Silver Glow's Journal--writing process blog · 8:35pm Jul 1st, 2017
Alrighty, kids, here's a blog about Silver Glow's Journal that I meant to publish quite some time ago. DreamKitsune had a bunch of followup questions and while I sent him a PM with the answers, I also meant to make a blog post, 'cause I figured that he couldn't be the only one who was interested.
So here's some insight into the process.
When did you start planning and researching the story?
Um, probably February 25; maybe February 24. I don't think there was a full day of planning before the first few chapters were published. Especially at the beginning, I was able to rely on my familiarity with Kalamazoo and Kalamazoo College, as well as my experiences in Kalamazoo, the places I'd lived and visited, and so on.
Most of the research was done on the fly, on an as-needed basis. Google Maps and Google Earth was really helpful for the flying sections, as well as some street names I'd forgotten and so on. I did take some liberties; for example, Blake's Diner has closed down or moved since I was in college.
I don't remember when I started making sure that the weather was accurate, but I know it was fairly early on in the process--I used WeatherUnderground's historical data for Kalamazoo (or wherever Silver Glow happened to be at the time). That was actually really useful, both because Silver Glow was always interested in what the weather was, and also because it gave the story a realistic throughline. Sometimes she had to change her plans because of the weather, and I didn't always know that that was going to happen before I got to the day in question.
I found lots of good class videos on YouTube for subjects like astronomy, thermodynamics, and math, and I also used my original class notes from Cultural Anthropology to set up most of those class topics (I did take some liberties, but overall the classes largely followed the videos or my notes).
When did you start writing?
Pretty much immediately. At the time, I was trying to stave off a lack of interest in writing which was largely caused by stress at work, and I wanted to try something that would be fun, that I could write in short little bits without ever worrying about a huge, complicated through-line, and I thought that if I published daily, that would also encourage me to write more and not waste all my free time watching videos on YouTube.
How much of the story was planned?, was discovered during the writing process?, was inspired by the readers’ comments?
Very little of it was initially planned. It was essentially 'it's gonna be a one-year journal, and Silver Glow is the main character' and that was pretty much the initial planning. After that, I did have to plan things like what her classes would be, where she'd go, what she'd see, and kind of sketch out a very rough framework of how the exchange program worked.
A lot of stuff was suggested in the comments. Poems and poets, for one; I didn't think of all of those on my own. I tried to remember to acknowledge people when they made a suggestion that got used, but I probably missed some. The camelbacks--I'd never thought of that. Lord Legion, I believe, made the suggestion, and then I thought of a logical way to fit it in.
In general, planning was generally very loose. For example, on her trip out West over the summer, the initial plan was take the train and then go to see the Tornado team (I had to figure out where the nearest train stop would be, and remembered that in one episode of a tornado documentary, the chase team had been in Shamrock, TX), then go to Colorado and do stuff, and then on the way back visit an airplane factory in Kansas, and visit a Boeing factory. Then once I had the basics set, I'd do the research on things like hotels in Shamrock (their pool really was broken, according to their website), what to do around Colorado Springs, and so forth.
Since the plot was pretty open most of the time, that gave me a chance to discover things with Silver Glow. Things like fun town names (such as Wild Horse) or interesting attractions (the giant egg that can be seen from Amtrak) weren't really planned; I discovered them as I was going over her route. I think that that really worked out well in the story: usually we writers tend to plan out everything and don't get surprises because we know that everything is supposed to serve the plot of the story in some way or another, but in real life it isn't like that. You take side trips or forget something that you were going to do or make a new discovery by accident.
When did you feel you nailed Silver’s “voice”?
Ooh, I'd say late in January, or early February. I think starting right around the Angry Man at Walgreens, she really started to be more of a driving force on the story, and sort of took over from some of my planning. And the more I wrote, the easier it became to be Silver Glow. I didn't have to ask 'what would she do' or 'what would she write in her journal;' I just knew.
If people go back and really pay attention to some of the details, they'd probably notice things changing up until that point, and then they become consistent. For instance, Aric originally eats in the dining hall, but by February, he's got his own house. She was originally going to be a high school exchange student, living at someone's house, and I changed that really quick. And there were a few other minor mistakes that happened early on.
What were the hardest/most frustrating parts of the story to write?
Well, the sex scenes were really difficult. Getting the right amount of detail without turning it into a clopfic was really tricky, and sometimes those were about the hardest part of a chapter to write. Also, there were some places where I wanted the audience to guess a particular detail but it was something that SIlver Glow wouldn't know, and so I occasionally had to dance around that a little bit. One thing that worked in my favor was the format; it wasn't unreasonable that she'd say something like 'which is called a Jeep,' because unlike most first-person narrators, she's exploring the world and so might put a mundane detail that she finds interesting in her journal. The flipside was that sometimes she wouldn't ever recognize something, and so it had to be left out.
What were the most fun parts of the story to write?
The ones where Silver's just being herself and flying around for pure enjoyment were usually lots of fun, and so were the flashbacks to Chonamare. Also, a few sections that were straight-up cribbed from my own experiences were really enjoyable, too, because in some cases I was just writing something that I'd done or seen from Silver Glow's POV.
And some of the little interactions, as well, like Silver Glow vs. the dog. Those were always fun.
How did you maintain your level of enthusiasm over the year?
Oh, man, there were days that it was really hard. Mostly when I was short on time, because of IRL things, or when there was a particular passage that wouldn't quite come to me. I couldn't tell you how many times I'd just be looking at a blinking cursor or a blank piece of paper and I knew the clock was ticking, and I had nothing. One handy trick, though, if you're stuck on one section, is to just skip it and add it in later. And there were some cases where that section never got added in, because by the time the chapter was done it turned out it hadn't been important after all.
I think having a deadline to publish really helped push me when I might have gotten lazy, and then skipped one chapter, or two, or three. It's like exercise--you can always find a reason not to do it.
At the same time, there were points where I had to delay on something that should have been in there because I just didn't have time to get all the research done on short notice. Like the poets, for example--I mentioned it before, but that's one place where the comments really came in handy, because I was starting to run out of poets that I knew that would fit into the class structure, and people kept saying 'what about so-and-so?' Like, I didn't even know that Kipling wrote poetry, and I'm glad I found that out, because a bunch of Kipling's poems were perfect for Silver Glow.
Aside from Silver, which character surprised you the most over the story?
Probably Meghan. You could see some early hints at her interest in Silver Glow back in February, when they took the road trip, but I never thought that they'd turn out to be lovers. I didn't think that Meghan had it in her to be bold enough to actually risk making a move. I can't remember for sure, but I think people commenting saw that it was gonna happen before I did.
See, that's the interesting thing about writing characters. If you really pay attention to them, they tell you what they want to do, and all you've got to do is listen, and let them have their way. You don't want to try and force them, even if you know that they're wrong, or if you know that they're going to complicate your well-crafted plot. A good character can move on her own without your help. And I'll be honest with you, I have no clue how that magic happens, but it does.
Which plotline surprised you the most?
Well, the aforementioned Meghan/Silver Glow paring; I didn't see that coming for quite some time. That was probably the biggest one; most of the rest, I kind of knew how things would go before they happened.
Also, her meeting Cedric and Leon; I didn't think that that would go much longer than their first meeting. That was another one that I didn't anticipate. But the more I got to know the characters, the more I realized that they'd really like each other, and that beneath their tough guy personas, both Cedric and Leon had a lot more depth to them. Heck, Kalamazoo College isn't known for its football program, so the only way that they were likely to get there was if they were interested in education first and football second.
Did you get to do all that wanted to do in terms of plotlines and characters?
No, not by a long shot. I wanted her to go to Firekeeper's Casino with Mister Salvatore, for one. She was supposed to see The Man from Snowy River, but that never worked out, either (mostly because I never had a chance to watch the movie). I wanted to bring up a little more about politics than I did, and I also didn't spend as much time with analysis of the Bible as I'd meant to, or comparisons with other major religions. I also managed to miss a philosopher due to not taking careful notes in the beginning; after that happened, I paid a lot more attention to keeping those things in the chapter notes (such that they were) so I wouldn't mess it up again.
Incidentally, the basic format of chapter notes went something like this:
November 1 [Tuesday]
November 2 [Cubs win the world series]
November 3 [Thursday] (Festival Playhouse Rocky Horror Show)
November 8 [trump wins]
November 9 [fallout from trump win]
November [early] mini-running of the leaves at Jeff's house
November 18 [heavy thunderstorm, heavy winds]
You'll notice that there are some missing days there; that's because I didn't know yet what was going to happen during those days (the document I pulled this out of was for the third week in October, so I still had some time to work on what was missing). And some of that got changed. The mini running of the leaves wound up happening in Madison instead, for example.
Some people were also disappointed that she didn't wind up with a Comp-Sci class, but that really didn't make sense for her. It would have been a waste of time. Maybe if it was one day a week or something, that might have worked out, but not as a regular class. She'd just get frustrated, and it's not knowledge that would help her all that much back in Equestria.
Is there one part of the story, either plotline or character, you wish you could go back and fix?
Reworking some of the early chapters to eliminate continuity errors would be one thing; one of the main reasons that I never have is that when people have read it they can't very well un-read it, so they're going to have that in their memories. Also, there's an entire missing day in January, but nobody's noticed it yet. I don't think. If you go through and match up January with a calendar, you'd find it, though. The thing is that I didn't catch it until towards the end of January
I also meant to use earlier-gen Aquamarine and Gusty as opposed to current gen, but I'm happy with how it wound up turning out. Also, I might as well mention now that Cayenne probably shouldn't be attending college, given her likely age in the show and the fact that this is set even further in the future. Maybe she's going for a PhD.
Aside from completing the story, did you accomplish your writing goals for this story?
Mostly. I mean, the big one was writing every day, and I pretty much did that. The few days that I skipped were because I had something else to do that wasn't conducive to writing, but in general I did manage to do it every day, at least a small part of a chapter.
The other thing that I was really hoping for was that the story would inspire other writers to take one of my ideas and expand upon it, or write a spinoff story of some sort, and there were a few really good ideas floated in the comments that I hope see the light of day.
In terms of writing, what did you learn from this story? What would you have done differently?
Well, I learned that I can write a million words in a year, which is f
ing insane. [And from a technical standpoint, I learned that a Razer keyboard can't stand up to that level of use.]
One thing that I would have done differently if I could have, is that I often got blindsided by a little detail, and sometimes that would slow down the whole process as I thought of it, and sometimes they were the hardest details to pin down, yet the most familiar to certain readers, like that Florida cars don't have front licence plates. I swear that they used to.
I spent I don't know how long figuring out what that crater was east of Colorado Springs, and had to resort to multiple satellite photos to get it. It didn't help that there wasn't a street view that showed it. And there was some stuff that I never figured out, like what that structure in the river in Punxsutawney was.
Having a better reserve of chapters would have been smarter, and would really have lowered some of the stress. Also, I should have kept running notes from the beginning; there were a lot of things that I had to go back to the story and look for later because I couldn't remember them.
Likewise, since I was basing it on real life events, I should have kept my own daily journal of news headlines and whatnot. A lot of them got overlooked because three months later when I was writing the chapter, I kinda forgot about them.
What advice would you give to writers doing an epistolic story?
It turns out that it's a very difficult format to work in. Everything is processed and filtered through the narrator, and in a story like this where Silver Glow doesn't really know everything about how Earth works, human body language, etc., it can be challenging to get across exactly what's going on, especially if it's something that she doesn't know but that the audience should recognize instantly. And you also have to think about when she might have written this down--was it right after the fact? The evening before she went to bed? The next day?
Also, things that might have been significant in a third-person omniscient story (for example) might not even really matter at all to Silver Glow, so she didn't write it down. There were a few things that got dropped in the course of the story simply because it wouldn't mean enough to Silver Glow to actually put it in her journal.
At the same time, such stories have a rigid format which helps keep an author focused and that can be a blessing. It's actually a fun format to experiment with.
One thing that I did think about when I was maybe midway through was that one of the things that I tend to be particularly good with as an author is dialogue, and in one respect this story had none whatsoever; and yet, to look at it another way, the entire story is written in Silver Glow's dialogue.
Feel free to comment with more behind-the-scenes questions you might have . . . maybe there'll be enough for another followup blog in the future!
Source
Kids who have only seen the Disney movie of the Jungle Book really miss out. In fact, the story goes that nobody at Disney had read it and they made the movie based on just a basic outline. I hear the newer movie was better, but still, the story suffers without the poetry.
Also, more people should be familiar with Captains Courageous. Great book. The 1937 movie was okay, though it cut out a lot of my favorite scenes and totally messed up the ending.
Speaking of which, would you mind too terribly if I borrowed Silver's hometown (or at least the name of it) for one of my stories? I have a character who is from the pony equivalent of Ireland, and having her hail from Chonamare would fit thematically, as well as being a nice little nod to your magnum opus.
That was one of the best parts of the story, IMO. Even moreso than Silver and Cayenne's sexual shenanigans.
Dog: Stupid bird-horse! Why won't she go in the barn, like she's supposed to?
The dog was the best character in Silver Glow's Journal.
Some people (and ponies) do go back to school even when older, for various reason.
I'll be honest, I did not process the dates on the entries ever. Like, ever. If you held a gun to my head, I might be able to say which scenes took place in which season.
Missing days seem like they'd be pretty easy to justify, until halfway through writing this sentence you realize that no, Silver Glow would have just written two entries the next day and the first one would be slightly less well-defined.
In any case, cool to see some behind-the-scenes stuff.
4589115
The newer movie is an improvement on a technical level, a level of actually having a story this time, and including more names from the book. A better product, but not not much of a better adaptation.
Has part of the law of the jungle poem.
I always liked how she thought car models were their names.
something I forgot to mention at the time (because my school year was exhausting and I didn't actually have to do this), my school actually has a GE technology section. Because of this, there's a lot of really basic tech classes like microcontrollers for everyone, computers for poets (love the name) and Genetic engineering technology. They cover a really wide range of topics. Things like that probably would have been more Silver's speed.
4589115
I'm not sure that I've even ever seen the movie. I feel that my grandpa had a children's book version of it, but I may be misremembering. I do know that he had the fox and the hound book.
As it happens, that's one of the books I thought about sometimes when I was writing flashback scenes. I've never read the full book, oddly, but when I was a kid, I had an abridged pocket version which I really liked (I also had Journey to the Center of the Earth, and I think one more). I'm actually going to order a full copy, since I do want to write a good pony sailing story.
4589122
Go for it!
I'd never planned for the dog, but it just seemed so obvious when she got to the stables. He was one of the best characters.
4589130
4589132
That's quite true. She certainly could have been going for a PhD or some other advanced research into physics.
4589137
Most people didn't, including me in the very beginning
I think that's why nobody ever pointed it out.
Well, it also screwed up which day of the week it was, which was kinda problematic. Although I suppose that early on, Silver Glow could have been dating her journal entries differently than she did later.
Thanks!
4589150
Even when she learned, she still referred to the ones she knew best by their name, like Cobalt.
The only programming class I ever took (and I dropped it halfway through) was a really basic HTML-type of class (I actually don't remember what language we were using; something that was reasonably common and basic in 1996 or 1997 [it wasn't linux]). I do think that she'd be interested in computers for poets. That sounds like a fun class, although I have no idea what the syllabus might be like.
Incidentally, if you haven't seen it, there's a story in the feature box right now that's pretty heavy into computer language.
sweetie.log
4589168
BTW, Go For It! was also the title of a "quintessentially '80s" board game that my family had when I was growing up.
Dog is best pony... wait a minute...
Also, for the record, I wouldn't have minded being one of Cayenne's "human conquests." She may have been a slut, but she was my kind of slut.
4589150
And that the logos were their cutie marks.
Well, the aforementioned Meghan/Silver Glow paring; I didn't see that coming for quite some time. That was probably the biggest one; most of the rest, I kind of knew how things would go before they happened.
I think this is very interesting and one of the best part of the fics. In retrospective, I think it looks clear in the first part of the fic that Meghan didn't was planned to have such protagonism as it ended being, compared to Aric, and the best of this is how this also ended being translated to the fic itself, as Aric get jelaous of how much time Silver is spending with Meghan and they have to sort it out.
It make me thinks of cases in tv shows, in wich a secondary character get's really popular with the public, and the screenwriters start to give him much a bigger pressence. That was pretty cool.
I don't need o say again that this was an incredible story, so fun and good to read. It really gave me a lot of pace of mind in some hard moments in my life.
I have to be hats-off to you on this one because I nearly had a mental meltdown when I was doing Monster and had to put out (because I was dumb enough to think I could) a chapter every week. If I do a EiH/HiE journal type story, there is no way in the world I could ever do one per day. I'd die. Or I'd have chapters that just said, "Went to the emergency room today because the way humans string power lines is stupd. More tomorrow."
4589233
All we had was Monopoly and Chutes & Ladders.
It's okay; my dad says that Spike is best pony.
img10.deviantart.net/5707/i/2015/257/2/8/cayenne_happy_by_camanalli-d99ighf.png
You know that somewhere in Equestria, there's a pony trying to figure out what those cutie marks mean.
4589281
Yeah, that was legit one that I didn't see coming at all, either.
In some ways, that's what works really well about kind of writing off the cuff. I pretty much let the characters do what they wanted without trying to get in their way, and they occasionally surprised me completely. I thought that Meghan was either not going to be interested in Silver Glow that way, or even if she was, she'd wind up pining for her and not ever trying to get in her pants (so to speak). And by the end, I think she wound up being a little bit bolder than Aric.
4589385
It's totally insane. Like, I get if it was my day job it might not be so bad, but there were times that I was coming home from work and I was exhausted, and didn't want anything more than dinner and maybe a soak in the bathtub and I couldn't. But . . . after a while it got to be a habit, and I have to admit that there was something relaxing about being in Silver Glow's world for a little while.
Also, throughout the whole thing I kept worrying that some technical failure or physical failure would be the end of the project--my computer dying, or me managing to injure myself in such a way that I couldn't put out chapters on a reasonable schedule (and that basically happened a week ago when I managed to crush a finger).
I can't say that it was all good, though; there were times when I probably should have paid more attention to real life and a little bit less than Silver Glow's Journal (some of that will be revealed in the next blog post), but overall it was a wonderful project, and I have no regrets.
I can say it would have been a little bit saner if I'd stuck to my original idea of chapters being a few hundred words long and really only covering one topic. But, as happens sometimes, projects wind up getting totally out of hand and acquiring a life of their own.
Probably the thing that wound up being the sanity preserver in the end was that I only intended from the very beginning for it to be one year long and no more, and I stuck to that. The same thing probably prevented a meltdown during both one-shot-obers I did--when you know that there's a firm end date, it's a lot more sensible.
I guess in some ways you could equate it to the difference between a marathon and Richard Bachman's Running Man (not the crappy movie).
again congrats on completing your herculean task, looking forward to your next project
A slightly crazy fact... The Man From Snowy River was released as a region 1 DVD (USA) more than a year before it was released in region 4 (Australia). Even our own movies are geo-blocked.
For anyone looking for it, please be aware that it is an '80s, Australian, period, drama/epic. For a modern audience the pacing might seem weird, and it will appear somewhat dated. But there are some great horse scenes. (There is also a TV series set some years after the events of the movie, it ran for too many years and was crap. Don't bother.)
Anyway, congratulations on the story. I miss seeing it in my feed daily...
4589233
Oh yeah, completely forgot about that.
4589197
Description is as follows. Can't get a hold of a copy of the syllabus for you easily.
The for poets mostly means non technical.
I actually couldn't get into programming until I started doing computation based stuff (ie solving math problems). Then I moved to hardware based stuff (motors and things like that). I don't know anything about web stuff and software development. It helps a lot when you can find stuff your interested in, and there's nothing wrong with only knowing how to do certain things. Project based learning is great as well and it really helps.
I hadn't seen that, i'll have to check it out. And I want to make sweetie bot now.
I knew you could major in girls/guys; I didn't know you could go all the way to a full PhD!
4589506
Thank you!
Hopefully, my next project is gonna be more chapters of OPP, 'cause I'm kinda behind on that. Plus, I've got a little something else I want to work on, just some simple ideas that have been bouncing around in my head. And I also need to finish Stained Glass. And if all of that goes well, I might manage to also write something for NaPoWriMo, which got extended another month.
4589648
That's kind of sad.
Also, I'd just like to say that Australia is an amazing country and I'd love to visit there again sometime. Everyone there is super nice, and also completely crazy.
It's gotten more normal to me now, but for the first few days it was really weird to not be publishing another chapter.
4589751
The for poets mostly means non technical.
That's kind of disappointing, because it would be really cool to see something programmed in limericks or iambic pentameter or something like that . . . and it seems to me that such a thing might be possible, if one were so inclined.
I theoretically knew enough math up to Calc 1 (technically, I passed that class, too, although with a D I obviously wasn't very good at it). And I also had some familiarity with programming in Basic, and it was an intro class besides. I actually kind of regret not completing it, but at the time I never thought that the internet would amount to much of anything.
It's pretty good. And you don't have to know programming to appreciate it (although I'm sure that programmers will get extra appreciation out of all the code in the story).
Sweetie Bot is awesome.
4589884
Pfft, I bet in Equestria you can major in friendship, so it only seems logical that you could get a degree in friendship with benifits.
This was the biggest obstacle I had when I was planning my own Journal. I suck at planning activities.
Funny thing was that I was planning to have a unicorn taking a game-related Comp-Sci degree at DigiPen Singapore because unicorn Mommy is a board game developer and joined a start-up in Singapore, so the whole family moved to Singapore as expats and unicorn daughter decides to follow Mom into game development but chose video games instead of board games
and totes not because DigiPen was my alma mater.4590111
carolingianrealm.info/journal/not_enough_work.png
well, the intent of that was to find a way to relate coding to something your interested in. For me, that was getting solutions for engineering math and hardware stuff instead of standard hello world stuff or apps. And it's not to late to learn to program, although i'd recommend finding a project and learning what you need to for that. Choosing a good language is important as well. I'd recommend python, it's a lot less picky about syntax and it's pretty high level (easier for humans to understand).
Missing chapter you say?
It sounds like the perfect opportunity for Silver Glow's Journal: The Lost Pages.
I still have Princess Luna Gets Stuck In A Dreamcatcher on the backlog. I really like the idea, but at the same time I have so many other ideas that I also really like.
I wish I could write faster.
4590435
So do I, mostly. I prefer just winging it.
You totally should do that. Somebody suggested in SGJ that there should be a pony studying/playing video games, and I'd really like to see that.
img05.deviantart.net/7324/i/2013/258/8/c/some_princess_is_excited____by_skyline19-d6mielt.jpg
4590526
I currently can't think of anything that I would want to do badly enough to learn to program. Writing a macro on my old keyboard to cheat at cookie clicker is the only programmy thing I've done in the last few years, and that was really easy since the keyboard had its own software for that very purpose.
4590847
I managed to get off by a day quite early on and didn't notice for a few weeks.
Oh, yes, that totally needs to be a thing.
I think every writer wishes that. Like there were some way to just quickly translate all the words and ideas in your head into full-blown stories right away.
Maybe neural implants could do it.
It does!
I have in the family of 2k for it already, but it's right now stuck on a cliffhanger until I can sit down and properly think about it again. The plan so far is leaning towards Luna going on a little adventure whilst Celestia does... very little to help her.
4590892
well, I got forced into it. It was kind of mandatory, but I ended up liking it (although some stuff more than others). Someday that may change, programming has advanced a lot since Basic as well and you may enjoy it more.
4589130
So true. And she never found out why.
Thanks for posting this blog. It was great to get "a peak behind the curtains" if you will. Thanks again for creating and sharing your works. They help keep my sanity in an otherwise insane world I find myself in. SGJ is still my absolute favorite of all I've read so far.
4591186
I feel that Princess Celestia would have to spend at least a little time laughing at Princess Luna's misfortune before lifting a hoof to help. Especially if the ponies have some knowledge of dreamcatchers.
4591706
I think if I was spending more time playing with trains and less time writing, I'd probably be learning it, since there's a lot of really cool stuff you can do with a model railroad for not a huge expense and some programming skills.
Now, if there was some device that could get ideas right out of my head when I had them and put them on paper, I'd be all over that, even if I had to write my own code for it.
4592019
One of the mysteries of the Earth.
4595428
It was a real pleasure to write. And thank you again for all your help on the Florida vacation--I couldn't have done it without you.
4595882
XD
I should totally do that. As soon as she finds out.
4595883
No problem. It was truly an honor.