What's next? (TRM Spoilers) · 11:56pm May 29th, 2017
I'm about a week late with this, sorry about that, work has been crazy busy the last few weeks and my weekends have also been packed. Anyway, this is going to have some spoilers (well, one really) for The Right Man in the Wrong Place so consider yourself warned if you haven't finished it yet.
I don't feel like wrapping the whole thing in spoiler tags so...
I'll throw in some blank space here.
and some more.
and maybe a little more...
Psssst... If you haven't finished The Right Man in the Wrong Place you should have already stopped reading by now.
Okay, so first things first. Between the day I posted the last chapter for TRM and the day after, I had like a 50% increase in my number of followers, so hello to any new followers, thanks for showing interest in my story!
When I first sat down to plan out the whole story I wanted to write, it didn't take me long to figure out that I wasn't going to be able to do it in one part. Before I wrote anything I figured it would end up being a roughly 150k word story for both parts. Part 1 was going to be the setup, get Hail Storm into position where he can help with the upcoming war. Part 2 was going to cover the war itself. Imagine my surprise when part 1 broke 200k words. Now I've got to cover more than just the war, there's also Hail Storm and Golden Dawn, and maybe we'll even see some hints as to what Celestia, Luna and Discord are up to.
Anyway, I had a few reasons for wanting to break up the story. 1st was just length, by splitting the story up into 2 sections it would allow me to finish the first part before I posted anything and then (at least this was the plan) work on part 2 while part 1 was being posted.
This... didn't work out so well. I've mentioned before that for TRM, I wrote the whole story before I posted anything, instead of the more common (at least, I think it's more common) writing and releasing a chapter at a time. This let me go back and fix continuity errors that cropped up from time to time and adjust things without making changes to already posted content, and it let me sort of view the story as a whole to make sure things made sense. However, instead of working on part 2 while part 1 was being posted, I ended up spending most of my free time cleaning up and revising chapters for TRM (I think I re-wrote chapter 19, which used to be the epilogue, like 3 times), so I've made very little progress on part 2 so far.
My second reason was that TRM was being told almost entirely from Hail Storm's point of view. While he will remain the main character in the sequel, anyone who has finished TRM knows that there is a war coming and I will have to switch points of view in order to tell the whole story. I thought it would be weird to suddenly start switching points of view halfway through TRM so it made more sense to me to split things up.
On this subject, what I'm planning on doing is similar to what I did in TRM for the view PoV switches, but more frequently. If Hail is around, it will be told from his PoV (1st person) if he's not around, 3rd person. I'll be trying to keep these switches on a chapter by chapter basis so I'm not switching PoVs in chapter cause that would be confusing. I've also considered doing the whole thing in 3rd person, or multiple 1st person PoVs (almost certainly not going to do this one). If anyone reading this has feedback on this, let me know (I'm just looking for thoughts here, I'm not taking a vote as to which method to use)
Third, I assumed I'd get some feedback on TRM that would be helpful in identifying areas I need to improve and... i did! So, now I know what to look for when I'm working on part 2 and what areas to focus on improving.
I've saved the (kind of) bad news for last. I'm planning on doing the same thing for TRM's as-of-yet unnamed sequel that I did for TRM. That is I'm going to write the whole story before I start posting anything. I think I do better work this way, but the downside is, if you are waiting for the sequel (which I suspect many of you are) it's likely going to be a while before I'm ready to post anything.
For a rough guess, It took me around 7 months to write what ended up being the first draft of TRM, so I'm expecting a similar timeline. I'll try to post updates every once in a while to keep you all updated on progress, I expect work to be somewhat slower in the summer as my weekends are mostly busy but things will pick up later in the year.
Last, but not least, for anyone waiting for a sequel to Into the Black, I haven't forgotten about this. When I'm done with TRM's sequel that is next on my list.
I recommend more proof reading and editing for each chapter. TRM had a lot of little mistakes. Other than that, the story was intriguing, and I am looking forward to what comes next.
I will defiantly be watching for the new story.
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Yep! Part of the issue was, my pre-reader would give me corrections, I'd make them, but then I'd make additional revisions at the last moment which only got looked at once instead of multiple times by more than one person. I need to not do that as much.
I will be looking forward to see the next story