Okay, here’s one I was hemming and hawing over, until getting a little nudge from someone on social media.
About a year ago, I was working on a story called Mixer. The premise put a group of men into an experiment. Half are told they are going to find love. The other half are transformed into beautiful women and told they can win a cash prize for forming connections with the men.
It was fixing to be a fun, cute story, but as the pages rolled on I felt it was missing something at the heart of it. I just didn’t feel that it had that “Liam Slade something” that I like people to think of when they see my writing. It wasn’t the first story I’ve ever dropped cold — it’s not even the longest story I’ve ever dropped cold. I had, and still have, thoughts of reworking it into something shorter and snappier, either for a free story on the site or a future collection, but there is a lot ahead of it on my to-do list.
The other day, I saw a conversation on Bluesky about transformation scenes. Emily had mentioned enjoying a particular type of transformation scene, where the main character watches others transform with a feeling of dread. I piped up that I had actually started writing a story (Mixer) to do this exact scene, and that maybe I would post an excerpt. The other party, Amber, encouraged me to do so, and, well, here we are.
You can now read the first ~7600 words of Mixer here. This comprises both the transformation and the immediate aftermath.
As a caveat, while I do tend to be very fussy with even my first drafts, it has not really been copy edited or prepared in any specific way for posting. It’s raw. Some inconsistencies, errors and unwanted stylistic quirks will be present. I hope you know my writing well enough to know that anything objectionable about this piece is not representative of the work I like to put out, but I’ll let it stand as an example of the process.
Please enjoy, and let me know if you think I should have kept going with this one!
Be kind,
Liam
Since you said you were considering rewriting it one day, here’s what I would do. I would reduce the number of characters – or at least reduce the number of named characters. Maybe leave room for 1 extra guy and 1 extra girl to play folly against our main characters. I would focus on the 3 friends, alternating their POVs. I would spend longer on Mike and Paul’s transformations. I love the setup as Dan will try to woo the girls, and the girls will either resist or play along to get the money.
Yeah, uncomplicating it is definitely the idea. I think for a huge-scale story I wanted to explore as many subplots as possible, but with a smaller one we can narrow it down to the core three and a few outsiders. Who knows, I might feel inspired!
You could always do multiple stories from the same event from different perspectives if you really wanted.