Perseverance Pays Off · 12:02am Feb 3rd, 2015
Been writing Chapter Four even though mobile FimFic is a pain to use, and I am pleased to say that it's most of the way done now. The way things are going, the chapter will be finished by the time my PC is back from android hell. It'd be even closer to finished if I wasn't writing on a phone, but what can you do?
It's got a bit of everything, this chapter, which makes what might have been a rather unremarkable bridge chapter something a lot more fun to write. We have the introduction of a new character who'll become more significant in time, a return to the Twilight Sparkle situation for the first time since the event, a bit of introspection and thoughts about a certain unicorn assistant, the setting in motion of events leading to the talk with Cadance, and the first interaction between Chrysalis and Celestia. It's been interesting writing it, for sure, and it'll be the part with Celestia which decides whether this will be a 6000-word chapter or an 8000-word one.
As has been suggested to me, this and all future chapters (along with the existing ones, when I re-edit them) will have a name along with its number. This will hopefully allow both you and me to more easily go back through the story to certain points without having to trawl through chapters to find the one you need.
After my PC is back and Chapter Four is up, I'll be going back through the previous chapters to do some much-needed editing. I'll be unifying the typography (right now each chapter does it differently) as well as redoing some things completely, i.e. Sparkle's 'death' scene will be rewritten so that you actually know why she's even 'dead', and overall the style and tone of the chapters will be tweaked to stand in a comfortable middle ground between that of the first chapter and those which followed it. With the re-editing of each chapter, I will rename it to have its name along with its number, so you will then know that it has been given the thorough once-over it needed in the first place.
The new chapter names are as follows:
Chapter One: Sudden Impact
Chapter Two: Taking Stock
Chapter Three: Appropriate Response
Codex One: Culture
Chapter Four: Necessary Preparations
And, just for fun, the working titles for the next few chapters in this arc:
Chapter Five: The Queen's Speech
Chapter Six: Fragile Harmony
Interlude One: Moonrise
Codex Two: Characters
The next codex will provide a lot of the backstory on each main character that I would otherwise struggle to fit comfortably into the story, and if all goes to plan will contain a picture (drawn by yours truly) of each of our oddball characters. This was originally slated for much later on but I decided I'd better get the basic stuff out of the way before I start introducing more character traits in later chapters. As for the interlude chapter, it is but the first of a planned eight such chapters, which I intend to be somewhere between the codex entries and main chapters in length and which will focus on a character whose identity is a complete mystery and in no way revealed by the chapter name, no sir.
As far as upload dates go, I'd estimate the new chapter will be done for Sunday, so long as I get my PC back before then.
That all sounds great. I'll give you one important piece of advice, though: Don't get too caught up in making the earlier chapters perfect. I've seen more than one story stall out because an author kept fixing and fixing until they ran out of steam. Perfect is the enemy of good, as they say. It's also the enemy of 'finished'.
2766104
I learned that lesson the hard way back when I wrote Portal fanfics, and I have no intention of doing that again. Perfectionism killed that story, and I don't want to lose another to that wild goose chase.
I just want to make the first few chapters fit the same style and tone I've slipped into for Chapter Four, since it isn't all that consistent between them all and I think that I've found the right balance between Chapter One's style and that of the following ones.
Besides that, though, and the Sparkle 'death' scene, most of the change is either error correction or purely cosmetic, such as unifying the typography at the start of each chapter and adding a name besides the chapter number.
All in all, it shouldn't take me that long to do, and if I start getting bogged down in it I'll leave it alone until the perfectionism dies down.
The most valuable lesson I've learned as a writer is that there is no such thing as 'perfect'. I hope that puts you a little more at ease about the whole thing.
2766194
That is somewhat reassuring to hear, yes.