ROF Structure, My Thoughts and Plans · 11:17pm May 25th, 2023
Just because I feel like it, I may as well lay out how the story's going to go. The next chapter and possibly the chapter after that is going to be downtime. Everything before that was set-up, this is the reaction now things have calmed down ever so slightly. As the the story's structure, it will have four Acts and an epilogue. Everything from "The Re-Emergence" to "When is an unfinished television series like a little puppy?" was Act 1, "Past Ties" up until the end of the Changeling invasion is Act 2, following that is Act 3 involving Aurum, a chapter or two which serves as the aftermath to everything and an epilogue. No idea how long it'll end up becoming when all is said and done because I know how the story will go, not the journey to get to that point. I don't plan out chapters, I kinda just decide the broad strokes of what happens in each chapter and then just wing it. Most of the decision making amounts to "oo, I like that idea so let's include it!" and whether it makes sense or not varies because I don't have a proof reader hence why you often seen spelling errors and cut-off sentences that I should have cut out. This bizarre approach is how we got the injured Scootaloo mistake and sudden inclusion of Chrysalis that seem to come out of nowhere. Why am I giving everything away now and spoiling it? Because anyone paying the barest minimum amount of attention to the story could already tell where this was going. The devil's in the details as they say.
The story is certainly derivative with many inspirations and cliches but any form of substance comes from interactions and character bits, not M Night level twists. The story started as more or less a popcornfic and now serves mostly as a character dissection of Celestia for lack of a better term although it's nowhere near very deep. It may seem like it veers away from the original idea but I intend to incorporate both concepts together and hope it works. As I've said repeatedly, the story is far, far different than how I originally intended it. This was at one point supposed to be a Shining Armour immortality story before a desire to make it longer than a one-shot and multiple ideas came to create what you see now. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing will only become apparent as time goes on.
My own thoughts on the story have swerved violently. I don't normally post about stuff like that or myself simply because none of you care and just want the story but the story changed so much that it's worth stating. I first couldn't get enough of it and was publishing chapters weekly or bi-weekly but then I grew to hate it after publishing the craptastic chapter "An Overdue Confrontation" (which "The Long Awaited Confrontation" serves as a rewritten replacement over) and had it deleted for about a week. When I decided to resume editing in January, I was trepedacious and frankly worried I'd infuriated the readers and this would become a deadfic where I'm basically writing this story for no-one. Frankly, I’m just waiting for someone to eviscerate me over writing a piece of crap. I haven’t actually been chewed out yet and any criticism is either not directed towards me or is in good faith but it just takes someone who either doesn’t like me or is having a bad day. Despite this, I'm pleased with how "Past Ties" and "Broken Alliances" turned out and the unplanned inclusion of Chrysalis and her Changelings actually gave the story some form of direction towards an ending. I know how it will end and even what the final chapter will look like but the journey's half the fun as they say. How will it end? Won't say much but I'd most compare it in structure to the final chapter The Ending of the End - Love and Tolerance Edition except as a letter instead of a song.
Be quite a while before that point and it probably won't be finished this year; especially if I can finally get a damn job in this disaster of a British economy. The story serves as an excellent way of blowing off stress and steam which is very handy given the aggravatingly difficult computer course I'm doing. A lot of the anger in Chrysalis' speech in the Aurora Realm from "Broken Alliances" was actual, visceral anger from me since I had been having an absolutely horrendously bad day and I needed to vent.
Many ideas I had been reserving for other stories in the future ended up getting incorporated into this one which I was initially reluctant to do because it reduces the potential number of stories I can write. Why did this change? Because I could very well be a one hit wonder so to speak. ROF may become my only semi-popular story and the rest decidedly less so thus why not go all out? Something you develop as a writer with an audience is that your have a constant fear of failure and pissing people off with my imposter syndrome not helping. Every single time I post, I'm like "how long until I REALLY set people off. Part of the reason these chapters take so damn long to make is because of an impending sense that one wrong step will basically annihilate any good will I've garnered so far. It's irrational but a common worry for writers that just aren't very good. In other news, the next chapter is about 95% finished unless I decide to add more. See ya then.
Drayvon.
