So It's Been Awhile...

Actually, it’s been almost more than a year since I made noise about this project. The last time I made noise was the first time I made noise. And since then, there have been a lot of things that happened between then and now.

A lot of the fault for the silence on this project really falls on me, as I’ve gone through multiple drafts of character dialog and never felt really satisfied with how things turn out. As such, not a lot of progress was made on my end, and thus there hasn’t been a lot of content to advertise. Turns out making a story outline too loose will end up very incoherent. Hahaha. Haha. Ha.

So yeah, the project went through some tough spots and even went through some soft reboots. A lot of the hang ups stemmed from world building and the society that the characters inhabit. Turns out I’m a big stickler for the smaller details, like what kind of foods are made, what public transit is like, how does the government tackle every day operations, to other smaller details like how people spend their free time, what kinds of attractions are there to do in this little city I’m creating. Creating a fictional world and having it feel alive is a pretty daunting task, especially for someone like me who doesn’t have much experience, but it’s something I’ve been enjoying a lot as I throw around ideas. So much so that I sometimes forget that I need to keep hammering out the script, and my workflow falls apart and I need to redo my schedule spreadsheets again.

The scale of the project at the time of announcement way back last year (to anyone who remembers I did that) had to get scaled down in order for me to not go loony over trying to write All The Things™ and put my attention on a more focused tale. The original plan was to have an anthology of short stories following Raina, but it grew way too big to handle as plan expanded to release six 100k(ish) word length stories focusing on different characters Raina meets throughout her time. The short stories themselves weren’t outlined well enough to satisfy my want for Some Good Character Progression™ either, so in the interest of not going overboard, it was decided to scale it down to one short story that could be expanded on.

I also burned myself out writing countless pages of dialog over the course of last winter, and was only worried about how much I can write, not how coherent I was writing. While creating roughs isn’t inherently bad, I just kept chugging forward and somehow derailed my already loose outline into oblivion, losing sight of what I wanted to write about. Couldn’t look at my work for a good chunk for the beginning of the year, to be honest.

I’m definitely green when it comes to this, but this is a project I committed to taking a stab at. I don’t want to let down my friends and colleagues who’ve been supportive of my efforts, and I don’t want to keep those who are working with me waiting for more work to do.

Going forward, I’d like to log these little thoughts on production, as doing this should (in theory) keep me on my toes on getting productive work down. Something like “Developer Logs” or “Diaries” as the cool kids say these days. So when the time comes for the next blog, I won’t be in cold feet trying to find things to talk about. At the start of every month, I’d like to do something like this. With a blog like this, maybe I won’t have to keep scrapping my delivery schedule spreadsheets every so often.