State of the Communion · 3:13am Mar 14th, 2016
Warm wishes, friends!
Not sure why I feel like writing my thoughts out this time – I get by well enough without making serious use of the blog here – but there's no sense not indulging myself if that's what I'm feeling right now, I say.
The eighth chapter of Pride Goeth went up today, which also means that chapter 2741 of Necessary Love is underway since I've taken to working on both stories alternately despite my original intentions. I've been musing on this exchange, and other things, hence the blog thoughts here. Doing two stories at once, especially ones that not only are significantly different in content but also different in approach, is a very interesting experience. Necessary Love is so open, freeform, and full of discovery, whereas Pride Goeth is very rigid and set, clearly defined in the ether and I'm trying to manifest it in an exactly perfect way. When moving between designing and writing two such stories your frame of mind changes between them; your thoughts, opinions, desires... they all undergo sudden transformations back and forth. You have to jump between headspaces, and maybe that's why I abandoned working on the two stories simultaneously some time ago?
But there's more to it than that. In terms of simple output rate, alternating chapters hasn't technically slowed my rate of writing, which is still at about one long chapter a month. However this on the other hand means only about six chapters are produced for each story per year, which doesn't feel so great; especially for anybody who is only a fan of one of the stories but not the other. That particularly hurts Necessary Love which is such an open-ended story that greatly takes its time anyway. I find myself wondering if I should try the simultaneous writing again.
You see, swapping where your head is at so that you can jump between stories isn't actually terribly difficult at all. Hell, it's probably not any more difficult than, say, having two different styles of video games on your plate (or books, or films, etc.) You can do it in a snap so long as you're not muddled. I'm not sure why, when I tried that when initially writing Pride Goeth, I felt pushed to do only one story at a time. I mean, one of the most fascinating things about my inner feelings with these tales is that when I am actively writing Pride Goeth I very much think about Necessary Love and long to work on it, but then as soon as I am working on Necessary Love I pine for Pride Goeth. If I could manage these urges, couldn't I work faster on both stories by spending less time pondering and more time penning each tale when it's most active in my head? Something to try, again, I suppose.
Another fun thing about writing two stories that are so separate is how they influence each other regardless. If you read both stories you have probably noticed that I spend much more time and effort on the formatting of Pride Goeth. That's a reflection again of how much more rigid I'm making that story. There's italics, there's bolds, some paragraphs have unique or wider spacing, etc. With Necessary Love and all its prior tales I pretty much just always chained paragraphs directly and only used ALL CAPS when I needed emphasis, among other things like not always starting a new paragraph if a character speaks in the middle of their actions. It's not that I ever believed formatting is superfluous garbage; it's not. I've just never cared, because James' saga to me has always been about the exploration of the raw content; a very, very subtle difference in not how the story is written but the thought it is written in, if that makes sense. So long as things were 'readable enough' it was good for me. Suddenly taking on the wider challenge of building a story specifically for FIMFiction, where the elements of formatting should be used to give the story some polish, has caused some of these things to bleed back into how I write Necessary Love.
Likewise there's a way in which Necessary Love has grown a little more loose and improvised. It's something of a rebellion against the strict order of Pride Goeth. Such a rigid story as that is only allowed microscopic improvisations as it's being written; changing even any of the medium-sized pieces of the story requires a return to the drawing board. Something like Necessary Love's explosion of characters in chapter 15 could never happen there. Every time I come back to working on Necessary Love I want to breathe, and so more often than before I shy back from making more constraining choices.
My mind has also wandered some on my wider goal with writing.
Pride Goeth is now almost as long as What Separates, although there is no danger of the story bloating like Necessary Love. Again, thank the extensive outlining and planning. Pride Goeth is about 2/3rds done; chapter 8 is the climax of Act 2 much as chapter 3 was the climax of Act 1. It's a classical three act story, so only Act 3 is left now.
That story is going to finish before Necessary Love, no doubt about it. James' tale is going to carry on for quite awhile. I've said before that the freely evolving format of that HiE series has gone from short novel, to long novel, to ongoing serial, and I've sort of taken that to heart. Not caring, not in a lazy or callous way but in a liberated way, has it's many ups and downs, and not always achieving a reasonable length is one of those downs. The story will go on until it reaches the end I know it much reach or I am otherwise finished with it, regardless of how long it takes.
But what of when Pride Goeth finishes? Do I write another story; again adding some rigidness to my writing life? Little secret: there were two Drypony stories I was thinking about writing and I eventually settled on doing the one about Prideheart. But there was this story about Broken Oak that I had in mind... With the experience I've been having on Pride Goeth I now really want to do that story too. You see now, perhaps, why I've thought about working on stories simultaneously again.
Hm. So. What do you think? I know, I know; I'm not expecting an answer. I don't really draw a crowd for many reasons, not the least of which is how little self-promotion I do (it is amusing to me how little attention Pride Goeth has gotten relative to the size of the response my other stories received, but there are many good reasons for things to have turned out as they have.) But I don't ask the question out of some desire to take a vote, or to gauge where my entertainment should go or which crowd I should please, or anything like that. I ask because: this is my blog of thoughts, and strictly speaking my thought right now is, "What are you thinking?"
Some of you certainly aren't afraid to share, so a big thank you to those who have been following and commenting on the chapters. For those who don't, you're just as loved. I'm honored that of all the places you could lend your eyes you're donating them here. I care what you're thinking not because I want to know, but because if you're here then isn't what you're thinking important, shared or not?
Well, my mind feels more empty now!
Friends, take care. If the past predicts the future then I'll see you again in April with Necessary Love's next update... or did I just spend 30 minutes explaining why we'll see a change in that?
Come what may, I'm excited!
