Progress Report · 10:26pm Nov 4th, 2023
In today's issue of "HK discovers how the FimFic metagame works", I learn that, apparently, posting a short little extra story flagged as a sequel drives a whole lot more traffic to the original story than to the short extra story - though not as many updoots or faves as the short story. I'll have to add that to the growing list, along with how finishing a longer story nets a ton of follows, but finishing shorter ones doesn't.
But enough about my inner attention whore getting his headpats, on to the content!
Sooo, you know how in my postmortem blog on Rider of the Storm, how I described my endless string of wheel-spinning in regards to starting the story? Well, a more limited form of that's been happening here so far. Some of that is down to my procedures, and some is down to realizing the direction I want to go with things.
Very mild spoilers ahead. If you want to go into the sequel totally blind, stop here!
Let's start with the direction issues.
For anyone who's checked out my story index paste lately, you can see that one of the key new ingredients for the sequel is going to be the fact that Anon takes on an evil apprentice. And he is going to be a major component of the story's early game, including his involvement in Anon's inevitable rescue.
And I've been struggling with making that work, primarily because the first few iterations of the character were fucking insufferable.
This is largely a retread of an issue I ran into when originally writing Thaumaturgy With Anon: writing characters that on paper are deep and complex, but in execution end up as a very unenjoyable drain on the experience, making reading their sections a total chore and the literary equivalent of grinding for materials in an MMO. And indeed, rereading the stuff I wrote for the intro bits left me constantly dissatisfied, and I wound up scrapping a few thousand words worth of prose over and over again in search of what worked.
The issue, thankfully, had a simple solution in this case: the problem was the character itself. As in, not the character's very existence, but the character's character.
The way I had his character and personality set up before made him very insecure, whiny, and panicky in his time before encountering the A-Non and entering his dark tutelage, whereupon he would develop a spine and some badass qualities of his own. The problem, however, isn't even the obvious problem of insecure, whiny, and panicky characters being generally unenjoyable to read, especially when written by a guy who hates reading about them. The real issue is trying to introduce an insecure, whiny, and panicky main character into a sequel for fucking Rider on the Storm. You know, the same Rider on the Storm whose characters are the diametric opposite of insecure, whiny, and panicky? The same Rider on the Storm whose main character's entire modus operandi is to come in, kick ass, take names, and have entire stolen American oil drums full of fun with it?
This took me a while to figure out because I am not a smart writer, merely a clever one.
Therefore, his current incarnation, as it stands, is going to start out as not a full-bore badass quite yet, but a fiercely independent rogue, with his own amusing quirks and charms. He'll be starting out as unequivocally bad, but not yet full-on Evil. And most importantly, the fears he does have are perfectly reasonable, and observed due to his obvious need for self-preservation. And when he does shed those fears and takes a chance on the A-Non, he'll graduate to evil in his own ways, making those that he previous feared instead fear him.
And though he'll have a different approach to getting what he wants, my hope is that it'll still be fun to read in it's own way.
Assuming, of course, I don't waste another month or two changing direction again. I'm too fickle with my ideas sometimes!
Now for the procedural issues.
In that same postmortem blog linked above, I described how I set up a whole new framework to get a better process for writing going. Well, some parts of that aged well, and some didn't.
The first major problem I ran into was with the spreadsheet planning. See, I had it set up to meticulously plan out each and every scene I would need to write, which were organized into chapters, and then acts.
Thing is, the aforementioned issues I was having with direction meant that this planning always went up in smoke, and wound up being a complete waste of time. Even creating new sheets in Calc to revise them each time and create a kind of audit trail wound up amounting to nothing. This outcome was as much due to my constant revision of characters and settings (locations) as much as it was because I am, at heart, a seat-of-the-pants writer: I write purely based on gut instinct, and feel my way through the scenes as I create them, changing them as necessary once I finish while adding in cool shit that I tend to come up with on the spot as I write. This often ends in me completely throwing out entire chapters simply on the basis that they don't feel right. Planning things out to the last detail is entirely antithetical to this writing approach.
This took me a while to figure out because I am not a smart writer, merely a clever one.
The solution to this - at least, I hope it will be a solution to this - is to reduce the scope of the spreadsheeting. Instead of planning out scene-by-scene, I'm instead planning out on a much larger scale than just chapters. Not quite at the level of entire acts, but in terms of major overarching points I'd like to hit, with plenty of room to just rearrange them or even outright discard ones I don't like anymore. This'll leave my imagination with plenty of wiggle room to do as it pleases.
Indeed, if it wasn't for the fact that I'm spoiled by Calc's ability to clone my old sheets to make massive revisions at will that I can tab between in the same file, I would probably forgo it entirely and just make it a straight list in a Zim wiki page.
The funniest part of this realization? It wasn't even for this story! I made this change for a completely different and much larger story that I had a huge "whoa, it would be so fucking cool if I did this!" moment for that added a whole lot more to it. Refactoring all of my prior spreadsheet scene-by-scene work for that behemoth would have been a massive chore and the textbook definition of a make-work exercise, which I hate more than anything else. Creating the much larger-scope spreadsheet made charting that big change out a far easier endeavour. Seriously, it was only an extra row or two to implement my big change in the new system! Enough so I'll remember what I'm doing and where I'm going, but not enough to impede my primary writing style or cut out random chances of cool new ideas.
Now, whether this system will work is still an open question, since it's all pretty new and still in active development. And being a tech nerd at heart, tinkering with my setup is half the fun, so who knows how long it'll take for things to settle into something stable?
And yeah, that's pretty much all I have to say for the moment. Writing up a status report on Fury of the Storm's progress after putting out Hurricane A-Non was always in the cards, but in true seat-of-the-pants fashion, it turned into a fairly detailed writeup on my processes, how they wound up not working out, and how I plan to fix things up.
Like my postmortem post for Rider on the Storm, my main hope is that this post was informative/useful at best, or entertaining at worst. So I hope this was, at the very least, an entertaining read!
If I'm being honest though, I do feel like Fury of the Storm is going to end up suffering the sequel curse, despite my best efforts. The tight experience of the first story is probably unlikely to carry over to Fury, which is why I'm thankful I had the foresight to have it end on letting the reader choose their own canon ending. Maybe Rider was, like FiM itself, lightning in a bottle? Or maybe I'm being too hard on myself, as usual? Hum, maybe, maybe not. Guess there's nothing for it but to see it through!
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go eat something. Man can't live on water alone.
Yeah, it worked for me. I see the short story, see that it's about 3.7k words, think to myself "oh, hey, I can go read this without getting lost/sidetracked from the main story I'm reading."
I click, I see that it's a sequel. I check out the original, and see that it's long. My interest is piqued, but I can't read it now. I add it to "Tracking" and come back to it later lmao
5753696
same, found it the exact way you did. bingeread it in one day and have no regrets
You've had a few too many extraordinary-quality stories to call any one of them lightning in a bottle.
Thanks for letting us enjoy them here and elsewhere.
Always interesting to read what you share about your writing process and it's struggles and successes.
I've had a couple of those afflict me in my creative endeavors, too.
I don't care how much you downplay the sequel, I am still hyped.
It's not a proper productivity tool if you don't spend 50% of your time tweaking it.