Comparing Notes retrospective...sort of.

Wrapping up this story was a strange feeling. BlackWater and I had been working on it for almost a year. It launched June 27 of last year.

It was also something I have never tried before, a collaborative story. But I’m glad I did, because it gave me a framework on how to improvise on a premise that let me feel like it was worth it to join SunLight Sliders II.

So how did this crazy thing get started?

Well, BW and I had been talking in the site PMs for a while over holiday fics, annuals, and other silly things. IIRC, I pitched the idea of us doing a story where one of us would be be character and the other would do the other character. When we tried coming up with a setting - and her having just given me permission to use her Hello Tropics as a honeymoon location at the end of Legacy - the idea to have the two couples cross paths was born.

But when? Couldn’t be too early because then it would be awkward to timeline - which at first we weren’t going to worry about.

Not too long prior to us drafting it I wrote Crystal and introduced Sunset and Sunshine’s daughters; Midnight Sky and Aurora. I liked the characters and the idea of the kids meeting was one of those wobbly wobbly bits that you often forget how they got thought up.

I personally blame the wood elves. Nasty buggers.

Well, like a lot of my stories do, the story slowly went from goofy lighthearted cross dimensional fun to a slightly sweet blossoming of a romance.

Fun fact, for those that have read it: the original plan was for Sunlight to fall for Aurora since Midnight was a year or so older than him at the time. Now I know it’s no big deal but when you’re Nineteen, you think these things. I sure did when I was Nineteen, at least.

But because I kept taking Middy’s perspective, she wound up with him after a unexpected mantis resonance was found between them. And since she is a headstrong filly, Midnight decided she wanted to open up for once.

In her own impish style, of course.

This story was a very interesting ride plotwise. Ideas were pitched then ran with or rejected or tweaked...side characters showing up to help establish the reality, the worry Middy had, Sunlight and his eternal optimism, Rory and her sleepiness, all of it grew organically.

The way this was written would go like this. One of us would start the chapter and write X words. Then we would send it to the other to give them a basis of what to write next. And so on until we felt the chapter was done. We later used Discord to discuss plots and google docs to pass the chapters back and forth, but probably a good four fifths of the story was written through FimFictions pm system.

Which makes formatting a pain with the way copy paste works.

But I will say, She gave me a few curve balls, and I’m sure I lobbed a few of my own. This story was evolving even as we closed it out. The Clue type endings, a discarded ending of Discord smiling and turning to a pair of Celestias and saying “If that will be all, I have a bit of work to do helping those two break cosmic barriers.” Or something like that. I had a lot of ideas jotted down on napkins. Some were pretty bad.

But here we sit. 65k+ words, a new ship linking our realities, fresh ideas for the kids, and a pretty damn good relationship with my co-author. And a few good jokes here and there.

I’m not afraid to admit that sometimes I feel like she was pressured to fit a mold I had made despite me trying not to do that.

Us trying to capture the voices of each other’s characters was an interesting test of skill for me, since there is such a difference between her Sunny and mine. Even the children were different. She got pretty good at Middy and I got ok with Sunlight, but a lot of the time I would write Sunlight as “[Sunlight replies]” because I was not sure how he would respond.

BW made up a custom section break line for the story but I noticed it was down while polishing a section. We’ll try to fix that ASAP.

And well….I’m. It sure where I was going with this blog. It’s already three times as long as a normal one. It’s damn near chapter length for me. I’ll close out by saying the BW will also type up a retrospective sometime and share her thoughts on it.

Would I want to do something like this again, sure! Dunno what it’d be about though.

grin

Hey, BW….I got an idea….

Ninja Vanish