An Update Is Probably Warranted · 2:51pm Aug 23rd, 2020
Remember when I said I made no promises regarding scheduling?
This is why.
I'm not going to make excuses; I wrote a 2,000,000-word daily over nearly three years. That both proves anything life throws my way is irrelevant to my ability to put out words, and is reason enough on its own to deserve a big break. This being said, I wanted to let people know I'm not dead, and also talk a little about where things stand.
The short version is this: right now, I have the first ~20k of The Immortal Dream done and polished to a state where I'm very happy with it and think it's a strong opening, but am not at all happy with the speed at which I did it and that new material gets added on. Sitting around taking a break between stories, even a long one, I can live with. Effectively hiatusing a story because updates come less than once a month feels a lot less cool, and I'm holding onto them because I frankly don't think my current pace of work is something I should be publishing under.
Why am I going so slowly after kicking out a hard minimum of 2k per day for all of Kinmari and TOW's ending arc? There are a few reasons, but what essentially happened is that I took my break, got back to work, wrote out the better half of the first arc, and it turned out that what I had planned really didn't fly. Not on a rustiness or execution level, either - it might have been apparent from my previous blog, but I was worn out after writing the same story for three years and spending too much thought on what I wanted to do differently and not enough on what I wanted to do the same. The end result was that I put too many things I had no practice writing together with not enough of what made TOW special, and I realized that no manner of editing and proper execution would make it work when I was starting off with the wrong set of ingredients for a good story. That got me into a very brief slump, and then a few conversations about TOW and rereading some of my old chapters got me back out, and I decided I needed to try again and do things differently. So I tossed out everything except TOW's already-established lore and my new protagonist trio and started from scratch.
Here's something very important to understand about TOW, however. The very first shreds of its plotlines started materializing in my mind around August or September of 2016. I came up with Ironridge early in December. Somewhere around late January or early February of the next year, I began writing daily about it, trying to build skills and momentum for when I eventually started the real TOW in June 2017. TOW's world got nearly a year of thought and around 200k words of practice before Miniglim ever set hoof in those mountains, and she stayed in Riverfall for another three months while I continued to refine things, all before Ironridge even started.
The Immortal Dream, by comparison, I always wanted to write, but I didn't seriously start planning for it until around a week into TOW Act 4, which lasted exactly 200 chapters. I didn't write a single sentence about my new characters or their new setting or any of that, and my thoughts were split between planning for that and trying to make sure I pulled off the ending of TOW exactly how I envisioned it. And now I've seen how that panned out.
So when I say I had to tear down the majority of my plans and try again, I'm talking about a project that requires months and months of brain-cooking at full boil to get to a place where I can churn out words daily like I used to. For a while now, since I pushed that reset button, I've been holding myself back to my old daily regimen, since it really was powerful and now I need the momentum more than ever. But it's almost no use, because most days I'll sit down to write a scene with only a very vague idea of where I want it to go, then just pick up my keyboard and start writing because I must, and then the next day I'll take a look at it and think for a bit and then rewind and try taking it in a new direction. Rather than continually appending chapters, I'm redoing the same things over and over again, because I have a backbone for the plot but it's incomplete and there are too many critical details missing to let the characters write it themselves while sticking to a general script like I did in TOW. But I make myself keep doing this daily anyway, because it makes me think about it and that, in turn, is how things get planned.
Anyway, that's my update. I'm still thinking about where I'm going to go from here. The first bit that I do have finished is mostly an introduction and character piece, so it wasn't as hamstrung by the overall routing, but I basically can't write any more without setting myself up for failure until this massive story that just got redone and is supposed to have months and months of planning congeals a little more in my mind. I think it would be pretty foolish to give anything even resembling an estimate, and it's also worth saying that since all my mental time is being spent planning The Immortal Dream, I haven't really had time to focus or plan for anything else I want to write... not that those aren't still priorities at some point in the future. I don't feel bad taking a "break" between stories, but I will feel bad if I put TID out there and it gets hiatused, and I'll feel even worse if I rush it and don't give Starlight and her friends the sequel and closure they deserve.
One last thing, concerning some of the thoughts I'm rebuilding everything around. Pretty much everyone I talk to (myself included) considers Ironridge the best part of the story. Given how gigantic Ironridge and the Empire were, that's clearly not a fluke; Ironridge must have had very substantial differences in what I was doing while writing it, and my biggest goal for reworking TID is to get more of Ironridge than whatever was lacking in the Empire. I've given it a lot of thought, and there are two things I think the difference ultimately comes down to. First, the Empire was a fantasy location built entirely in the service of the plot and political intrigue and facilitating the various developments I wanted to make happen there, while Ironridge was based on things in the real world that I care strongly about, and was designed less in the service of an end than as a portrait of a multi-faceted society. The Empire was a story about individual ponies, but Ironridge was a story about a city.
Second: Ironridge had a rough draft. It was piecemealy, full of fast-forwards past parts I didn't want to write, with inconsistent, railroaded characters and made with zero intent of ever letting it see the light of day, but it had one. And the more I think about it, the more I wonder if that's what TID needs too.
I'll be properly back someday, and wouldn't be putting in remotely this much effort if I had any intention of letting it go to nothing - I want to see Valey smash another watermelon over someone's head just as much as anyone else here. I miss TOW, and the fact that I can do something about it, more than anything else, is what drives me. And I still want to get into the habit of dropping random writing-process-related blogs sometimes when it comes time to write for the day but I don't feel like taking another whack at a scene I know I have no new ideas for yet, if for nothing else than to feel like I'm posting something. Until next time.
Thanks for the update.
Dude a daily update for three years is insane. Most authors I know only update every month or two. Don’t worry about needing some time to get those details to get TID going
I'm glad to hear you're still doing alright, but please don't worry! We're all happy to wait for as long as you need until you feel satisfied with what you've written.
Take all the time you need; we’ll support you no matter what.
Good timing for my comment I guess lol. I'll be interested to see the next story. Good luck!
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That comment may or may not have been what pushed me to get off my rear and post this, tbh. Ironridge having more soul than the Empire certainly isn't a new sentiment, but sometimes, the more you hear something, the more likely you are to do something about it. And posting a blog saying it was on my mind just happened to be what I could do in the moment.