Hey everyone. Sorry for the lack of content today. I’ve recently gone back to work after the quarantine sitution settled down a bit in my area, and that extra detail in my schedule caused me to not get anything properly done yet.
Going forward, you can expect uploads on Thursdays instead of Tuesdays, simply because I will have no real free time to complete any editing or writing on weekends as I have been up to now. I have no intention of stopping, but I wanted to explain the shift so it isn’t a surprise.
Now, addressing the state of the story, I’d like to give a little insight on my methods, because this is a filler post and I figure you may be interested in that sort of thing.
First and foremost, as I’ve stated before this is a rewrite of a story I wrote in High School, and as such a few topics may feel dated in that way. Updating everything with my more modern touch has been a lot of fun, but it’s also been a strong divergence from that original material. For example, the original form of this story ended at Chapter 22, only followed June, and was hastily thrown together for the sake of making a scene “look” cool without much content. Comparing this to this year, we will have our 19th chapter out this Thursday out of an unknown projection of chapters, leading me to tell you today that this is about a quarter of the way done now, and the story follows both June and Arceia in their individual lives while also throwing in some occasional third party narrators to exposit lore that a first person protagonist wouldn’t be privy to, but is essential information for the audience. It’s unknown how many of these extra chapters I’ll add, but I’m doing them when I feel the information is most relevant. The exact order of them is pretty much up to that factor.
The chapter sequencing might be confusing, so I’ll break it down for you a bit. I’m numbering June and Arceia chapters in their own chronological order because aside from the first Arceia chapter, you could theoretically read them as stand-alone stories. I’m doing this to make sure each character gets ample “screen time” to develop before I eventually combine their journeys into the second act of the story. Their individual perspectives and journeys are also a good way to guide readers through the world. With June representing the naivety of exploring a new world for the first time, I’m using her early chapters to really bring out how the world works and it’s natural that she would be heavily observant of this stuff. With Arceia, as she’s been present in this world and actively engaged with it most of her life, it would be silly to linger on every visual and cultural detail writing from her perspective – she no longer pays attention to those things because they’re natural to her. Instead, I am using her to dig into the mysteries of te world around the two and expand the tension, for now.
Chapters are not pre-written weeks in advance either. Usually I’ll re-read the source material a few days before Iupload date and casually redo it for that time, editing and writing as I go. If a detail doesn’t exist or has changed since then, that’s when I get to go off the rails a bit. Typically this has manifested inArceia chapters in general, but also in the ways I’ve had each character explore the city so far and the small details of subtext that I’ve laced into scenes.
You could say this fast and loose approach might lead to inconsistencies and holes, and you’d be right. That’s why I pre-screen chapters among one or two close friends the day before upload to make sure everything stays accurate, and if they catch me saying something that is counter to a prior chapter, they’ll let me know and I’l either rewrite it or, in my favorite way of handling inconsistency, I’ll highlight it intentionally and direct your eyes to my mistake while hand-waving it off in-story by the characters themselves. I like this approach because nothing is perfect and while I aim to be as consistent as possible, if I say something small and it breaks consistency it’s easy enough to have the characters themselves address it as misinformation or hearing things wrong. In my eyes this adds a bit more character to the world, but maybe that’s just because I’m the one writing it.
I’d also like to state ahead of time as we get into the next act of the story that going forward, there will be some small time skips. I don’t feel like it’s interesting or even fun to write out every single day of Junes’ education, so I’ll be touching on important dates and events in that education and skipping around when nothing is happening that would be captivating or important. I know this isn’t exactly rare for stories to do, but I wanted to state it ahead of time because it’s going to start happening immediately in the next chapter. When this occurs, I’ll make sure to notate it with a date change as a paragraph, or a header. I haven’t decided yet, but since I’m lazy it’ll probably be just its own line of text that I draw specific attention to.
One last thing. Yesterday was my 29th birthday! It had me reflecting a lot on the nature of this story and how far it’s come, and how none of that would be possible without the people in my life. With that in mind, I’d like to explore the design principles behind characters someday, maybe as extra posts here on the site all to themselves. If that interests you, go ahead and let me know somehow. There’s like buttons on the site I believe, but there’s also a contact form. This would be the best possible way to highlight the individual people that made each character possible, and Magna Varia is nothing without the people who have been there with me for the journey this whole time.
Thanks for your patience, everyone. You can expect act 2 to begin on Thursday, 10/15/2020, and unless something happens this should be the schedule going forward. I hope you’re all ready to start picking things up again soon! Stay safe out there.
-Cayman
Magna Varia 