A Caretaker's Soliloquy - Retrospective
So, it comes that time again for a story to end, this one being A Caretaker's Soliloquy, written for the June 2026 Monthly Writing Challenge on Honeyfeed.
I normally do a retrospective on all of my stories, but this is the first time I'm actually writing it down as a blog post. Why not make use of this platform, as they say?
So here's your warning for spoilers about the book and the world of Clio I'm trying build. If you want to stay uninformed or figure out the connections yourself, read this sometime else.
...all gone? Okay.
A Caretaker's Soliloquy is the ninth tale in the world of Clio I have currently written, or eighth completed if you want to be pedantic about A Fool's Errand not being finished yet. It develops the origin story of the fox girl (no name yet) first seen in The Mixing Market Chapter 4 and touches upon the origin of Stu Isu, the main character of The Chair is Magic!? and seen within The Mixing Market Chapter 7, Chaos! At the Halloween Festival Chapters 14-15, and various times during I am but a Cloud, Floating from Place to Place.
The story tells of their first meeting, and tries to develop the friendship / half-romance it eventually spawns into. I've written it more as a half-comedy half-serious piece given Stu's unshakeable confidence that he can't die in The Mixing Point. That's also why the story is told in mostly present tense in the first person, to provide those random ridiculous thoughts.
Timing-wise, it takes place during the First Era of the world, the first chapter before The Mixing Market, and the remaining after. On the story timeline scale:
- First Era
- Second Era
- Third Era
- Forth Era
You could say the story touches upon the origin of the world much more closely than the others, not that it really dives into those details. It only briefly eludes to everlasting war plaguing the First Era and the nonsensical reasons behind it.
So, with the basics out of the way, let's retrospect.
Starting with the positives, I think the mix of comedy and serious was done quite well. Even after a second readthrough, the jokes are still relatively funny, and the serious sections stand out quite clearly from the shifts in tone. The characters are easily distinguishable given the rather different personalities of the three. It also helps that fox girl speaks only a few words at a time, whereas Stu always uses a bit more, allowing for the conversation to flow rather smoothly.
As for the negatives, the last two chapters really reflect the lack of planning or notes I had in mind, which directly affected how they read compared to the first four chapters. They are quite rough and have the storytelling between a first (really bad writing) and second draft (decent writing). As for first-person present tense, there are definitely a few changes that I would make. First, I'd remove anything that is 'X does this' since it feels more like reading a traditional story compared to the more thought-telling nature of the story. There are also some parts that partially slipped into third-person and past-tense the way it read, which is not bad per-se, but definitely could've been changed slightly with a bit more time. Though, for a few hours of work, the chapters didn't turn out so bad.
All in all, I think it's a 5.9/10 story. If I spent a bit more time to polish up Chapters 5-6, it would've been a 6/10. Maybe that sounds too lenient or harsh, but I believe most of my stories are around the 5-7/10 range. Most of the time, it's only because of my decent writing, but the others is clearly due to time constraints when it comes to releasing.
Oh yeah! There were even comments this time! It's been so long since I've seen those. I wish they happened more.
Well, that's all I have. There are a lot more nuanced details, but those are so minor that they don't really fit in a blog post and are more notes for future stories. I need to start compiling a wiki of the stories soon too so I can keep the facts in order and... 'manipulate' them as I see fit.
As for some more fun spoilers... well, stay tuned for next week. There are two new challenges, which means two new stories, both in the world of Clio.