This story embodies the quintessence of my long writing cycles.  I started writing this one around the same time I started writing "The Masterpiece Society" in early 2006, 12 (!) years ago.  It had no working title, and in typical fashion I wrote about 500-600 words and then left it alone to let my ideas stew.  Months later, I accidentally deleted its text file from my hard drive and was only able to recover half of it, in two separate parts.  A little while later I became less enamored with the idea anyway and was still demoralized at losing half of it, so I just abandoned it.  In fact, I have referenced this story on four separate occasions - here, here, here, and here.  "#6" became "The Masterpiece Society"; "#7" is this story.

I went nearly a decade without ever looking at the remaining fragments of the story.  Then I randomly thought about it again a couple days ago and decided to give it another look.  The idea became endearing to me again, so I pulled it into Google Docs today and rewrote the whole thing damn near from scratch.  Precisely four lines of dialogue between Alyssa and Katie remain from the original version I started in 2006.

It's far from my best work, but it was fun to write - it's not often that I find myself smiling while writing a story.  I actually LOL'd when I read the Prg parts aloud.

It's also the first time in a long time that I've written bursting into a story.  Alyssa was going to burst in the original version as well, although I had second thoughts about it this time, so I decided to make the ending ambiguous.  After all, Prg had no trouble returning her to normal several times before that.  If you prefer to think that Alyssa was safely reassembled after bursting, you're welcome to think that; if you prefer to think that Alyssa is gone, that's no less valid.  Personally, I actually don't know.

Excited about some stuff I'm planning to do here in 2018!