A Complete Change of Plan · 10:37pm Nov 8th, 2015
So, I'm not dead (famous last words) and neither is the story, despite how lifeless it (and I) have been in past months. I've done some thinking, and I'm going to be changing quite a few things for the overall betterment of the story.
In short:
- The planned chapters 5 and 6 (memory/flashback chapters) are being cut entirely. They aren't working and they won't do so anytime soon.
- I'm switching to an aim of 3K words each chapter minimum. Writing 7K each time is exhausting and frankly beyond my ability to keep up.
- I'm replanning the story as of now, for the previous reasons and because I've gotten off track from the main premise, especially in my plans.
- The moment I've planned enough, I'm writing again, aiming for a Tuesday 24th update at the latest.
- Eventually I want to synchronise updates of this with my other story, with each updating every other week.
In detail:
I'm scrapping the memory chapters completely. I've sunk nearly half a year into them, with nothing much to show for the time and effort, and it's getting no easier to write them no matter how much I redraft and replan. It was a nice idea, but it is not, has not, and might never work, so for the sake of the story continuing at all, they're going out the window.
Writing the 7000-odd word chapters the story began with has become more and more difficult as time's gone on, despite me being perfectly able to keep up with updates on my other story, which I tend to aim to update with at least 3000 words per chapter (and often exceed by a thousand or so). As far as inspiration goes, I have more for Guilty Hornet by far, and it's not like I don't know where I want to take the story, which leads me to conclude that I just can't handle writing 7000+ word segments at any decent sort of rate. The first chapter was written in a burst of inspiration and excitement, with me having literally just read the story which inspired this one, and I think it's well past time I faced the fact that the reason that first chapter reached 7000-odd words was not because this story would be told best in installations of that size (as I've been telling myself) but that my initial burst of inspiration carried it further than I would normally write. Accepting this, I'm going with the same sort of chapter size aims I use for 'Collapse Collide' from now on.
Of course, I'm going to have to redo the planning for the story before I get back into writing it. Obviously, there are parts that are going to need to be told in other ways now that I'm scrapping the flashbacks, and redoing the flow of events so that it works with shorter chapters is also a necessity, but there are other changes as well. Some ideas I had for the story will need to go, or be changed, since looking back on them I see a fair few shoddy plot points, and honestly the story was deviating further and further from the basic premise. Where has Twilight been mentioned these past few chapters? She was the entire reason I wrote this, and I was chasing after other plot points of dubious quality by treading all over that core premise. I need to seriously get this story back on track with its original idea, cut out the fat I added to get up to 7k words, and get the hell back to work.
I got too attached to some bad ideas and a bad part of the story, and it's high time I jumped ship from that and changed course out of these dire straits I've put the story in. (Extended sailing metaphors FTW!) I'm going to replan now, and start writing on the new course as soon as that's done, with the hopes of getting a chapter out to you by Tuesday 24th at the very latest. With the move to smaller chapters, I plan to alternate between updating this and 'Collapse Collide', which means updates every other week, probably on Tuesdays, (which I think we'll all agree is better than every other month, or every six months, which is where it's been headed lately), although for the first few on the new path, I may update less frequently or regularly than that.
I'm so sorry this has taken so long, but I think we can move forward again soon. Thank you so much for your patience!
Well, it's good to hear that this is moving forwards again and I am looking forwards to hearing more once you have a new plan ready to go and can tell us what is changing in more detail.
Glad to hear you're still at it! I'm looking forward to seeing what's to come!
Well, if you've written yourself into a corner I suppose the best thing to do is back up a bit.
The one issue I can remember with Guilty Hornet is that you occasionally went too far out of your way to justify Chrysalis'/the changelings' actions at a couple points (like having Cadance attack her first). If you have the Changelings emigrating because they were driven out of their homelands by another species and needed food desperately, it's okay to make them paranoid about their reception by other races and invade instead of opening diplomatic talks. It's absolutely wrong of them but understandable and it doesn't negate your central premise of Chrysalis being tormented by guilt (rather it adds to it).