Terrors Of The New Column #3: The Incompletionist · 1:57pm Mar 19th, 2020
He has a lot of ideas, and they're usually the same one.
There are things he loves. It's easy to see what he loves, because they're what he builds stories on. A certain tabletop wargame system is where his heart lies, and so he brings playing pieces from that battle into Equestria. At least, we can generally assume that it's going to be Equestria eventually, because there's been times when he's gotten so involved in what he truly loves as to forget the smaller details. And in this case, that's not grammar, spellchecking, and basic sentence structure (although he usually forgets all of those too): it's ponies.
He's had a few stories revoked that way. Because there's a rule: when you post a story, whatever portion initially reaches the front page must contain pony material. If you put up ten chapters in the initial shot and Trottingham doesn't appear until Chapter 8? That's fine. But if whatever you published is, at best, Ponies Coming Soon, then it's Story Going Down now. And maybe he's just forgotten about it in his enthusiasm to post a story. Repeatedly forgotten.
But he truly loves that wargame. And because there are readers who share that love, he gets his upvotes for delving into that universe. Downvotes come for the lack of editing and bathing in the red tags, but -- over the course of his catalog, he has more people who like his work than disapprove of it.
(At least, what you can see of his catalog.)
Currently, that catalog has five stories in it. The oldest was started in December of last year: the newest is from this month. They're all multi-chapter works, and none of them are finished.
This isn't easy. Juggling multiple incomplete stories can be a nightmare, and that's as much for the readership as the writer. It's easy to bite off more than you can chew: I've been called out for taking too great a mouthful at least once. You need to be capable of generating updates for everything. Different tones and styles need to be juggled -- okay, he doesn't have that problem, but a lot of people would. There are separate audiences in play and they all have to be kept happy. Any pressure on the author is multiplied by the number of lingering projects which aren't finished. It's a lot to ask of yourself.
Maybe that's why he keeps his number consistent.
There are five stories currently visible in his catalog. He's had a couple revoked. He's written around... I'm not sure. It's hard to keep track. He's been here for a little more than two years, and seems to have been producing pretty consistently over most of that time. I think there's been at least fifteen postings.
Maybe FIMFetch would know: they often manage to get snapshots of things before they go down. Let's see...
...thirty-six.
I genuinely did not know that until I checked in the course of writing this blog. He's written at least thirty-six stories, because the ones which were revoked might not have been captured in time. Three of them were completed -- but that trio had but a single chapter each, all in the thousand-word vicinity, and looked to be part of a set: at a guess, he might have encountered some trouble because it's the sort of thing where the site will ask you to keep it all on one thread. A single story broken into multiple posting components with more to come, taken down and thus still incomplete.
The other thirty-three are unfinished. And only five are still in his catalog. This catalog, because I know he posts on at least one other site and...
...let's keep it at the numbers we can currently see. Thirty-six stories -- minimum -- in something over two years. Five in his catalog, all from the last four months.
It raises some questions.
I can't definitively say what's going on: I'm not the author. All I can do is read what he's said in his blog and some of the Comments sections, then guess. And from some of what he's stated, added to what I'm openly guessing at...
...if he's just seen something which strikes him as more interesting than his most recent effort, maybe a new unit was introduced for the game or he just read a really fascinating tactical article, then that's something he needs to write a story about immediately. Which means that he takes a extant story down.
...if a piece has lost momentum, it vanishes.
...if he feels a story has too many downvotes, he pulls it.
...if the Comments don't seem to be going his way (too many detractors, not enough participants in reader surveys), then that's the end of that tale.
...if he just stops caring, it's gone.
Over.
And over.
And over.
Some of his blogs talk about the new idea he's just had. The unit he's currently working with for the game. He asks his followers whom that unit should be shipped with (because there's a Romance tag on many of his stories). He finds his cover art, he gets the first few chapters together, sometimes he remembers to add a pony in the opening sections, the votes flow in, he'll keep it going for a few weeks and
then it's gone.
Five... that's the low-water mark for his catalog. He was keeping things at ten for a while, and then there was a fresh purge. A story went up this week: he took down an old one when he brought in the new, and then that fresh work vanished. (Based on the few comments I saw before it went down, it was revoked for lack of pony content.) So the old one went back up. For now.
He conducts blog polls. Who is this character going to be shipped with? Let the readers decide. And maybe there was a time when people told him, but -- they're silent now. He looks to the most recent Comments for feedback, praise, and that's not always what he finds.
Why vote for a romance when no story ever lasts long enough to show it?
Why invest yourself in something that's going away?
And there's pleading, here and there. Finish something. Anything. One thing. Just to prove you can. Because there are people who love the game as much as he does, they want him to succeed, just focus on one thing and --
-- there isn't much point in posting those comments. They vanish when the story does.
He seems to take stories down when he feels the downvote ratio is too high, and that ratio has been creeping steadily upwards. Maybe the new story has a good start, and that might be worth a green thumb for those who love the game. (At least one person has suggested he just go to a site where he wouldn't need to involve ponies at all, as that would give him more flexibility.) But in a very real way, we already know how it ends. Or rather, recognize that it won't. Not the way the readers want it to.
They're frustrated. They recognize what he's doing, and they know he won't stop. So they downvote, some of them, because maybe red in the bar will get his attention -- and when that ratio hits the critical point, it gives him a reason to take down the story. To start all over again.
He's slowly losing his readership, because so many of the long-timers have caught onto him now, and there aren't enough fresh arrivals to replace them. Those may call him out over and over. More excuses.
Thirty-six stories. That's just here, and those are just the ones that we know of. None of them are truly finished, and I don't think any of them will ever be. Endless births, and another child of his imagination is dashed against the rocks for not being good enough.
There's a lot of ways to exist on this site. To find your audience, make connections, thrive. And that game is so beloved, the fanbase is there for it, if he could just finish one story...
But I don't think he will.
I don't think he can.
And there's no point in pleading any more.
As always, if you recognize the author being discussed, do not invoke him by name, and don't link any part of this to him. Not just because it's against the site rules. But because he won't listen to this either.
Damn... this one hits close to home for me. I once had an account on fanfic.net where I only posted one story, I never finished it, might have only even updated it twice over some months before ultimately abandoning it. It was a shipfic for an extremely obscure matchup of two characters from the Warriors books. I had this terrible way of going about writing: every chapter had to be at least 1k words (and since I was in middle school at the time, this was astronomically difficult and frankly beyond my ability) because I thought that anything of less length could never be good, because... elitism? I was totally afraid of 'breaking canon', even though no one else would have cared and it didn't actually matter at all. I tried to go looking for it some years later; it appears to have been purged automatically, along with the old account. Kind of sad, since that destroyed the only record of it. But it's for the best, it would just embarrass me to read it again.
--
It sucks that this guy has this issue chronically and that he nukes any story 'unworthy' just to put up another one of roughly similar quality despite time passing. I assume he hasn't really improved over his tenure here? After all, to get better at (narrative) writing, don't you need to be able to start and finish something? Good blog though, thanks for the light reading. You probably put more effort into writing this blog about him than he has in any of his efforts across his entire catalog lol.
I don’t know who it is, but there’s a couple who fit the mold. Finishing is hard. I very much appreciate your own discipline that way, Estee.
As always, if you recognize the author being discussed, do not invoke him by name, and don't link any part of this to him. Not just because it's against the site rules. But because he won't listen to this either.
Too many possibilities to guess
But, The late R.A. Lafferty had the same problem (finishing after losing interest, I mean)
He sort of powered through it because if he didn't, he didn't get paid
Heinlein got to be the same way. Every one of his later novel, you can see the point that he lost interest & then he finished it any-old-how. Stranger In A Strange Land was the first to have this problem, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress was the last NOT to.
Well. This got uncomfortable in a few bits. Granted, this better fits my Civ VI playstyle ("This playthrough has too many barbarians." *restart* "This playthrough doesn't have enough barbarians." *restart* "... What am I even supposed to do with this starting position? *you get the idea*) but there are a few stories I've let languish for far too long.
As for the mystery author, one key step to improvement is learning to accept and learn from mistakes. Trying the same thing over and over, constantly restarting from square one and hoping for perfection from the word go... Not only is that the definition of insanity, we've even had an MLP villain who made the mistake. (Granted, she was an EqG character, but still.) Hopefully they learn, though after years of ingraining bad habits, I'm not exactly optimistic. If nothing else, they act as a lesson for the rest of us. Finishing is hard. Pretending it never happened is easy. But what's easy is so rarely right.
So apparently, you don't have to worry about that disclaimer at the bottom because there are several people this could be talking about. I'm not surprised, so I'm just going to bust out my usual "'there is nothing new under the sun' is itself old enough to be in the Bible" line.
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Fun fact about Douglas Adams: remember how the first Hitchhiker's book ends rather abruptly, with the next book opening at the exact same point? That's because Adams was infamously bad at meeting deadlines, and his editor got so sick of it that he told him to just finish the sentence he was on.
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It's hard to say. I tried to look at his earliest work through FIMFetch, but it turned out to be a case where the site only has a snapshot of the cover art, short & long descriptions, and chapter titles. That holds true for a lot of his earliest takedowns, some of which were pulled after only a few views (because FIMFetch records that too). So I can't look at the oldest chapters for content, because they didn't get cached. Just the descriptions.
So... here's the long description from a story he took down early in his tenure. And to be fair, this one got torched. The majority of his work collects some upvotes, and for this piece... well...
Okay. That's September of 2018. Let me grab a long description from something which had a better reception, meaning 'actual upvotes'. Because the fact that someone liked it might indicate an improvement in quality -- right?
This is from December of last year. The story was running at a vote ratio of 4.25 : 1 when it was taken down.
(Yes, the video was part of the LD. Also, up until this moment, I didn't know you could quote an embedded video.)
So... I think we can argue some level of improvement. But there might be too much reliance on the spellchecker, with no actual readthrough after the scan: that's one way to get things like 'prefect'.
Can't be accused of not finishing anything if you memory hole the whole lot. *Forehead tapping meme here.*
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*loathes forehead-tapping meme*
*and the 'clutch jacket in relief' meme*
*basically any meme which some mindless composer on Twitter can post and get 2,000 likes with*
*writes something original and is lucky to get two*
*but anyone who just posts a stupid overused meme...*
*YES I'M BITTER*
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I don't think the writers of "Darmok" realized exactly how prescient they were being. They just thought they had a cute metaphor for different cultural contexts and didn't realize they'd blindly clutched onto some piece of the squidgy underbelly of the human psyche.
Is this column number 3 of a series?
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Theoretically.
Also regretfully.
It's not as if I'm likely to run out of material.
And this is precisely WHY Ive written so very few stories over the years; not because I do't have lots of ideas, but that those ideas are too expansive for me to credibly ever start and FINISH. And I am just bloody-minded enough there would be a substantial risk that it come to feel like work and to be forcing myself to do it just TO finish; or that I never would, which would be worse.
(I remember every campaign I never finished, every game I'm not completed, every quest that went without resolution, even that NBleakbane Watches on my local ponythread where I got halfway through Skeleton Warriors... They niggle at me, sometimes for years. I had to make a special point of mentioning is passing what has happened to a couple of those campaigns on the big 40th birthday day I did, just so there was, in fact, a conclusion of sorts.)
So, I only am prepared to commit to write something when I'm 100% convinced I can do it short enough so that I can get it done while the iron is still hot.
'Cos? On the other hand, I can spend upwards of six months working on updating my 3.5 houserule and importing tons of Pathfinder to rthe point 3.Aotrs does, in fact, constitute it's own edition; since it's up to several hundred pages at the moment. And it took 13 years for me to write and eventually pubklish my starship rules Accelerate and Attack. So you can maybe see why I'm not keen on starting something I feel obliged to finish...
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Better than it had any right to be.
I was somehow spared from seeing his execrable work up until now, but (as with every time you leave the guilty party unnamed) my curiosity got the better of me and I just had to see it. Thanks Estee, you’re
a saintSatan.5223569
Have we met...?
Once again: if I write 'If you jump off that bridge, you'll die,' it is not a dare.
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Or is it!?
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Skeleton Warriors was fracking GREAT. I think I just ran out of dinner-times to finish my Bleakbane Watches and it lapsed. (I was keeping track, as I recall, of how many kills Talyn got (automatically Best Character by default because she was Voiced By Jennifer Hale, though I was, obviously, really rooting for the good Baron the whole time). I may well pick it up again one day, it's not like my DVD is going anywhere...
And I mean, compared to the idiocy that I forced myself through that was MASK and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors (the potential in that last one squandered made it more painful), Skeleton Warriors was practically Babylon 5. I can't even think of what something like Young Justice would be in comparison. (The latter of which I am just starting to watch through again now, having Done With The Narutos at long last and having the third season DVD - which is thanks to you that I knew it was out and thus able to yoink it!)
Oh hey for once I know EXACTLY who you're talking about! I even follow them for the lolz.
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Another Fun Fact
Charles Dickens NEVER missed a deadline, not even after being injured in a train wreck.
He did retire shortly after that, though
This behavior is why I dont put many stories in my actively watched bookshelves. Most go to the "eehhh when I get around to it" shelf because I've been burned by too many fanfics that just stop in the middle.
Having a bunch of completed side stories is why I started keeping up with Tryptic as you wrote it. Finishing other things around it showed me that you actually complete the things you start and it was worth risking getting invested in a longer story that didn't have an ending posted yet.
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Haha, oh wow. I was reading through that and thinking how at least he improved on the capitalization after two years, but then he dropped the ball towards the end of it. Adding a video? To a story's description? That's not a great start for any readers lol. If you can't even finish the description of your fic, how can anyone expect you to follow through on the real thing? At least he's... consistent?
Based on what I've read in these three columns, I can only assume the author in question is either very young or has a developmental disorder, so...I think you should stop making these blog posts about him (or her).
Despite how many bad things are being done by him, and despite how many legitimate reasons you have to be frustrated, if you continue making these series of shame posts it just feels like a clown show. One post would be bringing awareness to a problem, but a series is just bullying.
EDIT: nevermind, each post was about a different person.
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Each post was about a different person.
Oof. This one hits kind of close to home. I have at least three stories that people have been begging me to update for literally years now and I kind of feel almost obligated to, but I keep getting distracted by the shiny, alluring novelty of new ideas and the old ideas just start seeming more oppressive than they do interesting after a time.
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Each blog entry has been about a separate entity, meaning we have a total of three writers to date -- the second of whom was banned for his offense. I have no intentions of revisiting any of these people in future blogs unless something happens directly to me, as with #2's attempt at ban evasion.
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... oh.
The first was about plagiarism, the second also, so I made the assumption.
Nevermind, then.