Update On Progress, Or Lack Thereof · 1:30am Mar 17th, 2017
Today my favourite of my stories passed 500 views, a milestone it's been inching towards for a long time. For the last couple of weeks I've been having a race with myself, as it reached 470 views and Why Are You Here, Your Majesty? reached 470 likes. And, sure enough, Adagio won, with Chrysalis currently standing on 479 likes. So, in celebration, here's a blog post about how my writing things are going, and to let you know that in no way have I forgotten about that ongoing story.
Here's the thing, though. The first chapter was uploaded in August, and the second in December, and although I said there'd be no update schedule, one chapter every four months seemed like a good thing to aim for once I realised the first two chapters were four months apart and I was a month or so away from when the next one would be due. Now it's mid-March, though, I can sadly say that that almost certainly won't be happening in early April.
I'd really like it to happen. Well, obviously I'd like to be able to update it way more often than that, but once every four months is at least a minimum schedule I'd like to aspire to. And, going forwards, that would be lovely, and at present I have no idea how feasible it will be. Not this time, though.
And why not?
A couple of reasons, really. Firstly, writing this third chapter is hard. It's at 1,200 words so far, and while the other two were 3,300 and 4,300 in length, that doesn't mean that this one is 1/3 or 1/4 done. It will be as long as it needs to be to cover all the relevant subject matter, and in that respect it feels like it's barely got started. But then I could be vastly overestimating how much material will actually need covering, or how much depth I'll need to go into, so it may not be a monster of a thing when it finally arrives. Anyway, the point is, there are a couple of things about this chapter in particular which are making it a challenging, slow endeavour to write. Both of which should become pretty apparent when you're at last able to read it. For a general indicator of one of the problems I've been wrestling with - providing you don't mind minor hints, suggestions and possible spoilers for what's to come - see this thread on the group forum of The Sirens.
The other thing is that my IRL megaproject has kicked into overdrive since about the start of February, and I've recently doubled my hours of paid work. That megaproject was almost silent through December, and the Christmas period gave me quite a bit of time off work, which is how I was able to spend two solid weeks doing little else but writing about Rainbow Dash. Likewise, megaproject continued to stall through January, which is how I found time to write 8,000 words about Best Monarch. But now everything is in full swing, and I'm in theory working day and night to get everything done as soon as possible. In practice, I'm not good at staying on task, and end up on this site a lot - I'm mostly able to put off writing long PM replies to people who are kind enough to be patient with me, but I'm struggling to stop reading a lot of stories and leaving comments on them here and there (although Worst Patient Ever is, like Inside No. 9, the thing I will happily take time off from whatever else I'm meant to be doing to read/watch the latest weekly installment of - unfortunately it's thrown buckets of fuel onto my yearning to read about Spitfire, and so I'm still powering through a couple of Wonderbolt stories a day).
Both of these are problems because my writing is a very slow process as it is. King Of The Stingers (which now has a reading on Youtube, kindly made by AShadowOfCygnus!) was written in a few hours one night, and I think you can tell. I find dialogue easy when the characters are just allowed to chat, and there's no purpose to it (royale with cheese, anyone?). But when their conversation has to drive the plot (and, you know, there is a plot), then focus has to be split between character and plot, which makes things harder. So I think it's telling that King Of The Stingers was not only my quickest story to write, but also the one where I think I get the characters sounding most like they do in the show (especially Applejack, who I wasn't so sure about in the Rainbow story).
So, having already made the task twice as hard by having to convey character and plot simultaneously, pour some cement over it by having characters not be completely open and transparent with each other. I mean, the mane six happily walking down the street together discussing school aren't really going to be choosing not to share their thoughts aloud, not to any great extent at least. But Adagio, backstage after the show, going over how to proceed, trying to keep her sisters together and balancing not further destroying their confidence against not getting their hopes up? Or Princess Celestia, caught off-guard by a deposed tyrant sneaking into her bedchambers, perhaps with intentions for peace, perhaps assassination?
And then you can throw in the difficulties of simply structuring sentences, especially in dialogue scenes, to make it clear which character is being referred to, when they all use the same gender pronoun and you're trying to avoid Lavender Unicorn Syndrome. There are the concerns about using the same positioning of tags within dialogue structures too often, worries about breaking up long blocks of text with shorter paragraphs, and, most recently, the concern that too much internal monologue may completely destroy the pacing (Why Are You Here had a thousand words cut out of its third chapter, it was so slow originally). And the more I learn about just how deep 'show, don't tell' goes, the more I have to think about stuff rather than just writing naturally (I very much hope that that behaviour will become natural over time, as I get more used to it, but it hasn't happened yet). Oh, and I edit as I write, rather than doing successive drafts. Yeah.
So, what's the upshot of all this? The downsides are: No new chapter yet for Best Story, and no new other stories either. Lonnnng reply times for nice people I should reply to more swiftly. Spitfire obsession that means IRL megaproject is going much slower than hoped too. Myself chomping at the bit and desperate to spend a lot of time writing, but none to spare. But, the upsides: I can't speak for the how the rest of the new chapter will be, but I like the 1,200 words I've got so far. Some great ideas for character dialogue or internal monologue, both later in that chapter and in later chapters (clunky sentence is clunky - I'm a writer, yo! 
). A veritable cornucopia of fan fic ideas overflowing in my brain, because I'm not able to commit much of any of them to paper at the moment; I think this week alone I've come up with two new short story ideas, two potential sequel ideas for another as-yet-unseen story, and two older ideas which have started chattering in my head again and are demanding to be written soon - it's hard to tell when they're still largely conceptual, but some of them might even be good! And, you know, that megaproject might be finished someday soon, which will give me loads more time, and make me not a complete failure in life, possibly. And also more hours at work mean more money, it's nice to have that looking reasonably stable. I'm cooking a bit more, too, (pre-diced frozen onions and peppers are the best thing!) which is good for health stuff I guess? Most importantly, I have absolutely not forgotten about my ongoing story; I can solemnly promise you that. Not a day goes by when I don't think about it quite a bit.
Oh, and I've seen one image of MLP Season 7: the cover image of the trailer video. My reaction, with no spoilers other than my own response: Urgh. Literally the worst thing they could have possibly shown, in my book. But I'm sure it'll still be good!
I've held off doing updates/personal blogs before, I quite like keeping the blog just for talking about character stuff that interests me, and I like having the blog count not be way higher than the story count, but that's probably just me being silly. I felt an update was due, and that's pretty much what blogs here are designed for, so here it is. I hope to have the new chapter ready as soon as I can have it ready. But it will be released, and the story continued, sooner or later, unless sudden death occurs. I hope the size of this blog explaining the delays goes some way towards conveying how much I care about that story, and that that knowledge offers some reassurance that it won't be forgotten.
Anyway, I'm off, it's 1 a.m. and I've got two hours' worth of stuff to get done. Take care guys, and thanks for your patience and understanding.
...Although, before I go, it's just dawned on me that this is the first thing I've said since those few days in January when I was screenshotting the feature box every few hours. And so, I would be remiss not to say: Thanks for that, everypony. Really, sincerely, thank you.
Had a really bad day today on my real life daytime project. Estee blogged this morning about the worst review ever received, and, sure enough, I received the worst feedback of my life shortly afterwards. Following that, all I could see in the project were the negatives, so I really didn't feel like working on it today, and took the day off to write instead.
Chapter 3 is now at 2,500 words. Given that more than half of that is flashback, and one page is just talking about whales, I think the chapter is going to have to be significantly longer than the previous two to cover the necessary ground. I've typed up all the assorted notes I'd previously written by hand, so the dialogue-only script is all assembled in one place, and so far I've got through eight lines of that particular dialogue fragment. With thirty-nine to go.
But, given that I've dedicated a whole day to it, progress hasn't exactly been stellar. The 300 words of big, descriptive text paragraphs were already written out in my handwritten notes, I've just poked and prodded them a bit more into shape. Likewise, all the dialogue had been written out here and there before, I just stuck it all together. So it's by no means making good progress, or coming on well, and this certainly doesn't mean I've turned a corner and can now spend more time writing. But it's made some progress, and I like what's there so far. So it's closer to completion than it was yesterday. Just not necessarily that much closer, and may not any grow closer still for a while.