A Tale of Two Worlds Chapter 6 Delay · 8:06am Aug 18th, 2019
Good Morning from my writing lair (it's a working title)! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I'm giving a little update on A Tale of Two Worlds Chapter 6. Let's get Started!
I've been trying to keep to a weekly schedule, but I keep falling farther and farther behind until this. I ran out of a buffer of chapters and I decided to seek help nailing a completely rewritten battle scene.
At the same time, I've been watching the view counter, and it feels like I might have disappointed at least a few people, since there's been a small peek of interest and it's been over a week since my last post.
Thus far, I've had a fairly straightforward workflow:
- Rough Draft, the Original role play on Discord from 2017.
- 2nd - 4th Draft
- Final Draft
My Rough Draft is the original role play saved on a Discord server from 2017. I had recently finished watching Season 6 on Netflix, and Season 7 was yet to air. It was completely free form, and Stryker was a new GM, so the power curve did get a little out of control, at least with Applesauce, but I'm trying very hard to even that out with this retelling. I will say, that this draft is "complete" but obviously has some scenes missing.
My 2nd Draft is where a lot of stuff happens. I puzzle together individual posts into larger paragraphs, scenes, and chapters. This can be anywhere from copying directly from Discord to Docs to as difficult as writing a scene anew. I'm also having to figure out who is saying what, since (at first) we kept changing our server nicknames depending on who was talking, and Discord only remembered your nickname on the PC client and only until it refreshed from the server. Spell check also wasn't a thing Discord did back then.
My 3rd Draft is very fluid. This is where a lot of the revisions happen, and it's the draft that takes the longest. Since I'm trying to make Chapter 6 the best it can be, I've had to demote what was once 3rd draft content back down to 2nd draft standing.
My 4th Draft can be tricky to schedule. This is where I get on voice chat with Stryker, and I read what I have. I'm often pausing to switch out a word or two, and if a major problem comes up, we discuss how to fix it. The whole scene with Dr. Stone after lunch was added because two other people were telling me I couldn't just repeat the same few dialogue lines from another point of view, and I had a major aversion to moving from Luna's PoV to Dr. Stone's PoV without a section break. I'm really happy with the result, and it introduces elements that come into play later on.
Lastly, my Final Draft is where I copy the result from Google Docs into FimFiction's editor and do a final spell check. At this stage, I am sure to retroactively copy the changes back over to Docs. I also have a list of things I want consistent this go around. I'm capitalizing the race names, and making sure I'm saying Pegasi and not Pegaci. Applesauce's robe he got from Shimmering Dust is a robe and not a cape. And if I break these rules, there's supposed to be a good reason, like if the human speaker is thinking about how Unicorns are like the stories of unicorns back on Earth.
I'd just like to finish by saying I do want to finish this story. It might take 200K or more words, but I want to finish! I had a goal of finishing by the (official) air date of the final episode, but maybe I'll have to settle for some second movie I hear they're making.
Final Question: I've been considering a more catchy story description.
Here's what's up there now:
A little colt shows up in Ponyville the day after Starlight's graduation. Life is only stirred up again when a bipedal creature from the Everfree pays a visit. But somewhere beyond the horizon lies a host of shadows with sights on global destruction.
Here's what I'm thinking about changing it to (or something like this):
Ponyville had a little colt show up in town the day after Starlight's graduation. He's from Ponyville. The upright creature is from Everfree. While they're here, they might as well party up and deal with the host of shadows coming after them.
Which short description makes you want to read the story more?
This delay isn't entirely Shadow's fault. While there are still some things that need to be ironed out, we also don't get as much time to work on this as both of us would like to because of my schedule. However, we'll still continue working on this story to the best of our ability.