Worrying Unnecessarily About Obsolescence (Also, have an update on my writing) · 4:02am Apr 23rd, 2015
This precise moment is the one time over the course of this blog where I'll be making even a vague reference to that most woeful of species, beardicus inferiori, so put him out of your mind.
Two things happening in the blog: I want to take a moment to talk about what might be my biggest fear as a writer or as a content creator in general (though this won't be any lengthy thing like those "thoughts on"–style blogs), and I want to talk about what progress I have and haven't made in making new stories or updating existing ones. I've been pretty silent and/or vague on that for a while, but I think I've done enough now to at least make mention of it. If you're here mostly for the update on story progress, you can skip down past the line break.
For everyone else, I'd like to share a couple of scares I had today, and one or two others from a while ago. There's no moral or anything. Just sort of personal, I guess.
One of my biggest fears as a writer, if the blog title doesn't make it obvious, is that my stories or key elements within them will become obsolete. Now, I'm not super concerned when it comes to canon treading the same ground as me—it sucks, especially in the case of things I haven't published yet, but at the same time, it feels sort of… vindicating, I guess? So it's a quick sting, and once I'm over it, I can say to myself something like, "Hey, you already build on canon as a matter of course. Now you can build on that particular idea, too."
What I'm more concerned with is when what's treading the same ground as me is another fanfic. To be clear, I'm not so much talking about plagiarism, but rather coincidence. Most of you know that I write intensely slowly, at least on average, so you can probably imagine just how much time passes between my having an idea for a story and my actually publishing it. In that interim, there's every opportunity for someone with a stronger work ethic (or at least a stronger dedication to ficcing) to have the same idea and get it out there before me. Sometimes, their execution is so similar to or better than what mine would have been that I shelve the idea entirely—perhaps even after I've begun to write it. It's happened no less than three times, so far.
The times when it doesn't make me wuss out, I guess it can actually have a positive result. I first met Pearple Prose after seeing that his Ruled by Sin was bafflingly outwardly similar to my then-already-published Gout of Flame—at the time, it even had the same vote ratio. And he and I are all buddy-buddy now, even though I was a step away from thinking he'd copied me back then (until I actually read the story and saw it was, in reality, quite different).
Today, though, I was something of a nervous wreck. Just a tad. I happened to read what there is so far of DrakeyC's Cutie Mark Crusader Magicians, Yay!, which was similar to my To Glimpse a Wider World in more than just the base concept and outward appearance; it's set to head down roads that my fic will but hasn't yet tread, in terms of what's published. And not a few hours later, I caught the latest pair of chapters of a particular fic I've been following since I caught it recently in the FB, Jay-The-Brony's A Second Chance, wherein he sets himself up perfectly to do a particular thing, and said thing is pretty much the entire basis for a story—also a Dark AU—I've been working on since the start of the year (and came up with the idea for as long ago as August, 2013). He doesn't actually do that thing, and more's the pity for him, I guess, because I think his story is floundering somewhat and it would've been a solid hit of adrenaline. But in my all-benevolent luck, I happened to read up to the moment it could have happened just before I had to get off my train and spend the next hour driving home, assuming he'd done it and brooding a bit.
I do think some positives will come from this, though. I was already pumped to try and get the next chapter of Wider World out soon, and while I'm actually looking forward to seeing where DrakeyC takes his similar concept, it's another spur telling me to put more out before I'm left behind. Same in the case of Jay-The-Brony's story and my Dark AU, though there I suppose I was a little less worried, since I think he could be doing a more well thought-out job than he currently is, so I don't feel quite the same sense of imaginary competition, you know?
I do wish the best of luck to both of them. And to Pear, why not.
Alright, I think this will be the first time I've ever actually fully laid out where I'm at in regards to my writing, instead of vague things like "I have done work on it, yes." Here we go, in a vague order of potential release from closest to furthest estimated time:
1. A new chapter of To Glimpse a Wider World. Believe it or not, despite the fact that it's been well over two years since I've put something out for this story, I've been planning an awful lot for it. We're talking a prequel, a sequel, a set of mini-prequels to the sequel, a side story or two… It got pretty daunting, but I've started making more progress recently, and I did indeed manage to finish a chapter. It wasn't the fat, 20k chunk of a thing I'd said way back that I wanted to put out, but it could be considered the first installment of a comparable chunk (all one arc as the characters are in a particular place, essentially). I asked a couple friends to give it a pre-read, one of whom's had the time to so far, and he seemed to think it was about ready. Before I put it out, I do want to take a few days (probably this weekend) to go over the chapters that are already published and bring them up a little closer to my current standards. I also may want to have the next chapter finished, but I would say it's at least a third done already.
2. An entry for the latest World-Building Alliance competition, its current working title being "Veneration". Thing about changelings. I'm not far into it (I've only got some of the frame down on proverbial paper), but it probably wouldn't be all that long if/when it's finished. I'm not fully feeling the story, though, and we were given a good deal less time to write than in the old version of the competitions, so I can't be sure this one will see the light of day, at least in this form. If I do finish it, though, you'll see it by the end of the month.
3. The Dark AU mentioned in the first half of the blog, the current working title of which is "Together in Spirit" (courtesy of FloydienSlip). I brainstormed the basic idea for it way, way back with La Barata and Golden Vision, but only this year have I begun to write it, and I would say I'm a bit under halfway through writing the first chapter, though I need to do a good deal more planning. Everyone I've talked to about the idea seems intrigued by it, but I guess I'd rather keep it a bit of a surprise for you folks who haven't heard about it yet? Suffice it to say it's one of those AUs that starts off at S1E1, throws in a twist that makes a small change to the timeline, and has that change grow and echo forward. Though I doubt I'd be sticking to some rigid episode-by-episode structure like a lot of folks seem to—it'll become a distinctive world fairly quickly, I imagine.
4. A new chapter of Gout of Flame. This was the first story I went on hiatus with, I think—at the time, I had just written what there was of it for a contest and had no plans for what I might do in any future installments. Since then, though, I have done some planning (including working out what, exactly, the frame of the story is), and I've got maybe a third of the next chapter finished. It's a joy to write, when I'm writing it, so we'll see how I progress with it.
5. An extension for Plainswalker. And by "extension", I mean a more full-on story—the story as it is would be a prologue. I've written some, though I couldn't say what fraction of a chapter it is, but I've actually got pretty much the entirety of the second half of it planned out, and most of the first half. I've just had a lot of trouble getting rolling with it, even though I think it will turn out to be one of the best fics I make if it's even half as good as what I have in mind. And on second thought, that expectation is probably part of what's giving me trouble.
6. A new chapter of A Wish for Greener Grass. I knew exactly where this story would go before I even started writing it, but I've got very little idea of how to get there. Plus, though this story as it exists turned out pretty okay, I was really forcing my way through it. Not a particularly fun fic for me to write, even if I like the end product.
7 and 8. A pair of stories tentatively titled "Recursive Call" and "The Stock is Misbehaving". They're closely related (to the point that they might be released as a single fic instead), the first exploring the idea of recursive time travel and the second taking one timeline in a dark, dystopian direction. I've got some solid ideas for these, and I've written an opening scene to the second one that I'm really quite attached to. These are old ideas, though—from right around "It's About Time"—and there are some similar-looking stories that have come along in the meantime by competent authors which I might decide handled pretty much the same concept better than I'd like to take a crack at. I'll have to read them sometime soon to be sure.
9–∞. Any number of things I've only wrote snippets for or planned out in the most basic sense. A His Dark Materials trilogy (i.e. The Golden Compass and its sequels) semi-crossover called "Into This Wilde Abyss" about Twilight doing some universe-hopping for the purposes of inter-dimensional enlightenment—I dare you to come up with a more perfect title. Olde Magick, a story of the life of a relatable filly who ruins generations of her family's work just by existing. More guest chapters for alexmagnet's Scootaloo Dies a Bunch if he ever stops letting it sit there. Who knows.
I hope at least some of that sounds appealing to you, and I'm hoping to make this a productive year for myself, fic-wise. See you around soon.
He asked me to edit that (I couldn't), but I'm glad to hear it turned out good. Hoping to read it soon™
Sweet!
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees
It all sounded awful
I'm gonna be honest, the title of the blog made me think Obs had cancer or something
Also, I've got high hopes for your WBAWC entry. Considering some of the best stories you've written (in my opinion, at least) came from them, well...
i.imgur.com/NnoGhN1.gif
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Of course it's good. It is blessed by The Golden Touch™
Hm. This blog. I worry about a similar thing, although I can safely say that most of my future ideas have not been done before. The Ultimate Alicorn certainly wasn't an original idea (Twilight taking the Alicorn Amulet and being corrupted while defeating her enemies), but it was fresh out the gate at the time in regards to Tirek.
Just write what you want, bloke. If it's competently written (which it will be), people won't mind any coincidental similarities.
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The point is that I mind, when that happens, and I no longer want to/feel the need to write it as much. If someone else did a great job with the same concept, to the point that exploring it more myself seems like something I'd have to force, I just turn to one of my other ideas in progress. In that sense, I guess you could say that I'm writing what I want.
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Ah, I gotcha.
Huh. That's similar reasoning to why I deleted one of my other fics. Hadn't updated it since last June, and just lost the will to do so. Had I kept at it, I would probably have finished it before the Sombra comic came out and nuked it.
Ah well.
Please. The story has great momentum and is sufficiently distant from the show (if I remember correctly) that it should not suffer obsolescence. Maybe you should use collision rather than obsolescence.
As for that issue, I'm trying out framing stories to set things in context with the series. In that way, I have more freedom in the central part of the story, using it to expand on themes FiM stresses but without coupling it to show events or major characters.
I understand the pains of writing slowly. I was all set to call my magnum opus a piece about a transgendered Vinyl Scratch, when just a week later, one appeared in the featured box. It likely won't be the same story by far, but damned if that doesn't suck.
Mm, I know the feeling. Excited for new chapters, though.
I can readily identify with this feeling. Three years ago (wow...) on this little site called Ponychan, I expressed that exact concern, that a story I was (and am... and will be...) writing bore a striking thematic resemblance to another, much more popular story in the fandom. Once I, too late, spotted the similarities, I was afraid that so would everyone else, and that mine would thusly be panned by readers as a derivative knockoff, like some sap who tries to write their own "improved" version of MLD or Cupcakes.
This little-known Ponychan poster by the name of Applejinx replied to my concerns:
You need to accept that all ideas, at some level, have already been done. Don't let existing / in-progress / created-after-yours fics frighten you, because barring straight-up plagiarism, they will be different stories, just like in your Pearple example. One of those stories is their vision of how everything goes down, and one of those is your vision. And yours is a story worth telling.
Nice! I'll be looking forward to the updates