Aftersound 2.0, Resonance ETA and some other news · 10:17am Nov 13th, 2021
It has been a while, eh?
The following blog is brimming with spoilers, so proceed at your own risk.
Straight to the point—I rewrote Aftersound.
I started that story as someone who didn’t have any experience in writing (science articles and theses don’t count) and after over two years of working on it, I’d learnt enough to be aware of its numerous problems by the time it was finished.
Mere months after posting its epilogue I started cleaning up the earlier chapters and then decided to extend that effort to the whole story. However, a year and a half passed, only three and a half chapters got a facelift… and none of that helped since the issues lay much deeper than could be fixed by going over grammar mistakes.
Tired of Aftersound’s sordid state and armed with whatever skill I’d gained I’ve put it through a ‘soft’ rework; by which I mean leaving the major events and sequence of the chapters unchanged (though I did change some of the titles).
However, I went through every sentence and wrote much of the text anew.
That served a few purposes prose-wise: removal of redundancy and culling exposition to only what is relevant to the plot; bringing stylistic consistency to the text and improving its quality in accordance with my improvement of English; it also greatly contributed to speeding up what used to be an atrociously slow pace.
I also made significant changes to the content of the story. The set-ups that lead nowhere had to go, and meaningless scenes as well; unfinished arcs got fixed; characters that had suddenly changed their behaviour throughout the story are now consistent in how they act; new scenes were added to fill gaps in the logic and narrative; the pace is now much more swift and the story shouldn’t feel like a slog, nearly impossible to wade through.
Red Wire, Tin Flower, Rainbow Dash and Princess Luna got substantial reworks and are now quite different from their previous iterations. Certain characters now have more presence in the story and thus more relevance to the plot.
The protagonist has gotten a fundamental rework.
Aftersound v.2.0 isn’t a perfect story to any extent; the issues with the pacing on the ‘macro scale’ are still there. I don’t quite like certain arcs, but I can’t change them without rearranging the entire plot and if I did that, I might as well just delete everything and start tabula rasa, likely in the original universe. Except that is not going to happen ever—I’m dead serious about that.
Now, in case you want the old version back—no can do. This website’s rules explicitly state that the rework of a story is supposed to replace the original. However, I didn’t delete it—everything is carefully preserved on my Google Drive and I’m willing to provide access to those files upon request.
The rework of Aftersound is done in such a way that Resonance doesn’t need it as well, though some things from the sequel are likely to make more sense now. However, Resonance is going to rely on the reworked lore/characters in more than just a few places, so I suggest giving AS v.2.0 a look if you are reading its sequel. It is not absolutely required, but might help to avoid confusion.
Rewriting AS took me more than three months and I tried to not let it affect my writing schedule concerning Resonance—it didn’t quite work out; plus I had some issues I had to deal with in real life. Nevertheless, by the end of this year, the number of chapters should be following the original plan.
Speaking of which, in spring I finished polishing up Resonance’s plot—there will be thirty-six chapters. That means about two more years until the story is finished; if nothing goes wrong, of course.
Resonance isn’t the only MLP story I’m going to produce in the foreseeable future. I’m already working on one more fanfic and hope to finish it before next year.
In January I’m starting to write Niello—my original story. Most of the planning has been done already over the last two years and the time to finally bring it into inky flesh has come. Though I have set for myself a deadline of five years, I’ll try to finish it as soon as realistically possible. The result will be posted somewhere online (the current candidate is Fur Affinity), free to access.
On a side note—there will be no Aftersound v.3.0 in any form, meaning I’m not going to turn it into a game as I had once planned. Initially, it was supposed to be one of the prospects for Geka and me as we wanted to delve into gamedev. However, we reconsidered that aspiration and realised that we wouldn’t have the time and resources even if we dropped everything we are doing now.
So, only crappy stories from me.
That doesn’t mean scrapping all the work that already went into that project. A lot of it has been cannibalised by Niello, but the rest still has the potential to be a full-value standalone story in a cyberpunk setting… in time.
Other than all that, I plan to give Truth-Telling Lies a rework on a similar scale (it is unpublished now). A few ideas have been lurking in my mind for years—time to drive them out; they are all pony-related, by the way. Though I harbour some grand plans about original fanfiction, you will see horse stories from me for a while longer.
Stay awesome.
yay!
I had been planning to read Aftersound for a while and when I was about to download the epub I saw that you were rewriting it... I waited patiently and I'm glad you managed to fix what you wanted! Really looking forward to read this one, thanks for the hard work and see you in the comment section ig xD
edit: also I'm sorry if you already answered this, but is there a reason why you removed the cover art? I think it looked very nice
5616301
Many thanks and, hopefully, you will enjoy Aftersound—the revised version should be a more enjoyable read for many a reason. The old version is still accessible, even in the epub format, if you want to check it out (but I advise against it).
As to why I removed the cover art...
In the case of Aftersound—it no longer really fits the content of the story: Twilight's role in it shifted and whilst the art could make some sense, I'd say it could be even confusing for some. In the case of AS and other stories, even though most of the artwork was made by my friend, it still doesn't feel right to rely on someone's else effort to promote my works, nor do I strive to attract attention anymore—more of the opposite.