User blog:DranosJ/Reworking things

Well apparently someone pissed off Erubetie and she decided to hit most of the country with Melt Storm. This has somewhat slowed down progress on putting chapters out as I've spent most of my time huddled around a fire praying to Salamander for the repairman to arrive and fix the furnace. But that's only part of the slowdown, the big thing has actually been my absolutely atrocious first draft. Apparently I was really rushing just to get things on paper before my brain moved on and going back over what I wrote I could not even tolerate reading it. While the basic premise of the later chapters were fine the structure was incomprehensible and painful to even look at. Plus I'm convinced someone slipped me something as I had gone from an axe to a jackhammer on the fourth wall in the latter half of the third and even into the fourth chapters.

This means I'm pretty much having to almost write this from scratch. As such the chapter output will be nowhere near as frequent as I would have liked. Originally I was able to post a chapter a day, that's not going to be possible anymore. Originally it was my intention to present the first story still in its script form but seeing as there's a lot of info dumping up ahead the writing had become almost all dialogue, really more monologue with the other character just chiming in questions to move things along. To break this up from here on out the story will be written in 'novelization' form as it will allow me to describe the characters actions and expressions as they talk. This has done a lot to break up the almost drawnout narrator feeling chapter 4 had become after the first rewrite.

My goal is to hopefully get a chapter out a week, however these chapters will be of greater length due in part to the different writing style as well as me being more aware of what absolutely needs to be there now that I've conceptualized a great deal of the overall tale. I'm looking start releasing on a schedule as I would like to get into the habit of releasing content at a regular pace plus deadlines can be good motivators. However if I don't feel comfortable with showing what I currently have I may forego or postpone such a release. There's also the option of putting out part of a chapter. That will be a bit difficult with this first story as it follows Erubetie's point of view and each chapter was intended to be such breakpoints for release. With the second story having a more ensemble cast the writing is much easier to break up within a single chapter, however we shall see how this all works out. Right now my intended day to release is every other Friday which should give me a bit more time to clean up chapter 4 and get to work on chapter 5 and beyond.

Update: So right now there's a huge amount of information I have to convey to the audience and unfortunately the story right now is getting excessively 'info dumpy', where I'm throwing a lot of backstory on but little in the way of plot or character development. While a lot of backstory is nice just having one or two characters go on and on about things in the past can get a bit boring so I'm trying to craft something to make it more 'Show Not Tell'. Another option is to do a dual-story approach where I have characters engaged in an activity but reminiscing at the same time. This could allow for natural telling of backstory but also keep things engaging in the current narrative. One problem I may have is that I'm trying to keep from one character's point of view. The protagonist possibly only becomes an observer for the duration, however this still allows for character development and since the goal of this story is alter Erubetie's personality I might be able to get away with this.