Writing progress report · 3:45am Sep 3rd, 2023
I'm happy to say that things are still on course, despite quite a lot of changes being made to the story. Duvet and I have been in near-daily communication, talking about ways to improve the story and make it the best it can possibly be. Though one concern we have is that the MLP fandom may have moved on. Meaning fimfiction itself feels like a ghost town lately, compared to what it was like back in 2014. I'm not quite sure the people who remain here are interested in a dramatic and complex action/adventure story. It isn't slice of life. It isn't HiE. It isn't clop. We'll see how this goes.
Recent efforts have been in the expansion of our antagonist, Razor. You have just briefly met Razor in the recently published chapter 5. Previously, he wasn't planned on making an appearance in the story until much later, perhaps chapter 35+ or so? But Duvet has been a great help in brainstorming ways to integrate him into the early and middle events of the story. In particular, the scene you just read is brand new. This was Duvet's suggestion of perhaps tying Razor in with the shooting of the colt at the school. Before, and honestly for the last nine years, this event happened for entirely different reasons that wouldn't be revealed for probably another 100 or more chapters. I had it all worked out how it would tie together, but since Black Feather is being massively shortened for the sake of actually completing it, some things have had to be rearranged.
It's actually better this way because it gives us a coherent antagonist thread throughout the story and also serves to build suspense in the reader, where before, it was more or less just left hanging and disconnected from the rest of the plot.
I've been thinking a lot about suspense lately, actually. When I first began, my focus was on mystery. This would be where you plant subtle clues throughout the story that get the reader wondering what's really going on and what's behind everything. Ultimately, mystery culminates in a reveal. That reveal is something you have to hide from the reader in order to not "spoil" the ending. But I've been paying attention to some of Alfred Hitchcock's talks on suspense and how it is the antithesis of mystery. With suspense, you give the reader information early, but you keep that information away from the main characters. This way, the reader experiences a high degree of tension, watching as the main characters carry on oblivious to the danger the reader knows is there. The reader will constantly be wondering when or in what way this danger will strike the characters. It's a far more enjoyable form of storytelling than mystery.
Thing is, I wrote Black Feather to be a mystery. Converting it to suspense has required significant thought and the addition of some scenes to the overall layout. This Razor scene in chapter 5 is one such scene.
I've also just recently added significant dialogue to chapter 6. That has been a priority concern of mine over the last week, figuring out just what to do with Dinky's integration into the story. It isn't a spoiler to mention Dinky, as she's already tagged and in the cover art. But chapter 6 is where I needed to kick off her presence in the story, and it's different from how it was originally designed. Chapter 7 also has a brief change that supports this.
Currently, I am working on chapter 9. This is my big deal. Chapter 9 was originally designed to be a transition chapter, but the way I went about it was really terrible. We used to call it "the unboxing chapter" because it was about as exciting as an unboxing video on youtube. I made many attempts to fix it, but now, the whole thing is being scrapped and I'm rewriting chapter 9 from absolute scratch. I have the first scene entirely finished, and it's fantastic. But there are several scenes to go. This will be my main project all through September, because chapter 9 will be published on the 30th and I have to get it finished by that date. There's quite a lot of content to cover in this part of the story, and I hope I can keep up because the rewritten portion will probably span two or three chapters, and thus two or three weeks of publishing. All written from scratch.
I think I can do it.
