Post-Draft Blog Part 1: The Long and Lonesome Highway... · 4:52am Sep 21st, 2015
Well, it's finished. Fifteen months, twenty-nine days, and I truly don't want to know how many words later, I've completed the first draft of the long-form, long-in-the-making project I've simply been calling Firestarters.
I promised my thoughts on all this after a week's time, and thanks to a nasty virus and a couple hangovers, it's actually ended up being a little bit longer than that. But here I am and here you are, and if there's one thing this process has taught me, it's that late is far better than never.
To use its non-working title for the first time: let's talk about Gifted for a bit.
It's easy to make a project like this one seem bigger than it is. Though I haven't done an official count yet, I feel pretty safe saying the first draft I just completed clocks in at well over two hundred thousand words--longer than any singular story I've ever published anywhere. That number will ideally shrink a good deal over the course of the editing process, but if it didn't, it'd hardly be inconsistent with its as-yet unrealized legacy. In theory, Gifted is the first book in a series that could cover as many as nine successive volumes, Firestarters being the blanket name for said series. The implication lurking in my phrasing is that this is all a single monstrous tale I couldn't pare down enough to avoid Kkat waking up in a cold sweat later tonight, but this time that's actually not the case. At present, Firestarters is--by design--not so much a nine-book series as it is a trilogy of trilogies, split up so that each collection of three volumes tells its own self-contained story that in turn contributes to a larger series-wide narrative.
The thing is: to a certain extent, this is big. This is the biggest thing I've ever done in my life, and I mean that more than the word "big" is long enough to express. I've accomplished all manner of good and nice things in (as of this coming Tuesday) twenty-two years, but all of those things weren't wholly mine to do. I got good grades in school because I wanted to put in the effort for them, but the consequences of not getting good grades always existed as implicit, intrinsically horrifying motivation. I'm an athlete because I like to do athletic things, but showing up to practice and playing well in games effectively isn't optional if there's a social and/or monetary investment in doing so. The stories I've published here are good in no small part because you guys like good stories, much as I love writing for its own sake.
But not finishing your first novel doesn't have any negative consequences. The people who knew about it might be disappointed, but there'd be no lasting impact, no what-could-have-been that irreparably ruined what-is-now. For the first time in my life, I did something completely for myself, something that came solely from my own willingness to put in the work day after day for no reward other than what I got out of it. It's the purest form of artistic success I've yet achieved, the final link in a chain of progress I've been working my whole life, and it makes me that much more grateful for all the people who would have cared if I failed. So to all of you, I have two things to say: thank you, and don't worry. As far as the capacity to see through a project like that goes, finishing one book has proven to me that I'm capable of finishing nine books if I'm willing to put the work in, so I'm not really worried about that.
What does worry me, just a tiny bit, is what comes next with this book. And that--in two parts--is why I'm making this post.
The editing part, relatively speaking, will be simple. I've already established what a daily pattern of writing productivity looks like, so I figure applying that to a process I've done many times with many previous stories shouldn't be that complex. My current plan is for there to be four separate drafts of Gifted by the time it's ready to post. The first one--the actual writing of the story--is done, and thank God it is, because on top of all the aforementioned mushy shit, damn it took a hell of a long time. By contrast, the second draft will be the quickest one, since all it'll entail is a single run through the first draft cutting out huge sections of the story and formatting it into a rough approximation of what the final product will look like.
From there, the third draft will be the real editing run, the part where I go line by line through what the (proverbially) sober followup to my (not-so-proverbially) drunken writing leaves for me to work with. Once the (I don't know if this counts as a proverb) pig's lips have all the lipstick they can fit, that's when I'll have the fourth draft ready to share with whomever among my circle of friends and followers is willing to take a look at it. I've really fallen off the "have someone else edit a story before you put it somewhere every-damn-one can see it" wagon in the last few years, so I'm trying to turn over a new leaf for this story. I'll be asking around with more intent about that as the third draft grows nearer to completion, but for now, I'd very gladly take any volunteers for when that day eventually comes.
That being said, though... here's the thing. At this moment, I don't exactly know what form that fourth draft I show to people for editing help will take. And when I say that, what I really mean is that I'm not one-hundred-percent sure it's still going to be a fan fiction.
To once again repeat something I've shared before: the whole three-trilogy, nine-volume canon of Firestarters exists in my head primarily as an original series, and the draft of Gifted I just finished is ostensibly a rough draft in fanfic form of an original book. This implies a few important things, most notably that I've definitely taken a lot of liberties with a lot of FiM characters in writing it. I'll spoil-tag the juicy bits (although really, this shouldn't surprise you at all), but the main characters of Gifted as a horsefic are the Cutie Mark Crusaders, Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon, and several other members of their schoolyard class, and while their ages in the fic version of this story are around 12 years old or so because that's the absolute oldest I could rationally make them, the characters they correspond to in the original version are all 16 years old and midway through high school.
Suffice it to say, that's a hell of a gap in terms of what these characters can be reasonably expected to act like, and I've had a hell of a time trying to translate between the original characters and their FiM counterparts. And when one has a hell of a time doing something like that, one wonders why in the hell they're doing that thing at all. To complicate matters further, at this point I'd bet real-world money that Season 5 will end with the CMC having finally acquired some goddamn buttmarks, which--while awesome and way too long coming--would foul up a first-act plot element in Gifted that it'd really be kind of a ruby-red pain in the ass to replace. And worst of all, the publishing industry's stance on publishing converted fanfics is vague to the point that I'm not sure if pulling a Fifty Shades of Grey-type move is wise, or even logistically possible. From what I've heard, publication on FIMFiction may be considered by some publishing houses as "prior publication", and as such would lead to Firestarters being dead in the water in the long-term the second it goes up here. I don't know if that's what will happen or whether it's at all likely, but frankly I haven't looked into it enough at this point to be sure.
So therein lies my dilemma. Do I keep plugging away at a version of this project that may end up slightly retconned, was always going to be the deformed evolutionary predecessor to a more refined original piece, and might in fact harm that original piece's chances at publication. Or do I bite the bullet I'll have to start chewing on sooner or later and begin the conversion process now while it's fresh in my mind, knowing that it'll deny everyone here a chance to read the story in its initial form after I've spent so long talking about it and hyping it up?
If it's any reassurance, my current plan is to stay the course. Regardless of what I decide about submitting it to FIMFiction, you all will see Gifted in its ponyfic form at some point--if not officially "published" on FIMFic, at least through a blog post with a link to a PDF or a Google Doc collection. As for the second and third volumes to which Gifted is the first in a trilogy, I'll have to make a decision at a later date as to whether I'll write those as ponyfic at any point or just move straight to original. For what it's worth, Gifted does function as a standalone piece without leaving anything more than a couple minor loose ends for me to pick up and run with in the sequels, so the latter plan won't leave you guys twisting in the wind, so to speak. It really depends on what I want to do after Gifted is out in some form or another, and as far as that discussion goes...
Well, this post's long enough as it is, so I'll go through all of that tomorrow. Kindly stick around until then, would you?
Fuck it man, let your original work be original work, and don't torture it to fit fanfic frameworks if it stands better on its own.
Talk to bookplayer, if you know her, she knows a lot of stuff about this kinda thing.
I'd like to know about this too, because like you, I have a massive story that started out as a ponyfic but which I'd ultimately like to "de-ponify" when it's finished and publish as my own. If you find anything out, please make a blog post or at least kick it my way.