Stay Determined: the sequel? · 7:38pm Mar 19th, 2018
Back when this story was published, I made an offhand comment somewhere that maybe there would be a sequel in a year or two. Well, it's been a year to the day since, so how about a progress report?
The tl;dr version is this: it's going to happen. I'm actively working on the first draft. But it's not going to be ready for a very long time. Maybe another year. I'm bad at predictions, though, so who can say? A very long, in-depth, slightly-spoilery-for-the-original ramble about the story ahead.
That Stay Determined should have a sequel is... sort of surprising? Looking back on the original, I'm still really happy with a lot of things, especially how much the ending closes out. That's it, the end, nothing can still happen because you know everything that has happened and is going to happen and what would even be the point of continuing aside from because one can? At the same time, it's terrible, and there's a need for Starlight to get something, anything else, whether it's her mythical happy ending or just an ending, period. And there are a ton of unanswered questions I couldn't cover in the original, due partially to the contest word limit and deadline, and mostly to me not knowing the answers myself at the time. Oh, I had ideas, but...
Who were Starlight's friends? How did the time loop start? Could it be broken? What lay in the world's future if it was? How did the world get that way in the first place? Was it really Equestria, or somewhere else? What happened to Luna and Celestia? Why were there two Starlights? Where did the one's alicorn powers come from, and what happened to her cutie mark? And most importantly of all, is there such a thing as a happy ending?
To find out, all I'd have to do is pick up right where the story left off, with an amnesiac unicorn coming to their senses and beginning a journey where they make friends and never lose and ultimately find themselves at the base of a lonesome tower. There's plenty of room there to work with, and it won't even have a foregone conclusion: suppose something different happens, and the loop "breaks." What's stopping one from casting the spell anyway, should circumstances lead up to it? There'd be no way to tell if things were truly changed, but there would always be hope.
So that's why I planned for at least the possibility of a sequel from the start, and am trying to write one now. But there have been a few problems that are huge... almost insurmountably so. Some, I've solved (sort of), others, I'm still working on.
First, the original story was really something else. Placing second in a big contest with tons of reputable talent, and then getting into the RCL? That doesn't just happen. It especially doesn't happen to no-name authors with ten followers who have just finished posting a big edgy pile of nope and haven't even been writing for six months, no matter how driven they are to learn from their mistakes. There may have been a little bit of creative, literary lightning involved, and ninety-nine percent of it had to do with the concept.
But lightning never strikes in the same place twice, they say. Well, I needed it to, because my number-one requirement for writing a Stay Determined sequel has always been not just to do the original justice, but to outdo it the same way it outdid my expectations for myself a year ago. I didn't just need one concept, either, but enough for an entire story long enough to answer that big pile of questions from earlier. And it needed to stay thematically consistent with the original, along with being just the right amount of Undertale-y...
I may have set the bar a little bit too high.
Still, never underestimate the power of daydreaming while trying to stay awake in an 8am upper-division college course taught by a professor who could consider a career in recording lullabies. It took a long time and a lot of fragmented and rejected ideas, but I think I've got what I need to do the original proud. I hope. I'll find out when I get enough of a draft put together to bounce off some prereaders, because this story is definitely going to get editing from someone other than me.
Second problem: this story might be somewhat long. Not ginormous, but with the outline I have, I'm looking at ten chapters... most roughly the length of the original story. Yeah, there's a lot that needs to happen. A part of me thinks it would be really cool to have the completed story take about as long to read as a true pacifist run of Undertale, but that's kind of just there: either way, the sequel will probably be in the 150k-200k range as far as wordcounts go.
This is a problem because of my other Starlight story. It's a daily, the kind where I chug along rain or shine and write, edit and publish a new 1-4k chapter each and every day no matter what. The Stay Determined sequel isn't exactly supposed to be a million-plus supermegaepic, but still. How are you supposed to write a longfic on top of that?
...It took me a long time to get past that. A really long time. I didn't want to start, only to lose steam and drop it halfway through. But in February, I finally did. Maybe it was because I wanted to have something to show to myself by the time this one-year mark rolled around. More likely, it was because Aragon's comedy contest had its deadline, I wound up one-shotting my entry, saw that I was only a few hundred words from breaking my personal daily wordcount best, and needed something I could put a tiny amount of work in on and call it a day.
Since then, I've been writing the sequel daily, too, because the alternative is stopping and that's almost as unthinkable as it is for Starlight. Only a pittance 250 word minimum, last thing before I go to sleep. Most nights, I barely brush past that. It's super choppy and incoherent and is almost definitely going to need a full rewrite from the ground up... but it has momentum.
The third problem, unfortunately, is one I haven't found a solution to yet. It goes like this: when I wrote the original, I knew there was a possibility of a sequel, but knew nothing about how it would go, so I was deliberately vague about a lot of things to give myself room to work with. But as I look at my ideas for how everything's going to be now... it looks like I wasn't vague enough. Particularly for the how did the world get this way category, which I can't very well change without throwing out a huge number of other really important plot points that totally depend on it.
The original story, no matter how I slice it, needs a rewrite. And I have no clue how to do that.
I can't edit the story directly. No major plot points would be changed, just minor-yet-critical details about the setting. Stuff like getting rid of color as a motif, relocating the dead map table, replacing the wind/desert/sand type of postapocalyptic wasteland with an eternal cloud of ash... That kind of thing. A few of Starlight's powers and abilities need modification, too. But for a story that won a contest and got RCLed, making any sort of edits beyond typo corrections now would be terrible form at the very least, and if not outright against the rules, probably should be. At the same time, the revised version would still fundamentally be the same story, so just trying to include it as the first chapter of the sequel and marking the whole thing a standalone spiritual successor could come across as double-dipping. I'm pretty sure there are site rules against this, as well.
What seems like the best option right now is to just add the revised version as a second chapter to the original, marked "2018 edit" or something and put a specific note saying it's the one canon to the sequel. But... that feels weird too. I don't know. Fortunately, this will only matter when it comes time to actually post the story way down the road, so it doesn't stop me from working on it now. I'll think of something. Eventually.
That's what I've got to say. I wish I could offer a teaser or preview of some sort for people who actually read this massive blog all the way through, but the fact is everything I have now is too rough, too empty, too done in the name of keeping momentum. But it is coming, and I hope it won't be another year until I have another update I can share.
I think the "2018 edit" option may be your best bet here. It wouldn't be the first time I saw two versions of a story side by side as chapters.
In any case, looking forward to the sequel!
Quietly stashes certain plans away
Anyway, I agree with FOME down there, the “2018 edit” option is probably the best one. And this sequel sounds like a really cool thing that I’m going to be excited about