Recently I talked about what might've been a deciding factor for a sequel being received poorly with another writer, and I mentioned that conveyance is important on the first chapters.

It got me thinking about my own. I'd never written a sequel before, and it comes off the laurels of a rather peculiar story that rewrites a lot of the logic and history of the show concerning Changelings as it was written in early 2012 and we all had vague ideas of how their race worked. Beyond that, there's also a lot of world/relationship/ and expositional building that I had to convey from the get-go to setup the scenario, "Hit the ground running" style.

But there's an art to making sequels, isn't there? The intro/first chapter is incredibly important to a story, as it's the foil to the rest of the premise. You can't just info-dump everything all at once so you can dive head-first into a new series of events. That would put off first time readers bad! I had to think carefully about what I should mention, how much to mention it, all while trying to set up this new 'reality' that I had spoken about to the writer I advised earlier.

Basically my questions are this, for just chapter 1 of my story...

Did I myself manage to write it well enough to strike that 'conveyance' properly?

Do first-time readers feel like enough was mentioned to help them understand the plot, and also to feel intrigued?

Does the first chapter make those readers feel like they need to read the prequel to understand, or can they feel content with continuing the story knowing only what they know from the first chapter?

((Just those three questions. I wanted to mention that I do strongarm the idea that the story doesn't require reading the prequel in the form of an author's note, as I do write the rest of the prequel's plot points into the rest of the chapters as they become relevant, but Chapter 1 is important and I'm still curious to hear someone's opinions on whether or not I wrote it okay enough.))

Below is the story in question.

EA Kindled Beginning

• MLP: FiM
• Adventure
• Slice of Life

Changeling Princess Chrys undergoes the biggest trials of her life... School, making friends, and living in the world above. For a small girl never having known life outside of complete darkness, this is a hard task!

• Alt. Universe
• Twilight
• Spike
• OC
• Main 6
• CMCs

Darkevony · 78k words  ·  84  1 · 1.4k views