Unfinished Business: Tale of Two Heavens · 11:41pm Apr 26th, 2022
When I first published this story back in 2019 it was already about 80% finished. Here we are in 2022, with the same unpublished seven chapters sitting still waiting to be cleaned and published.
I re-read this story a couple times every year, and it brings me to the verge of tears every time. This story set out to say something both beautiful and meaningful, and every time I read it, that beauty cries out to me and my heart replies in kind. And yet...time and time again I struggle to bring hands to keyboard to finish it. The beginning is finished, the end is finished, but there are pieces in the middle not even begun that are absolutely crucial. And some of these, I find myself struggling to write in a way that does justice to what they must be.
And yet, is it better to leave the story unfinished? No, clearly every reader would rather I finish this story even if the delivery is lacking. Especially this late in the fandom, where our numbers are diminished and fimfiction is slowly being taken over by Generation 5 stories, and by writers who know nothing of our beloved characters, let alone specific verses like Friendship is Optimal. In this era, I would think some few readers would be grateful for even just one more Optimalverse story.
Tale of Two Heavens was not particularly well received. It has the second worst up to downvote ratio out of every story I've written for Fimfiction. It has less than one fifth the views of To Love a Digital Goddes. Even Out of Context Nightmare, with nearly double the downvotes as upvotes, received both more views and more comments than Tale of Two Heavens. I suspect, because of the subject matter. The Optimalverse is now ten years old. While once one of the most well known verses on fimfiction, I supect that the curent generation of writers who've only joined in the past few years are largely unaware of it. And, Tale of Two Heavens deals specifically with religious matters. The problem of evil. The Epicurean Trilemma. The nature of self. It's protagonist is...well, let's call him "a true believer." The set of readers who are interested in both an old verse like the Optimalverse, and yet also interested in reading about such religious matters in a story where both sides of the equation are given a fair showing to make their case...I think the venn diagram of reader interest where those two topics intersect is not a large one.
Sometimes I wonder if it's even worth bothering with this story. I have other things I could be doing. Other projects. And so I ask myself if it really makes sense to spend the time to finish this one when so few people will read it, however much it cries out to me for closure.
Can't say for others, but I'd read it