Coming Back Chapter 4 Remaster Online · 9:50pm Aug 12th, 2019
The remaster of chapter 4 of Coming Back is now online. Like the previous chapter remasters, there haven’t been any major changes to the plot or structure, just a cleaning up of prose and some slight polishing of ideas, and like with the other ones, the original version of chapter four has been saved and is available on GDocs via a link in the chapter’s Author Notes for those curious.
… I now should probably explain myself, because I’m sure a lot of people are saying “Why the hell has it been over five years since the last Coming Back news?” and even more people are saying “What the hell is Coming Back?” So, for the confused and curious, there’s an abridged version of Coming Back’s history below. For the unconfused, incurious, and somewhat impatient who are more interested in knowing what’s next in the pipeline, I’m already hard at work on (and in fact am nearly done drafting) the next new pone story, a one-shot TwiJack romance that I’m guessing at being around 15k words total. Take a look at the status of Current Projects on my user page for more details. Now then, let’s dig up some of Fimfic’s old bones.
In December of 2012, just after I’d started writing in the fandom, I began posting a long-form, dark fantasy AU novel called Coming Back. Coming Back was a lot of things for me, but above all it was ambitious. I’d never tried to write anything quite like it before, including in tone or scope, but especially in workflow. Chapters were in the 6-8k word range, and I published them weekly. For eleven weeks in a row. Totaling in 12 chapters published in that initial run. I was writing ~7k words a week, every week, for nearly four months, putting up around 85k words, all while also writing other things as well. As I said, I was a novice at trying to write something like that, and despite my “OMG, EVERYTHING IS SHINY AND NEW” enthusiasm for fandom writing at the time, I burned myself out on it. I took a shortish break and wrote chapter 13, which went up a month after the initial run in March of 2013, and then stepped away from it for a while. I was still very enthusiastic about writing more pony, I just needed some space before I was willing to write more Coming Back.
And boy, was I sure as hell enthusiastic about writing pony then, writing multiple short stories, starting and finishing another novel, and starting a third novel, for a grand total of about 150,000 words written between Coming Back’s initial hiatus in March of 2013, and when I started thinking about it again in August of 2013. In those five months, I’d gained a ton of experience writing, and I was thinking about picking up Coming Back again. But when I picked it up, I’d look at it and say, “… Eesh, this is rough.” Rough enough it killed motivation to work on it, because all I could see were the flaws, until I broke down and made the decision to go back and rewrite the early chapters. The goal was not to change the story much, just to clean it up and make it not painful for me to look at, so I could keep going with new content. The rewrites weren’t terribly difficult writing, nor did they take up a lot of time, seeing as I’m basically working from the most detailed outline to ever exist, so I figured I could squeeze a chapter in between working on other, bigger projects. I’d gain progress on the rewrites steadily, without slowing down my other writing all that much.
And so I made that plan, and remastered the first three chapters between September and December of 2013. And that concludes the history of Coming Back, nothing else has happened with the story until today.
“What happened?” you may ask me, or perhaps, “What the hell is wrong with you?” and the answer to those questions is, of course, a lot of things, but the simple answer is that Coming Back bookended most of my heavy, early involvement in the fandom’s writing scene. I slowed down a lot compared to my manic, constant production in 2013, putting out only two actual stories in 2014, and just a few more between then and when I started up being actually-for-real active again last December. That slow-down was caused by a ton of junk going on with me, including depression, procrastination, depression, other non-pony writing I was trying to get off the ground, and a waning interest in the canon show, but mostly depression. Most of the pony I did write through that time was out of some sense of guilt that I didn’t want to completely abandon the fandom, or was written to show that I was in fact not dead, and Coming Back rewrites never entered the picture then. Being depressed made them extra hard to work on, and I always preferred to be working on something new, rather than trying to fix something old. They were supposed to be in-between writing time, not the primary writing.
Which leads us to today where in the last six months of being active again, I have put up nearly 100k new words of pony, in the process finishing a different started-and-then-left-unfinished novel and putting up several new stories. I’m not as fast nor half as manic as I was back in the halcyon days of 2013, but I am consistent now. And once I was consistent, I’d always planned to one day go back to rewrites on Coming Back, as something to squeeze in while working on other projects and get back into shape enough to one day finish. So, I got started on that.
Of course, in the intervening five and a half years, I now look at the first three remastered chapters and think they’re a little rough, but that ways lies madness and they’re not so rough I wasn’t willing to jump into chapter four, so here we are. Maybe some day I’ll remaster the remaster, the serpent will eat its tail, and the world will come to an end, but that isn’t today.
I know better than to try and make promises for a timeframe on when I’ll keep going, but I’m planning on squeezing in a chapter rewrite here and there around other projects up until the story’s all the way remastered, with chapter five planned for after I finish the next upcoming new story. There will likely be gaps, because I want to keep myself active and moving on new stories too (as well as my non-pony related work when that’s something I’m working on), and I just don’t write fast enough to do all of it at once, despite the rewrites being relatively quick and painless. That said, it is relatively quick and painless writing (the release gap between this and the last story was caused by other factors, including me being out of town and unable to write for a week and one of my editors being busy; the actual hands-on time for writing this was around 8 days), so I should be able to slip additional remasters in with reasonable frequency without slowing everything else I’m working on to a standstill. And then, after it’s all the way edited, I’d like to work on writing new chapters for it, maybe even one day finishing it. It’s stuck out like a sore thumb in my story list, it’d be nice to be able to mark it as complete.
Anyway, I’m off to work again on something entirely different. TTFN.
I just experienced some sort of mental time warp from reading the words Coming Back, but most definitely not in a bad way. I'll put it on the list of stuff to get excited about half a decade later! (Trying to get back into fic after a long kind-of hiatus has been a pleasantly weird experience.)
Delighted to hear you're coming back to this masterpiece! Can't wait to read the cleaned-up version, and the resolution!
More Coming Back! More bats!
Woohoo!
You're juat doing this to show me up for finishing Sun and Hearth, aren't you?
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Hey, you finished a thing, I'm just poking through rubble trying to exorcise all of the LUS.
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The hardest part of lavender unicorn excorcism is finding a suitably adorable crucifix.
Coming back has been on my fav list since I found it years ago, and while I had thought it dead I always held onto a bit of hope. I will continue hoping, but you take care of you first.
I can't wait to see the remaster pass the original then.
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I'd like to hit that point, too. Things are a little weird right now thanks to the current world situation and I really haven't been feeling like writing lately, but when I get back into it, Coming Back is the first thing I'm working on since the rewrite of chapter six is sitting half-finished on a GDocs file. I'd like to get back to work on it soon, I'm just also so tired emotionally from my day job helping people who have been hit the worst by the pandemic. Things are slowly starting to calm down, though, so hopefully I'll be in a more writingish mood sooner rather than later.