Wax & Feathers

A Tweet Tragedy

The next Temporal Tale up for your delectation is Wax and Feathers: in which Icarus learns his last lesson when he ignores the advice of his father the famed craftsman Daedalus. A classic cautionary tale that sticks a finger in the eye of both arrogance and ambition.

Broadcast Wednesday 18th January through to Friday 20th. 9.00 am EST (2.00 pm GMT) on @TemporalTales.

Not only does it plug directly into man’s desire to fly, the story of Icarus generates resonance down through the history of storytelling on so many levels: heed the wisdom of your elders, know your limitations, read the bloody instruction manual. I’ve added no twists, there’s no jet packs or magic; it is simply my interpretation of a well known story. The ending is known, it’s how we get there that I hope is worth reading.

This particular version of the story wasn’t written expressly as temporal fiction, but it was written entirely as dialogue which makes it eminently suitable —if a little different to what has been broadcast so far. The only major issue I had was whether to send it out over one day or three. The play-like structure, however, made the decision for me; it will be broadcast over three days as three acts.

The format of Wax and Feathers is a departure from the diary-style text updates from the protagonist as narrator of the previous stories. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but this is an experiment to see how something more traditional can be drip-fed over the twitter ether and still work as a narrative.

The other departure is that it is a dialogue and not a monologue. This introduces its own problems, especially as I haven’t ascribed the character’s names to each line, though I hope that there is sufficient individual voice for each character to make them identifiable, but we shall see.