In Reflection, The Same is OVER!

WOOO It's finally done! I'm so relieved to finally be done with this.

And since I'm done, I thought it'd be prudent to share my thoughts on the story, and the experience writing it.

TLDR: It was agony and the story sucks. 4/10 on the Arbitrary Rating Scale.

But why do I think that? Well it's a bit of a story. Read if you want, skip if you don't. idrgaf.

So I don't entirely remember what inspired me to make IRTS, but I do know it was in part due to the Failure of my ACTUAL first story, the Twilight Province. Now I had a lot of ideas for that story, and even wrote out an outline for the course of events. However, as one might imagine, writing ten thousand words per chapter is quite the heavy task, and if I wanted to keep viewer retention and finish the story before college, I would have to think of something else. And thus IRTS was born.

Initially, it started out as just a string of ideas: Twilight being mind controlled, a giant nuckelavee, an old world filled with cryptids and folkloric creatures of all sorts. The only problem was that was ALL I had. All the same, I started writing, not entirely sure where the story would take me.

Evidently, not having a concrete plan for your stories can have some unintended consequences. Story beats would be retconned (Twilight's friends were supposed to play a larger role, but were eventually filtered out to the role of essentially background characters), Ideas would be scrapped (Sam was originally going to succeed in hypnotising Twilight, but for obvious reasons, that didn't work.) And it's very obvious when you read through the whole story.

Characters and details would be inconsistent and seemingly inconsequential, though I tried my best to cut out as much fat as possible. And, as noted in the comments of my story, this led to Twilight's friends appearing as uncaring, cynical, and mean. And honestly, that's not even the worst offense this story commits.

The pacing of this story is god awful. Some chapters feel like they're only twenty words long, while others feel drawn out and bloated, DESPITE BEING ONLY A THOUSAND WORDS LONG. This creates a definite sense of narrative whiplash, and makes the story even more confusing to read than it already is. Worse yet, the lack of any underlying structure meant I was mostly going with the flow, which made certain occurrences and events feel like they just kinda... happen, with no rhyme or reason.

At the end of the day, this story was rushed, due to me going to college. As such, it's jumbled, confusing, nonsensical and amatuer. 4/10

Ok wall of text over. I don't like this story and the writing of it, while enjoyable and an incredible learning experience, was overall not good. If you enjoy it, good on you! I won't stop you. But over the writing of this story, my contempt for it only grew, which only encouraged me to rush it more.

Prolly not gonna write another long story for a while. I'm gonna stick to the shorter stories. Have a pic of Sam's wacky little hand. And have a good day too.