Okay so the climax of the story, to say the least is having behind the scenes issues · 7:35am Jun 28th, 2023
This story was always going to end with a fight with a nerteln, unfortunately while I spend a lot of time on basically every other background element in my story, I never worked on filling out nertelns enough. Basically the nerteln fight against Doctor Willow was always a "fill in here" moment for what Doctor Willow actually did. This has been a problem because while it is easy to come up with things for a nerteln to do, it's causing pacing issues with the story.
A nerteln should have reality bending powers that feel anywhere from annoying to cheating, it should feel like you're fighting somebody who shouldn't be able to do that. They should also be generally distasteful, unpleasant, uncanny, and especially unoriginal, their best attacks should be something that they copied from somebody else, badly, but their powers from eating souls has made it work. Another thing is that they should be generally unpleasant in most ways, you'll notice I've had Doctor Willow's cutie mark fading away, the motif of him growing gold even though he could care less about it, his relationship with Pomo, that sorta thing, these aren't the antagonists that you'd put on a t-shirt.
The problem here is that while I haven't had any trouble with coming up with things for him to do, and ways for that to create moments, I've now got major pacing issues that I'm having to work out with the next couple chapters. Because he needs to feel frustrating to fight, he needs to be a cheap bastard, but I don't want to annoy the audience with too much stuff and eventually the First Administrator is going to drop down with a squad of heavy hitters and squash him(he just can't do that too early or else an eldrich being wakes up and decides to get angry for interrupting his dream in a way that puts him in a bad mood).
Anyways I think I've finally managed to work out the pacing issues with the upcoming chapters so it's not just 12,000 words of JUST fight scenes or something like that. I'm going to devote some time into characterizing Doctor Willow a bit more directly and that will be a nice break in the action before the cavalry finally shows up.
