| abstract
| - I think I hit my stride in this collection with Cool Cat, the cheeky comedy story left to round out the first half of The Heels of the Unknown. This was a story that when I came up with a final list of 8 stories on August 15, 2016 didn't even exist. In fact, on January 12 2016, when I came up with the new list of stories, including the addition of Starfall and Crushing Blue and the removal of a Sertung story and a Roshi/Oolong story, Cool Cat still didn't exist. It wasn't even on the radar yet. That came months later, making it by far the rawest story, conceptually. I did almost no work on this story before I began working on it. It was the shortest blurb of any of them on my notepad document: "4. Korin - origin story, featuring Garlic, Makyans, Beezelbub, and others." Yet, in so few words lay so many possibilities. It was a daunting task when I finally decided to do it. I knew I could make this a 12,000 word epic, and that could potentially not even scratch the surface of a Korin origin story. This was the story I worried about the most out of all of them going into the collection. This is the story I expected to be not only the longest one-shot I've ever written, but one of the longest stories I've ever written. I expected it to be a tremendous amount of work, with the Bojack story being the second hardest on the onset. Of course, as it turned out, neither of those two ended up being the hardest. This one especially. I wrote Cool Cat after getting drunk for several nights in a row. Those were wild nights. I've never got drunk three nights in a row before. As anyone who knows KV knows, I hate alcohol. I only get drunk for the effects on my writing (mostly), where I get way more bold and funny. Anyways, on the first night, which was May 17, 2016, I wrote from 12:01 am to 3:14 am off and on, writing up to Korin buying the Sacred Water from Beelzebub. I went to bed. Then I woke up that same day, and edited that part while sober, from 4:13 pm to 5:12 pm actually writing a bit at the end, extending the story up until Korin raced after Beelzebub and tumbleweeds. That was one of the few parts written sober, and in general, it is rare for me to continue writing after editing. Usually, I will edit a section or a fragment, and once the edit is complete, I'll take a break that can span anywhere from 15 minutes to several days. But in this case, I just continued right on adding a few hundred more words because I was inspired and in a funny mood in the morning. It's also rare that I write after waking up. I usually write near the end of the day, hopefully going into the night, and that was not the case here at all. So anyways, I did take a break after that, resuming writing from 7:44 pm to 3:44 pm (very sporadically!), editing a lot of the page, including adding a lot of the opening, and taking the story all the way to the end of the first section. Then I went to bed again, passing out in a drunken haze. I remember being quite fond of this story at that stage as I went to bed that night, being excited because it was unlike anything I'd written before. But I also knew I wasn't done, that I hadn't managed to finish it on that spectacular 8 hour span. And that was a bit disconcerting. I tend to write slower while drunk. It took a long time to write the story. I knew what I wanted to write, and it was making me laugh, and I had the exact wording in my head, but I was getting distracted and tired, as one does when one is drunk. So it was a struggle. I remember I definitely forgot several jokes and great one-liners. But, there's nothing I can do about that. I got up that next day of May 18, 2016, and continued editing from 3:35 pm until 7:08 pm, taking a few breaks in there. Anyways, for that amount of time, I finalized the entire first section. It was hard work, and I did a lot of added-in lines and changes, especially to make sure the story could be canon but still absurd. Certainly, I spent many hours on this story, and we haven't even gotten to the second section yet! The second section originally had two lines written by my friend's sister (hz note: Julia is based on her). They are as follows: "A gold atom walks into a bar. The bartender says, “‘A U, get out!”" and "Don’t trust atoms they make up everything.". I deleted them before writing the second section. Those jokes are okay, and certainly she laughed when she told them to me, knowing this would open the second scene of a Korin one-shot. But those were what she said. I deemed them too random to be included. So yeah. Quality control was top, despite this being such a drunk story. So yeah, after the editing on May 18th, I got drunk and began writing the second section. I wrote it from 9:39 pm to 11:09 pm, finishing the whole story in that time. I was quite thrilled with this, as I was drunk, and I was pumped. I was ready to finish this story and continue the trend of the comedy story being released in a matter of days after the long-planned serious story in each THOTU binary. So I began to edit from 11:16 pm to 11:51 pm, while still drunk mind you. I was sober enough to make sure I was following canon and not making grammar or spelling errors. And of course I was trying to make it the best I could. As a consequence of all of this, I remember very little of this story. I wrote most of it while drunk, and I even edited some of it while drunk. I made up almost all of the plot while on the spot or during the editing phase. Very little of this was planned out. The stuff with certain characters was planned though - stuff with Beelzebub, for example, and the Makyans, including Garlic's ancestor, and finding the power pole and sacred water. But how those characters interacted with Korin, how they progressed the plot, and what the other aspects of the plot were were all improv'd on the spot. I knew this was a comedy as I was drunk and as I was not, so this was intentional comedy. I don't remember much of what I improv'd, so we'll get to that below, together. I remember finding this one funny, and I also know that it's the craziest of the stories in this collection, but I don't remember too many specifics. There's Makyans, and I think Paul McCartney makes an appearances, but... there's not much more I remember. In terms of things that were planned, this story originally had a different wall scroll before I posted it, but I changed that as I did a last minute google image search for cat wall scrolls. I somehow found the one used for Cool Cat below, and it's really funny and cool and majestic, and perfect for Whiskers the Wondercat in my estimation. The theme song is Revolution by the Beatles. It was a variety of different themes when other stories, such as the Roshi/Oolong story or The Benefactor's story, were in the fourth slot of this collection, but when I settled on this slot being a comedic Korin story, I gave it the theme song of "Hey Bulldog" by the Beatles. I thought that song was cheeky enough for Korin, the best example of such by the Beatles. But when I was getting closer to writing this one, I became more interested in "Revolution". Revolution has that cheeky swagger, that anarchist carefree swagger. It was better suited for what I was trying to do in this story, both with the plot and with Korin's development. On an unrelated note, if I ever do another one-shot about Korin, I'd make the theme song "Revolution 1" this time. Anyways, onto the endnotes I say!
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