A Resolution · 3:59am May 12th, 2014
GotP 17 is in Editing.
That's a rather innocuous sentence, whose only major feature seems to be the capitalized 'E' (because editing is serious business). What it fails to convey is the amount of soul-rending pain I struggled through in getting Rainbow's scenes to work, and the delays that resulted from that struggle.
I'll be frank with all of you: I feel bad doing a chapter a month. I feel like I'm letting you down. I hate being slow. So I'm writing this blog post to force myself to do better. That's going to result in some changes to what you're getting from my work, but I think you'll all enjoy the result. I'm also writing this so that anyone reading who happens to be an aspiring author can learn from my mistakes and my struggles, and hopefully be better for it.
Firstly, I'm going to write a minimum of one thousand words every day. To those of you following along at home, one thousand words is a lot when you are taking care about plot and characterization, so I don't encourage it for everyone. What I do encourage any and all aspiring authors to do is: set SOME limit. Forcing yourself to write sometimes feels like squeezing water out of a stone, but it produces better results in the end than the alternative, of writing in spurts. See, as a result of my work schedule, that's what I've been doing recently. You sit down, drop an entire five-thousand word scene of some immense revelation or brutal battle, and then you let your work sit on the screen, growing cold and dead for a week, or two, or three, as if you're waiting for inspiration to hit you like a lightning bolt. It will, eventually, and if you're only writing for your own personal satisfaction, that's fine. But if you take any sort of pride or pleasure out of others reading your work, delving into its characters and its secrets--in short, investing in it--then you have an obligation not to make those readers wait.
Hanging over cliffs is exhilarating for a while, but eventually, your readers arms will get tired.
Above and beyond having a limit, you have to make the time. This is the trap I fell into. When I was writing Honor Guard and FSWL, I was still in college. Every day, I would wake up in the morning, skip basic Bio (I only attended tests, and got a 3.9 in the class...), and write until my next class (which was at noon on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday). I put out fifteen-hundred to twenty-five hundred words every day back then.
These days, I'm working eight hours a day on computer code. It's an incredibly stimulating and enjoyable job, but I tend to come home halfway zombified after I've had my face in algorithms all day. I still love writing, but the way I write is an intellectually draining activity, as I'm sure some of you can relate. I do research on mythology and real-world history and geography. I reference my own work to make sure Dead Reckoning is missing the eye on the same side of his face in every scene, and similar continuity things (the Commander's crippled leg is going to give me a heart attack some day...). I think at length about how you, the readers, will react to a given character's revelations or developments (a habit I picked up after Honor Guard Ch 3, and reinforced after GotP Ch 4). When my head is already feeling drained, sometimes all that really starts to seem like work, whereas the call of near-mindlessness in League of Legends is a tempting and welcome alternative.
Don't get me wrong; I still love writing on here. I would tell you I'd given up otherwise. I spend too much of my time on these stories not to love it. But I tell you all this so that storytellers like myself will hopefully take my lesson to heart: writing for readers is a commitment, and letting them down is a sin.
Forgive me, Readers, for I have sinned. I've taken the wide and easy road and let my writing sag, not abandoned, but only crawling forward at the rate of molasses, when the thickness of the plot begs for a raging river. I've let my fatigue and my lack of inspiration dull my pen.
Today, that changes. As I have sworn, I shall put to paper (or rather, screen) one thousand words each day.
My second change, which is particular to my inclinations and not necessarily applicable to all storytellers, is this: going forward, chapters of GotP will be more numerous, and shorter. Now, I'm not about to become Imploding Colon, dropping each of my daily thousand words that very same day; I don't want that kind of pressure on my editing team. What you can expect, however, are four- to eight-thousand word chapters instead of the current twelve- to twenty-thousand. Further, these chapters are likely to be single-scene, rather than my usual "Smörgåsbord" of characters or groups; rather like what I did in chapters 12-14. For example, Ch 18 is probably going to be exclusively Luna, with perhaps a short scene for Celestia or Cadance or somepony who doesn't have a major plot arc devoted to them.
With that out of the way, I have two final items. Firstly, my new avatar is Mortal Coil, for those of you who are caught up on GotP. Here's a full-sized version of the image:
Morty is also pictured a bit older here:
Both of those are by Ruirik, whose work you should read if you haven't already.
Now that you've got my art, I'll leave you all with this thought: the Season 4 Finale actually made Price of Loyalty even more canonical. Not only did it justify our use of Tirek and Tartarus, but it also basically confirmed Empatha and Endura, and, perhaps most importantly, gratuitous pony violence.
Now, I'm off to write some GotP 18.
-Loyal
If I'm remembering correctly, Empatha was about using a pegasi's innate magic for elemental stuff, right? Are you saying it's practically confirmed because all of Tirek's magic-sucking means all ponies have magic in them?
That Morty sure is an interesting fellow...
Wow, that would make excellent title for chap 17. A Resolution
That's cool you're setting a more ambitious goal. All the care you put in certainly shows as each chapter has tons of polish.