A Prench Tale Part 3 Conclusion & Part 4 Release Date · 4:02pm Oct 18th, 2019
Hello dear readers!
Part 3 of A Prench Tale comes to an end with Chapter 21. The story will resume with Part 4 and Chapter 22, which should be posted on October 31st!
A big thanks to all of you for following me on this journey – I'll do my best to keep delivering quality Prench content for weeks to come!
And a little note before getting to the behind-the-scenes stuff: no new chapter next week, but some bonus material instead!
~ A little behind-the-scenes look at Part 3 – including spoilers for that Part, of course! ~
So... This third Part has been a difficult one to deliver, to say the least! Beyond the delays between Part 2 and this one, as well as the one-month hiatus between Chapter 18 and Chapter 19 caused by my training (and being sick for half that time on top of it), this Part also ended up substantially longer and more complex than the previous two.
Part 1 was very straightforward and didn't have much in the way of plot; our mane trio got their cutie marks, and reacted to the change. Part 2 tried to mix a little more plot and action, 'Amber and Vi go to the trial' being 'plot A' and 'Chard and Crispy deal with the children' being 'plot B' (though ironically I think the climax of plot B ended up more impactful and effective than plot A's).
With Part 3, I wanted to go for something a little more complex, and really try my hoof at building an interesting intrigue in addition to our usual character exploration. For this, I went for three concurrent plotlines: the return of the Brigade, which includes the blight (focus on the characters), Pippinstrelle (focus on the community itself and the general themes of this Part), and the photographers (which turned out to be mostly a red herring, muddying things up a little). Though the first two to three chapters had a lot of things to set up before the plots could kick into gear, I hope the little mysteries of Coursac were entertaining, and that their resolutions were satisfying! Not all future Parts will have this kind of tangled plot lines, but some definitely will.
I'm quite satisfied with how this Part turned out in general, but everything didn't go all according to plan either...
Chapter 16, is the first chapter that I wasn't really happy with but still published, because I didn't manage my time efficiently enough and had to rush the actual writing process. I'll be honest, my confidence as a writer took a real blow from this failure, and I feared that maybe I wouldn't have the skills and talents to really do justice to A Prench Tale and its characters... Fortunately I was reassured by the next chapter, but I think that, now that Part 3 is completed, I'll write a new version of Chapter 16, including the bits that I had to cut for time. By the way, that's also why Chapter 20 came out later than usual – even if I was running short on time to publish it on the usual day, I decided to take all the time I needed to finish it to my complete satisfaction.
Another unforeseen hurdle was Amber's song. Initially it was supposed to be placed at the tail end of Chapter 19, directly in the wake of Keensight's own song. But when I got to it, I felt that switching directly from Keen's defeat to a new PoV scene really didn't fit; Amber's optimism and the positive resolution would have lessened considerably this bittersweet conclusion. When I got to write Amber's part and it went for about 7,000 words, I knew it was the right decision, even if we didn't get to have Chapter 19 ending on the “Where's Chard?” line, and it may cause a serious mood whiplash with the rest of Chapter 20.
Actually, rhythm has been an issue for me as of late, in good part because the mean wordcount of my chapters has steadily increased (I promise I'm only aiming for 8,000 words chapters, but some characters (Amber, I'm looking at you!!) like to ramble...). This is something I've tried to improve on, which wasn't always easy for Part 3 considering how much stuff had to happen in a given chapter for the next to make sense. A perfect example would be Laurence chasing the feral dogs away at the end of Chapter 16 – this had to happen before the first meeting with the Council of the Weirdos, which in turn could only happen after Laurence had spent some time with Dusky.
(Oh, and let's not talk about the fact that the Part 3 cover art is still missing, alright..?)
Even though all our characters evolved somewhat through the events of Part 3, I feel like it really ended up being Laurence's Part, character development-wise, after our human-in-a-pony's-body had to be out of focus during Part 2. I'll admit that I was surprised myself how much she grew and changed during these past seven chapters, despite all her character beats having been set for months.
Speaking of, this last chapter proved to be quite satisfying for me, because Laurence's talk with Amber is one of the very first pieces of dialogue I wrote for A Prench Tale. It felt great to see this scene written almost two years ago finally find its natural place in the narrative!
