Episode 953: One Story Done, One To Go

The portfolio is essentially done. Seems so silly now, worrying I wasn't leaving myself enough time to finish it. I could actually stay up and work on the last couple of hundred words needed to finish the first story properly and make the ending less abrupt, but I have to get up early for a seminar tomorrow. The changes I wanted to make to my second story aren't possible to incorporate without radically altering its premise, so I think I'm leaving it mostly intact. It's about an insomniac who has defaulted on NS, so I was thinking of writing in a twin brother who had stayed behind to serve, and how their sleep cycles synced up and disrupted the defaulter's life, at least until his brother dies in a training accident. Realised it wouldn't quite work though, unless I shifted the defaulter into a time zone further away from Singapore's. Otherwise, if he fell asleep at the same time his twin was going to bed on Tekong, that would still only be around 12.30 am. Hardly insomniac territory, is it? A greater time zone separation would kind of diminish how ridiculous his situation was though, since part of the story's effect is that two hours can really be considered spare change for international travellers. Ah well. Maybe I can turn the ideas I had for edits into a separate story and submit it to the Machine Of Death anthology?