Well, Crap · 1:54am Mar 20th, 2016
Hey all, been a last while since we talked. It was fun before, but this time isn't going to be so good.
I've been writing How to Be Kind for a few months now. It started out as a great idea of how to continue How to Be Cruel in my mind, but lately...
It's just so damn long. I had a vision in mind for the story when I started it, but I needed to progress the plot to the point where it got to where I wanted so I could write the actually interesting stuff.
...So far I'm 92,708 words in, and I'm still not even at the part where I wanted to start. That's bad. And I'm becoming less and less happy with what I've written.
It's just not as good as How to Be Cruel or Lost in a Terrifying world, in my opinion. Hell, it's not even as good as What Lies Beyond the Dance. I know motivation is only half of writing, but I'm all out of steam.
Long story short, is there anyone who'd be heartbroken to see this go on hiatus? If there's a few people who really want to see this to its conclusion, I'll fulfill my duty as someone who started something and complete it, but otherwise this might be the first fiction I just scrap.
Good idea? Bad idea? Let me know in the comments, or let silence be my answer. Thanks,
--Erisn
PS: One of the main reasons why I want to put this on hiatus or cancel it or just finish this clunker is because I have other things I want to write. Another novel, for instance, and there's another story I'm working on not in the MLP-verse but in the Erfworld-verse. This just takes too much time out of my writing to work on the other stuff.
If your not feeling up to writing it, you shouldn't force yourself to finish it. If you have other things you'd rather write, it would be best to work on want you really want to write.
I'm enjoying it... particularly since the big reveal. You do what you need to do, as a writer, but I won't pretend I won't be sad to see it go on hiatus.
Hm. I still really want to finish it, but it's a pain to juggle a job and writing. I'm down to barely 400 words per day, and that's far too slow for what I'm doing. I'm following the words of the great Terry Pratchett who did that when he had a job -- but then, he wasn't writing fanfiction but amazing novels. If I were also writing a novel while doing fanfiction I could justify the pacing, but I'm not.
I find that frustrating, but this next chapter...let's just say it's going to be interesting, so I'll finish that at least and see how I feel from there. Get ready for a ~10,000 page monster coming up this week. Maybe split into two parts.
Write because you want to, not because others want you to write.
I've been enjoying the story, though I'm completely lost as to Flutter's very existence at this point, something I'm sure that would eventually be explained - but if you are losing desire to write it, then put it on the shelf. To force yourself will lead to your resenting it. Doing it for the wrong reasons.
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Is that lost in a philosophical kind of way, as in you can't justify her actions, or lost in a I-really-don't-understand-her kind of way?
Lost in 'I don't see how Fluttershy - real Fluttershy - is alive' and 'What the hay happened to Fake Fluttershy' and 'Fake Fluttershy was Fluttershy all along? But but Changeling' and that sort of thing.
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Yes, the plot twists more than my large intestine...to clarify some things without giving too much away:
-Fluttershy survived the fire, but she was scarred. She's tough. Remember that Chrysalis was insane when she shoved her face into the fireplace, and probably didn't do the smart thing of checking for a pulse. She burned Fluttershy, dumped her body outside, and let her escape to heal up.
-'Fake' Fluttershy was really Fluttershy in disguise the entire time. Let's get our minds around that. But she only claimed to be a changeling -- she never actually displayed any real changeling abilities besides talking with them, which is a skill that can be learned.
-'Real' Fluttershy is Chrysalis, but she was messed up. After having her entire people die in her head and being beaten by a bear and nearly burned in a forest fire, she went nuts. Cue thinking she's Fluttershy and then realizing she's not. Her mental stability at this point is questionable at best.
It sounds confusing, but I had it all planned out, I swear! Just check out the cover image from How to Be Kind and compare it to How to be Cruel. There's one crucial difference besides the lighting.