'Create a short story indicating a shift in the health continuum.'

That was the assignment instruction that prompted me to make this work.

But soon enough, such a story spiraled out of control. A story that was meant to last for 20-ish pages, it had almost quadrupled that goal to a point where it no longer was an assignment but a passion project.

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Initially, the story idea was developed months before ever attempting this project, where I discussed the idea with a collaborative friend where it was put on a table for emotional story ideas. 

Ultimately, this idea was left to collect dust after we chose a certain topic to touch on. But I guess I had the chance to reuse such a concept for this assignment (albeit it was remixed slightly to fit the logic of this assignment...)

 

SPOILER ALERT (Use the mouse to left-click and drag over the text in highlight if you read the story already.)
 

The original idea was to have a childhood friend ghost that pushed a shut-in protagonist to move on from the event that cause the friend's death. But over time, the more the protagonist moved on, the childhood friend ghost would gradually disappear until one day, the protagonist returned home to see her completely just gone. However, I felt that idea would take a long time to execute it the way I would like it to, despite its potential emotional impact. So when I approached this project, I already had the protagonist on the verge of moving on but still wanting to stay in the past. And from there, the idea shifted from being a ghost to one being a hallucinatory manifestation of the childhood friend the protagonist lost where it was a balance of accepting reality and living in the comfort of delusions.

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Along with that, I drew a great deal of inspiration from psychological stories such as OMORI with themes of moving on, Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0: Thrice Upon A Time with a structure of a psych-stricken protagonist and their subsequent liberation from their torment, and Fate/stay night for its writing style at times, especially the uses of the em-dash.

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To be fair, this was the most I've ever suffered from a period of stagnation while writing, perhaps writer's block. There was a point where I got peer review for my first draft and while it was somewhat good, trying to rework the project to a point where I could hopefully satisfy most of the review's suggestion proved demotivating as I realized my project was much more disorganized and lackluster in certain areas than I thought. I ended up having about half a month/almost a whole month where I made little to no progress until I realized the summer was about to end.

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From there, I noted that instead of writing on a computer, I found that writing on a notebook proved much more stimulating in the present since I can actively write ideas on the sidelines of drafts along with active revisions here and there, to show that in my mistakes, there was progress after all the cross-outs and erasures. And to me, that proved to be the defining mark to finally go forward in my project.

 

So after 75 pages of work and about 19.1k words, I can hopefully and proudly present to you my first novella:

                                       

                                                          Hansha. Or in English, Reflection.

 

*I may put up more revised versions as time progresses where I may edit parts here and there.