You always have a good plot hanging around inside your head. But when you try to write it into a long novel as you always intend it to be, it doesn't necessarily work out.
Here are a few short stories that I hoped would go on for a while but turned...
This story came in a single day; so suddenly that I can't exactly remember how and when. Compared to 'The Story of a Dead Man', which I had been thinking about for months, a day is quite short.
And, as much as it came fast, it is short and... definitely complicated.
Idea
I think it originated most likely from Ted Chiang's 'The Alchemist and the Merchant's Gate'. However, please note that I hadn't been thinking about using the same name for the item Brad discovered and uses to surprise and impress the protagonist in the story. I honestly think I did a very poor job with how (my) Gate would function, compared to Chiang's Gate. However, I think the tone of the entire story was appropriate.
Tone
The tone is kept in a storytelling, explanatory way, which was one of the first things to pop up on my mind after the plot did. Also, I did my best to make the protagonist-whose name isn't revealed till the very end-feel curiosity and the incapability to understand the Gate fully; I was worried that a lot of readers might not realize what the Gate can do, so I tried to make the protagonist do the job of empathizing with them.
How the Gate Works
Now, let me explain it one last time.
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The further you get away from 0, the greater the entire sum of your location grows. My Gate works the same way.
The further you get away from the Gate once it's been flipped, the more forces you feel on yourself-friction, gravity, pressure, etc. It's just like trying to walk on Earth for a few minutes after being in space for months.
Now, I think that was the easiest and simplest explanation.
Title
Lastly, the title is one of the few twisted and mischievous elements in this story(in 'The Story of Dead Man, almost every statement or paragraph was mischievous!). People who've only read the title might think that the story is a very dark dystopian novel or something, but here, as you might now know, 'negative' means the set of negative numbers and the world which is opened once the Gate is flipped.
Now, since this story has no life lessons or something, I'm gonna end the storynotes for 'A Negative World' here. And I'm really hoping that some more elaborate plots on Sci-fi might come knocking my mental door soon and create something much better and stand-alone than the one.
