In all honesty, I have been very unhappy with how Melody of Light and Love Rescue turned out. Actually, since this blog post is titled "A bit of honesty", I guess I need to be more open.
I absolutely hated writing those two story lines. There are parts that I think are very well done, but as a whole, they both spun their wheels for so long that any real momentum I could have created I cut off because I had zero direction as to where I was actually going to take the stories.
Melody of Light was the most painful. I had no idea what I was doing with Q, Aria, or the Witch until probably part 25. For a while Aria was the bad guy (hence the creepy vision of her in the plane, which makes no sense with how I wrapped things up...). Then it was Q. Then it was the Witch. The who, what and why were constantly changing in my mind, which made parts of the story, and specifically those three characters, very uneven. I was struggling to write it, which meant that I didn't have much of a buffer between my current post, and my last scheduled post. Usually I like to be three months scheduled ahead. With Melody of Light, I was lucky if I had three weeks scheduled. I just couldn't get the story to work, and it was a real struggle to even sit down and write.
It finally started to click into place around the time Liz got pulled into the mirror. Then things became easier, and I was writing scenes that I actually thought turned out pretty well (the scene with Bobby and Kurt in the shower, and Liz's whole capture scene are two scenes that deserved to be in a much better story) but there were so many loose plot threads from early on that I started to feel like the whole arc didn't make much sense. (That whole riot in the hotel lobby was my attempt to tie in the HeartBreak Island stuff I had made such a point to make stand out early on. Yeah... that bit me in the ass big time.)
Before I started Letters from the Dead and Ruins I was planning on doing an arc about Clare and Max's wedding called Ceremony of Darkness. I thought about it and thought about it, and I found myself dreading the idea of writing it. Everything I came up with was horrible. I'm serious. They were truly and utterly terrible.
I didn't want to look at that world, and those characters, characters I have spent over a year living with, and dread them. So, I needed to make a change. It was either that, or just give the series up all together, and for me, personally, giving up wasn't an option. I still have stories that I want to tell, they just aren't the stories that the series was moving towards.
I needed to step back from the characters, and look at the world from a different point of view. I needed a little distance from the core group of Demon Slayers Inc. to properly expand the universe beyond them. I needed to find that spark again that made writing Experiments in Darkness and Daughter of Darkness so much fun. (Daughter of Darkness is personally my favorite of the four arcs, actually.)
Now, on to Pom Pom Angel. The series is on hiatus because I cannot figure out what the next story will be. I know there is one, buried deep inside of my head, but it hasn't been fully formed yet. While I don't consider Love Rescue one of my better stories, I do love the cast of characters. I want to do justice for those characters, and give them a worthy series.
I went into that story with no clear idea of what I wanted the tone to be, or what I wanted it to be, really. Sure, it was going to be goofy, but was it going to be sweet and fun, or a little more mature and raunchy? What I ended up with was a very uneven tone that didn't really correct itself until the last half of the series (around the time I introduced Regina).
As I was writing I could feel my brain spinning its wheels, attempting to stretch out the posts so that maybe I could find a plot thread that I could latch on to. Even with the more focused plot in the later half, it still never really hit that right note. And, again with the honesty thing, the arc doesn't have an ending. At all. It just kind of... ends. Why? I could not, for the life of me, think of any other way to end the story, so I just got everyone together to save me set up time for the next story, and faded to black.
Those characters deserve better than that. I actually think Pom Pom Angel has a very strong start. Missy and Gus both have very entertaining, funny voices. The problem is, that type of series requires a lot of time to build and grow. That was time that I just did not have, and I learned that the hard way. As I was writing, and attempting to figure things out, I felt myself losing the characters' voices. They became muddy and kind of uneven. Things did snap back into place when Regina showed up, but at that point I realized that I needed to wrap things up, and really sit down and plan before even considering starting a second story arc.
So, Pom Pom Angel is not dead, but it will be gone for a while. At least until I can figure out a proper story, (and figure out a schedule that will fit said story. That's a whole different post, though.) I am considering possibly bringing Missy and Regina into Ruins somehow, but that is too far in the future to make any promises.
So, Letters from the Dead and Ruins were born out of all this frustration.
As much as I want to discuss Ruins, I really can't. I don't want to give anything away. Just know that ALL of the core characters from Accidental Demon Slayers will eventually show up in some way, shape or form (that includes Max and Rita), and that the story I have planned is big, and fun, and I'm having a total blast writing it. I'm also having a blast creating a new cast of characters to inhabit the world of the story, and as I near part 40 of the story, I am really enjoying how they are developing.
These are the details I can give you. The story is post apocalyptic, the initial focus is on a completely new cast of characters, it plays up the fantasy aspects from the original Accidental Demon Slayers, and it will be more of an adventure series than horror series.
As for Letters from the Dead, the story came out of me wanting to do something different, and again, explore the world of the story from a new angle. I have been wanting to do another Wheaton Prep story ever since I finished the game, and I decided that this would be the perfect chance for me to give it a go.
I'm finding both of these series very freeing. With the Accidental Demon Slayers stories I felt myself holding back when it came to the horror scenes. With Letters from the Dead, and the whole Suffering Cycle, I am finally allowing myself to go to those dark places that I never really felt comfortable going with my first stories. While Daughters of Darkness did push some boundaries, even then I found myself editing posts to lessen the impact or shock. As much as Ruins, and the ReBirth Cycle, are focusing on the fantasy and adventure aspects of the original series, the Suffering Cycle will be an outright horror series. It will be dark, it will be violent at times, and if the ideas I have in my head make it onto the page, it will be shocking.
Since I have mentioned the whole cycle thing, I feel like I should also explain that, since the idea also applies to Eye See You. For my first two series I wrote, I stuck to an arc structure. As in, the stories moved in a linear fashion, each story happening either directly, or not long after, the last arc ended, but always with the timeline moving forward. It worked fine, but there were a lot of stories that I wanted to tell that wouldn't work in that model. With the Cycle model that I am working out, the stories don't always move forward. Sometimes the next story will be set in the past, or the future. Together they will create a cohesive whole, but each story may not be the linear continuation of the story before it. So, the timeline can cycle forwards or backwards, depending on what part of the world I want to reveal at that point.
A perfect example would be this. For Eye See You, the first two parts are told in the present, the third part however, is told in the past, by a character who is dead in the present story. Doing this allows me to reveal certain parts of the story, and specific details about the rules of the world, without having to force characters to "figure it out (which usually means a sudden epiphany followed by an info dump). It gives me, as the writer, a chance to organically reveal details about the story through the story, and revealing different viewpoints that I would not be able to focus on through a more typical, linear, arc based model.
Make sense? Well, it does in my head at least.
So, there is the process that led me to the major changes at Square Zero. I am still figuring this blog out as I go, and I always knew that it would eventually have to change and evolve. Hopefully you stick around to see exactly what it can become.
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