind of tone I was going for. Below, I will show some bullet points for information that I kept while coming up with this one-shot collection. This information covers roughly a one month period: 8/22/2016: came up with idea for a ginyu/alien story, and named it 9/4/2016: came up with idea for successor to dabura story and another story about korin 9/16/2016: came up with first list of six stories, decided to make a story in the spirit of every one-shot collection I was involved in except dragon ball what if...; none of the stories except captain ginyu one had names at this point; narrowed broly songs down to either paperface or lullabye for wayne 9/20/2016: came up with idea to have multiple stories in each category, depending on how many ideas I came up with 9/21/2016: a lot of stories were thought up and categorized into the various collections, with most of them being created on this day. At first, I was going to produce 1 story apiece as DLC for each of my previous one-shot collections, including Dragon Ball: Legacies, but not including the non-canon Dragon Ball What If.... From late August through September 2016, I slowly came up with several story ideas and eventually decided that I needed to produce more than one story for some of the collections, with my DLC for THOTU and The Black and White Collection clearly needing multiple stories to work. Astute readers will also notice that there are some ideas mentioned above that I never actually used. One of my earliest ones was about kid Ginyu and him discovering his body switching powers. This one-shot was never written, but at least in the early days, it was the one-shot I most associated with this collection. I may or may not write that one-shot later in the future. This collection served as a repository for many old ideas I had. Ice Age Coming for example was an idea I almost used in THOTU. This collection is also likely the last one that I will have so many of my old style of one-shots in it, like Superior, Small, and Untouchable. Focusing on the backstories or showing cool little side stories for my fanon characters has become more of a priority of mine since writing this story. That was somewhat apparent in THOTU, with four of those stories being about fanon characters (and the final three stories in that collection were all about fanon characters, setting a specific tone moving onto this collection). This idea became more widespread in ASLD, though I certainly wrote a lot of stories simply about canon characters. 5 out of the 11 canon stories are about canon characters primarily, so this shift in character focus did happen in ASLD, but not fully. In my next one-shot collection after ASLD, Ikigai, there will be a much larger focus on fanon characters. My style of one-shots for The Brady Patrick Collection, for instance, will probably not be returned to soon. Really short emotional one-shots about canon characters is something I've been known for, but I am now moving away from that style of writing for the most part. So now onto this story. Not So Far is a lovely, interesting way to start off A Short-Lived Dream, in my opinion, because it wasn't planned to be in the collection at all. Originally, I was going to do two THOTU-era stories. I had many candidates for the THOTU DLC, including a story about Sertung meeting Vados and Champa and giving them Verlate's mind prison, a story about Rikyu's father, a story about Roshi and Oolong that was cut from THOTU, a story about an original Majin that was also cut from THOTU, and a story about Audacci's origins. Eventually, I decided to bump the THOTU DLC to 4 stories (two additional spring and autumn sections to mimic the famous Japanese poetry collections of the Kokinshu and Shin Kokinshu having twice as many books of poetry about spring and autumn as they did about summer and winter). So I did the same thing with THOTU. Even so, it surprises me now that I picked Not So Far from the story options I had. I actually didn't use too many of my leftover ideas for the THOTU DLC. I didn't write about Sertung or the true Majin or Rikyu's father. Audacci's backstory (in a way) was written, though, and Roshi's story was kept. The autumn stories were both new creations. Not So Far comes almost exclusively from a class I was taking in the Fall 2016 semester on Japanese literature. This story was influenced by The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon. In that collection of stories and accounts, there was one tale about a female cat promoted to the fifth rank of the court whom the emperor loved dearly. The cat gets into an altercation with a dog that is really sad. I made reference to this story signficantly in the story that Korin tells to Yajirobe and Ledas. Overall, the story impacted me greatly, and I'm not sure why exactly. On the very day that I heard this story - October 5, 2016 - I wrote the first words of Not So Far on a google document - the endoplasmic reticulum joke that Ledas makes. This was spur-of-the-moment writing, and I wasn't concerned about themes or writing style or any of that jive as I wrote this story. It was an idea that came out of nowhere and one I felt I had to write. In terms of what I planned for this story, there wasn't much. I wrote about poker and Ledas hanging out with Korin and Yajirobe because I wanted to. I just wanted to show what Ledas was doing after TF, but in a way that was far less consequential than The Great Sushi-Eating Contest. I assumed when I wrote this story that it would take place after The Great Sushi-Eating Contest, but that didn't turn out to be the case. This was a story very much about character interactions and seeing how Ledas is like around his friends. I got the idea for Nir's name origin around this time as well. So there's a lot of little stuff in this story. There's not really any profound truth or plot point that will come up later - the Nir name origin reveal is about the most plot-consequential thing to come out of this story. But it was fun to layer in the character development of the three characters, especially telling this from Yajiroe's perspective. I chose not to tell it from Ledas' perspective because I wanted to have 2 fanon and 2 canon perspectives to keep the balance of THOTU. It works better not having Ledas be the protagonist here. He's just another character, like how Piccolo might appear in a story about Gohan or something like that. It was a cool thing to try since Ledas is usually the protagonist when he appears. I wrote about him similarly to how I wrote about him in Dragon Ball Z: In Requiem, but with more nuance this time, I hope. So in terms of the actual writing, aside from the one scene I already mentioned, I began writing on October 6, 2016, and I wrote from 6:58 pm to 2:28 am on October 7th. I wrote off and on that night, getting up to the point where Korin introduces the Nir cat in that time. I was drunk the entire time while writing this story, I think. In the very early hours of October 8th, I continued writing, getting up to "“Y-yeah… I guess…” Ledas scratched the back of his head." by the end of that night. I continued writing again later that day from 12:34 pm to 3:47 pm, and then later from 11:26 pm to 5:56 am on October 9th. Obviously, I didn't edit continuously for those time periods, especially since I was drunk, but by 5:56 am on October 9th, I had completed this story and edited about half of the first section. From 3:06 pm to 5:54 pm, I finished editing the story, and I posted it not long after on the wiki. Not So Far, much like the other opening stories produced for a story collection (Sixth, Bluestreaker, and Glory come to mind), has a slightly different feel to it than the rest of the stories in this one-shot collection. This is mainly because I didn't know what kind of writing style or thematic stuff I was going to do for all of the stories - that would just happen naturally. As it turned out, with ASLD, I wrote in a fragmentory, minimalistic style that is not reflected too much in this story. Not So Far's prose is the least like any other ASLD one-shot's prose. It was particular fun for me to have three stories within a story here. It was complicated to work out, but quite fun to come up with. Having each story be of varying complexity and length is related to the characterizations of each character as well. Notice how Korin has the longest story, while Yajirobe has the shortest one. Korin's mythological storytelling is contrasted heavily with Yajirobe's trite little tale about catching a boar to eat. I'll get more into this stuff in the endnotes. I think in general, this story is optimistic. It is unlike many other ASLD stories because of that. A lot of the other stories in this collection aren't really happy. Even though this one has some subtle allusions to the self-destructive tendencies of Ledas, I still think this is a tale of hope. The song I chose for this story, which is also Yajirobe's theme song, evokes this hopeful, energetic tone well. It is interesting to me to see this in ASLD, because I think a lot of the stories are about the suppresion of emotion and energy and movement (though obviously not all of them are). In a way, Not So Far is an outlier. I suppose that's alright, though. Being entirely honest, I love this story. I think it's one of the best one-shots I've ever written, and it's exactly the kind of story I want to read. This is one of my stories that I come back to most often to re-read. I enjoy reveling in the energy and wit of the prose. So I'm quite familiar with this story, and I think that it's likely that this'll end up as one of my top-ranked ASLD stories. I would certainly be surprised if it doesn't.
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