100,000 Words . . . · 6:47am Dec 15th, 2016
As of the posting of chapter 16 of ‘Finding a Place’, this story has grown to 100,000 words in length. It’s quite a mark to reach in my honest opinion. You only need 50,000 words for a story to be considered a novel apparently. I’ve got some thoughts about the story past the break to share but they might contain a few minor spoilers. If you’d rather avoid spoilers until you’ve read the story I’d suggest leaving for now.
The first words of 'Finding a Place' were written on August 30 of this year. By my calculations, I’ve written a bit more than 950 words per day since then. Of course, that’s not counting discarded drafts and future chapters I’ve written as inspiration strikes. It also doesn’t include the three short stories I’ve completed or the five other longer stories I’ve written initial chapters for. In fact, looking through my files I find it hard to grasp the sheer volume of writing I’ve done.
When I initially wrote the first four chapters of ‘Finding a Place’ I thought it would take four chapters to adapt the first movie (Arc 1) and six chapters to bridge the time to get to the time of Rainbow Rocks (Arc 2). As the story began to come together I realized it would be too much of a rush if I cut it short and I would be sacrificing a lot of neat character moments. I stepped back and improved both the detail and the number of scenes which I think has only improved the story the characters.
As far as the story to date goes, the goal of 'Arc 1' was to adapt the original movie slightly to introduce Silver Spark and connect him into the main characters without significant disruption of the original movie. I’d like to think I accomplished that in my own way and I did make a specific choice to not have him save the day.
Arc 2 was a more interesting beast to assemble because other than the five short youtube videos it has been entirely my creation. There were several goals when I planned out this arc but the main one was to establish the human six as proper characters and gives some natural growth to their relationships. I actually dedicated approximately one chapter of Arc 2 to each of those relationships before diving into the final approach to Arc 3.
Beyond Sunset Shimmer as the only unique character, it's a bit sad to see the Main Five in Equestria Girls as simply human twins of the ponies. I suppose that's the downside to movies over a TV show but it still bothers me a bit that they are almost caricatures of the ponies. At this point, I’d like to think I’ve done a decent job of giving not only Silver Spark but the human six characteristics of their own. If you're interested I'll post some of my thoughts on how they've evolved in my story in a future blog post.
When I initially worked up the courage to publish ‘Finding a Place’, I never imagined my work would get such a positive response. I’ll admit the first couple dislikes were disheartening but that was quickly assuaged by the positive response, not only in the form of likes but also your comments and even just the number of people reading it. It really makes pushing that publish button a bit easier.
So what's coming next? Well for 'Finding a Place' we will be moving into Rainbow Rocks and some stuff I've been looking forward to introducing for a long time. There are a few unassuming mysteries tucked away in the first sixteen chapters that will eventually come to the forefront and more that will appear soon. Barring any life or writers block issues, I should be able to keep releasing one chapter every 7 – 8 days. As for other stories, there's one that should be coming out in the next few days but I'll save discussion of other future story plans for a different blog post.
Thank you all for your support and feedback over the past months! But most of all, thank's for reading!
