Happiness Found (Cap and Short Story)

We all deserve happiness!

So this cap started off in very unusual way for me.  For the most part when I go to cap it's either after looking at someone's preferences (or at least getting my mind into the space to make a cap for a particular person), or after looking at random images until one speaks to me.

But this one came about as an experiment.  You see I was writing a post on my other blog about how a simple good mood can be maintained, and possibly even be used for writing   I don't get into a genuinely good mood all that often, especially these last few years and I found myself in one today.  While writing up the post I realized that I'm normally in a good mood when away from being Caitlyn.  So this was a rare opportunity to try capping while in a mood like this.

So I cued up the music that would help maintain my good mood, loaded up an image that I had stewing away for a long time and stared to write.  I've probably had this image for close to three months.  The only vague idea I had for it was that it was the heroine finally accepting her femininity and finding happiness by making love to her kidnapper/master/husband.

Let me tell you... when I'm in a good mood I WRITE.  I had no outline or even vague idea of where to begin, but I just started writing.  Several paragraphs in and I knew I would never fit it into one panel.  I figured I could probably use three or maybe even four of the images from this set...I would just have to have a line or two hinting at what was going on.  But when I reached the third page of story and had only just reached the part about the surgery, I stopped thinking of it as a cap and thought of it the same way I thought of "Getting Clean".  I would write it out as a short story and then take the gist of what I wrote and condence it down into a cap.

The only change I made at this point was making the generic characters into Jennifer and myself.   It's not really a true 'Jennifer' cap, but I think she'll enjoy the story, and I owe her.  When I got done writing the story it was just over five pages and just over 3000 words.  Condensing it down into a single panel would be difficult so I opened up a new document and wrote out the key points that needed to be in it.  Jeremy and Calvin's outlook on life.  Calvin's discovery of Jeremy's bookmarks.  Calvin blackmailing and training.  The surgery.  The honeymoon.  I was cutting a LOT of the story out, but I knew that even keeping that little in, it would be hard to fit it into a single cap.

So I got to work.  I would read about one of those key parts in the story, then write it out as short as I could.  I tried to pull as much actual writing as I could since I genuinely liked the tone of the story, but there wasn't much that I could copy word for word.

Oddly enough once I had it cut down I realized one thing I had missed.... naming the main character.  And I had massaged each paragraph to fit into the space perfectly, so I couldn't just shoehorn in a line or two.   So.. I guess the story is dedicated to Jennifer while the cap is more generic.  I think the cap works well... it's obviously more rushed in tone than the story, but that's just from covering so much ground with so few words.

I posted the story over at Caitlyn's Musings in it's entirety, and you can red it over there..  If you want to read it and comment there, I'd love to hear your thoughts.  Of course I'd also love to hear what you think of the cap on it's own here as well!