Progress At Last

Two blog entries in the same month?! What could possibly have brought on such jubilant lack of sanity? In my case, I’m just very happy that seven months after its last update, my favourite of my stories now finally has a third chapter!

Ok, let’s take a minute to talk about this picture, by CoNiKiBlaSu-fan. The reason it’s here is because Sonata’s face in the top frame is completely adorable. As ever, though, the real highlight is Adagio, who the caption describes as saying ‘help me, I’m a beached siren,’ but I much prefer the view that she’s rolling on her back laughing at Sonata and Aria.

Anyway, third chapter!

...Well, half of one, anyway The story has nearly doubled in length, though, which might count for something?

Why has it taken so long? Pretty much for all the reasons listed here, back in March. I mentioned in that blog entry that there were a couple of things about this chapter in particular that were making it tough, which should’ve become apparent when reading it. Therefore, the rest of this post will contain spoilers for the new published chapter, so I’d suggest stopping now if you haven’t yet read it (whether you're intending to or not - if you are, there'll be spoilers, if you aren't, it'll just be a bit pointless ).

The first thing, if anyone were in any doubt as to where the difficulties stemmed from, is that this chapter is from Sonata’s point of view. This was my first time writing her, and while I really enjoyed it, it does present some challenges. Using big words proved tricky, as did detailed observations of peoples’ reactions when coming from a girl who sometimes doesn’t get sarcasm. I knew from the outset that trying to keep hold of the plot probably wouldn’t work, so I just let Sonata loose, with the other two punctuating the narrative with actual relevant stuff from time to time.

The second is the plotting methods by which the sirens’ deduce the nature of their predicament, which required some very careful planning. Initially it was all a bit long-winded and curiously conveniently extrapolated, until I hit on the flashback idea, and then everything came together.

I had no time, though, for all the aforementioned reasons, so I wrote out dialogue plans here and there in moments where I was stuck with my notepad and unable to do much else. This was ok for the first half of the chapter, but by the second half the conversation was all planned out, which made it difficult to work on here and there. Dialogue isn’t so bad to write like that, I find, nor is internal monologue like the opening scene of RDIAMF, the first half of which was written by hand one night when I couldn’t sleep, but balancing dialogue, internal thoughts, and descriptions of what characters are doing I find harder generally, especially by hand, and most finished paragraphs I’ve written that encompass those elements have been rearranged and rewritten sometimes several times over, often with the whole story in front of me on the computer.

So that chapter was stuck at about half done, and looked to stay that way for a while.

And then politics happened. I could have stayed up all night and watched the election results come in seat by seat, but it’s mostly just party figures toeing the party line, arguing about whether the exit poll is to be believed. So instead I spent the night writing, and checked the TV every hour or so. I got somewhere between 600 and 1,000 words written that night, I think.

And by the next day, the results were in. Elections are funny things – not everyone can win, but everyone sure can lose Seriously, while there were a couple of impressive performances from various leaders in various sectors, overall it was bad news for every single party. And since the stage of my IRL megaproject required sound judgement and honest appraisal, which I wasn’t really in the best mood to do, I spent the whole of the next day, pretty solidly from when I woke up to when I went to bed, writing. I finished the last few lines of dialogue off over the couple of days that followed, interspersing writing with working.

So here we are, with the third chapter much sooner than I’d been expecting. I understand why many think ponies should remain entirely separate from politics, but damn, nothing like politics to prompt escaping to Equestria for a bit. Maybe if there’s another election soon (as has been suggested), the second half of the chapter will be written in the not too distant future as well?

Of course I’d like to get it done much sooner than that. But it takes time, and I don’t have much of that to spare, so it’ll be done as soon as I can, but that may not be very soon. Hopefully fewer than seven months again, that would be really nice! And there are some bits in chapter five or six that I’m really looking forwards to writing...!

Comments

[King of Madness]

Congratulations on your progress.

Also, you're right. Sonata looks super adorable in that picture.