Chapter 12, Audiobooks, and Narrative Restructuring · 4:18am Apr 2nd, 2017
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Hey guys! What's up? I'll tell you.
So I finished the Chapter 12 draft yesterday night. I admit it's taken me longer than I would've liked. Getting through the middle gave me a spot of trouble, and for a while I was worried that it might not even reach the 5k goal I give myself for every chapter. But then things happened as they often do for me, and the last 2k words came out all at once, giving me a solid 6500 words to send out to the editors. I hope to have it published Friday at 6PM EST. The good news is that I've actually already written 2k words for the Chapter 13 draft, which is coming along much breezier than the other.
I've started listening to audiobooks during my daily commute to and from work. It's pretty nice, actually, and helps solve the dilemma I often have while actually at work of choosing between writing or reading in my spare time. I've been listening to the original Fallout: Equestria, which—funnily enough, considering it's one of my personal role model stories—I've never actually read more than halfway into. I can't recall why. It's just that for one reason or another I never get around to finishing it! Writing a story that could be lauded as "the new Fallout: Equestria" has always kind of been one of more foolish goals, and yet I've never read the damn thing. Well, here's to audiobooks opening up a whole new avenue of story digestion for me!
It's because of this new listening schedule that I've come to the decision to restructure my plans for Empty Horizons. It's always been planned as a three-act story, but after some deliberation with my co-author we've decided to actually publish each of the three acts as their own stories, turning it into a proper trilogy. Why are we doing this? Well, the main reason is that I really liked the narrative structure Fallout: Equestria is written with. It uses timeskips graciously to carefully adjust the pacing, a thing which I currently can't do with the precedent I've set for Empty Horizons. If I want to skip past some time, then I have to switch perspective. It's too far into the story for me to suddenly change that, so I'll start using timeskips without perspective switches once I finish act 1. As to what I'm going to title the second and third acts—well, I don't rightly know. Maybe I'll do a X Horizons and Y Horizons, or a Empty X and Empty Y, or maybe I'll come up with something better. I'll cross that bridge when I get there.
As usual, I invite anyone interested to join me, my team, and a bunch of other lurking fans in my Discord channel. Seriously, there's only like five people there that ever speak, and four of them are either me or my editors. How am I supposed to brag about my awesome story to my writing friends if I don't even have an active Discord? Sheesh. Everybody has one these days y'know!
Anywho, here's to hoping I see you lot on Friday. If we're lucky, I'll have the Chapter 13 draft done by then, too.
Can't wait!
You've got a treat in store, mate, if you haven't read (or in this case, listened to) the other half of Fallout Equestria! It gets worse before it gets... better... But it's gonna be awesome!