![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
negrekHrrrk, this chapter.
This chapter is possibly the one I've written the most out of any in the fic, and unlike the others I've written multiple times, that's not because I really enjoy it and sometimes just want to write it again despite having already done that. I have tried many times to get this chapter to work, and it has never worked.
One of the first things I did when getting ready for this chapter was go back and see how I handled it in the previous version, only to discover that--I hadn't! I'd deleted it entirely, and instead only referred to/summarized events at the beginning of what is now Chapter 47. Skipping it again was a very attractive option, but given the ways that the story's changed in this iteration, didn't seem entirely justifiable this go-round. This was both because Mewtwo needed to get reintroduced somehow--in the previous version he was simply a member of the party already--and because there wouldn't be a lot of opportunity for the child to interact with its pokémon without Mewtwo being around going forward, and I wanted to at least touch on some of the stuff going on with Titan, in particular, without that particular complication. In the previous version the child's pokémon weren't around, so the cast was just the child, Absol, and Mewtwo; there weren't a lot of scenes that even could happen between them.
In the end it felt like it would simply be too awkward to jump straight into Orre after the end of Chapter 45, and wanting to have a little more time with the pokémon was what really sealed the deal for me. I was going to resign myself to showing at least a little time on the boat, but I was still hoping I could combine this with what is now Chapter 46, which would essentially get all of our traveling out of the way, taking us from Kanto to the child's home base in Orre, with the next chapter properly kicking off the rising action of the next arc. TWO chapters simply getting from point A to point B struck me as deeply unattractive, and possibly unprecedented in the course of the story. There's the bit near the beginning where the child takes Nate from the forest north of Fuchsia to Cinnabar Island, which I believe is also two chapters, but that section involves multiple character introductions and a fair bit of characterization and general information dump; I think there's really just more going on with it.
Smashing these two chapters together was a little under 20k words of text. Hope springs eternal for my ability to cut something like that down to manageable size, but there wasn't a great deal to cut out of the Orre portion, which had previously been published, in particular. Words actually needed to go into it; like I said before, the child's pokémon hadn't been around in that iteration, and with more characters present, the scenes naturally got larger. But I'll save most of the talk about that chapter for when I do its commentary!
The actual boat stuff, as well as a little bit in Kanto, is where I'd need to compress--and I did actually take out quite a bit from that section! Most of the words lost were from the conversations themselves, reducing redundancy across the two of them and smoothing out some of the dialogue within them. But when I did a wordcount on the conversation with Titan and found it to be over two THOUSAND words long, it was like, yeah, there's no way I'm gonna be able to get this down to an acceptable size, is there? Overall I could see that the combined chapter wouldn't dip below 13k words long, so I reluctantly split it so that Chapter 46 would once again be its own standalone chapter.
From there it was one long, agonizing edit to get the chapter to its final form. I kept thinking it was *nearly* done, only to go back and make major revisions--most notably when I was feeling like, ah, a couple more readthroughs, that's all there is left! Only to delete an entire scene immediately after opening the document to get started. This was another scene in Kanto going over the child actually trying to figure out how to get to Orre. All in all we have plenty of scenes showing how bad the child is at humaning, and will have plenty more in the future, so I've been actively working to cut down on them unless I think there's something particularly interesting or important going on in them, or they're particularly funny; nothing special about this one, so it got chucked out.
In the end I'm not super pleased with how everything turned out. The boat chapter has always suffered from having a couple bits that I thought were fun or interesting but not really enough to carry an entire chapter. The conversations here, which make up the majority of the word count, strike me as rather flat and uninteresting; they're in there because I think they cover some important things, but on the whole they strike me as lifeless.
Also, there's the fact that the chapter begins by immediately undoing the setup of the last by bringing the child's pokémon back into the picture. This is one of the most egregious cases of cast-swapping, which happens a lot during the middle section of the fic; the child loses its pokémon and then gets them back within three chapters, or vice versa, what, twice? Three times? It's some unfortunate residue from the large restructure that this part of the fic went through, which involved moving a lot of scenes around and not always being able to adjust the casts in them. This is, fortunately, the last time it should happen; there will be some cast rotations later in the fic because we are, as ever, operating with some groups of people who would gladly murder each other if put in a room together, so we need to keep them apart until the appropriate time. And also to make cast size more manageable; the Orre arc does have some issues with that. However, there are a lot fewer shuffles, and they're far more reasonably spaced out.
This particular reversal also felt very unnecessary! All that we'd need, as an alternative, is for Mewtwo to show up after Nate leaves and before the child peaces on its pokémon. There were multiple attempts to make that happen, but there were logistical problems with this. Mewtwo could always have ~just happened~ to find the child at that particular moment, but that's not very satisfying and also is counter to to how he was actually searching ("searching") anyhow. Another possibility is Absol going to get him when the child doesn't immediately leap to go to Orre after Nate leaves. That seems a bit hasty for her, though, and I certainly didn't want more faffing about until it would be enough for her to get up and go do it. More so than logistical problems, though, attempts at writing the scene where Mewtwo actually showed up didn't go very well. There have already been plenty of scenes of Mewtwo pushing the child into doing something, and there are many yet to come, and in general this one didn't bring anything new to the table and was simply dull. At least the scene we get in the final chapter introduces Mewtwo to the child's amazing brain-chemsitry-altering abilities, which means we won't have to cover that later. But at the same time, "Mewtwo shows up and browbeats the child into taking him to Orre after all" doesn't feel like it's a scene that could really happen offscreen.
Thinking back on it now, having Mewtwo show up at the end of the previous chapter all "why hello there," smash cut directly to Orre might work. Perhaps the problem was trying to start the chapter off with him. Something to try when reworking this chapter, perhaps.
My favorite part of the chapter is probably the little bits devoted to the boat itself. I didn't know a great deal about boat travel before writing this, and especially not cargo ships, so it was fun to do a bit of research into the topic--mostly reading travel websites devoted to it and watching some video diaries from people who'd take that sort of trip on Youtube. Work on this chapter also coincided amusingly with the blockage of the Suez canal by the Ever Given--for a little while I had a personal joke, which would happen first, the boat getting unstuck or the chapter getting published? The boat won by a mile, of course.
I don't have a lot of positive things to say about this chapter, but it's out there now, and the next couple are pretty solid, I'd say. We're leaving behind the squishy middle of the fic and starting to gather some forward momentum again. The next chapter will finally actually be in Orre, and I'm excited to be there at last. I'm also expecting to have it done in a week or so; I may hold it back a little to give me some more time to work ahead on Chapter 49 and the subsequent NaNo chapters, but it needs very little additional editing.
Also, all that time spent investigating cargo ship travel makes me think I'd like to give it a shot, albeit not by myself. So if you ever feel like you want to take an unnecessarily slow trip across the Atlantic or something, hit me up. ;)
This chapter is possibly the one I've written the most out of any in the fic, and unlike the others I've written multiple times, that's not because I really enjoy it and sometimes just want to write it again despite having already done that. I have tried many times to get this chapter to work, and it has never worked.
One of the first things I did when getting ready for this chapter was go back and see how I handled it in the previous version, only to discover that--I hadn't! I'd deleted it entirely, and instead only referred to/summarized events at the beginning of what is now Chapter 47. Skipping it again was a very attractive option, but given the ways that the story's changed in this iteration, didn't seem entirely justifiable this go-round. This was both because Mewtwo needed to get reintroduced somehow--in the previous version he was simply a member of the party already--and because there wouldn't be a lot of opportunity for the child to interact with its pokémon without Mewtwo being around going forward, and I wanted to at least touch on some of the stuff going on with Titan, in particular, without that particular complication. In the previous version the child's pokémon weren't around, so the cast was just the child, Absol, and Mewtwo; there weren't a lot of scenes that even could happen between them.
In the end it felt like it would simply be too awkward to jump straight into Orre after the end of Chapter 45, and wanting to have a little more time with the pokémon was what really sealed the deal for me. I was going to resign myself to showing at least a little time on the boat, but I was still hoping I could combine this with what is now Chapter 46, which would essentially get all of our traveling out of the way, taking us from Kanto to the child's home base in Orre, with the next chapter properly kicking off the rising action of the next arc. TWO chapters simply getting from point A to point B struck me as deeply unattractive, and possibly unprecedented in the course of the story. There's the bit near the beginning where the child takes Nate from the forest north of Fuchsia to Cinnabar Island, which I believe is also two chapters, but that section involves multiple character introductions and a fair bit of characterization and general information dump; I think there's really just more going on with it.
Smashing these two chapters together was a little under 20k words of text. Hope springs eternal for my ability to cut something like that down to manageable size, but there wasn't a great deal to cut out of the Orre portion, which had previously been published, in particular. Words actually needed to go into it; like I said before, the child's pokémon hadn't been around in that iteration, and with more characters present, the scenes naturally got larger. But I'll save most of the talk about that chapter for when I do its commentary!
The actual boat stuff, as well as a little bit in Kanto, is where I'd need to compress--and I did actually take out quite a bit from that section! Most of the words lost were from the conversations themselves, reducing redundancy across the two of them and smoothing out some of the dialogue within them. But when I did a wordcount on the conversation with Titan and found it to be over two THOUSAND words long, it was like, yeah, there's no way I'm gonna be able to get this down to an acceptable size, is there? Overall I could see that the combined chapter wouldn't dip below 13k words long, so I reluctantly split it so that Chapter 46 would once again be its own standalone chapter.
From there it was one long, agonizing edit to get the chapter to its final form. I kept thinking it was *nearly* done, only to go back and make major revisions--most notably when I was feeling like, ah, a couple more readthroughs, that's all there is left! Only to delete an entire scene immediately after opening the document to get started. This was another scene in Kanto going over the child actually trying to figure out how to get to Orre. All in all we have plenty of scenes showing how bad the child is at humaning, and will have plenty more in the future, so I've been actively working to cut down on them unless I think there's something particularly interesting or important going on in them, or they're particularly funny; nothing special about this one, so it got chucked out.
In the end I'm not super pleased with how everything turned out. The boat chapter has always suffered from having a couple bits that I thought were fun or interesting but not really enough to carry an entire chapter. The conversations here, which make up the majority of the word count, strike me as rather flat and uninteresting; they're in there because I think they cover some important things, but on the whole they strike me as lifeless.
Also, there's the fact that the chapter begins by immediately undoing the setup of the last by bringing the child's pokémon back into the picture. This is one of the most egregious cases of cast-swapping, which happens a lot during the middle section of the fic; the child loses its pokémon and then gets them back within three chapters, or vice versa, what, twice? Three times? It's some unfortunate residue from the large restructure that this part of the fic went through, which involved moving a lot of scenes around and not always being able to adjust the casts in them. This is, fortunately, the last time it should happen; there will be some cast rotations later in the fic because we are, as ever, operating with some groups of people who would gladly murder each other if put in a room together, so we need to keep them apart until the appropriate time. And also to make cast size more manageable; the Orre arc does have some issues with that. However, there are a lot fewer shuffles, and they're far more reasonably spaced out.
This particular reversal also felt very unnecessary! All that we'd need, as an alternative, is for Mewtwo to show up after Nate leaves and before the child peaces on its pokémon. There were multiple attempts to make that happen, but there were logistical problems with this. Mewtwo could always have ~just happened~ to find the child at that particular moment, but that's not very satisfying and also is counter to to how he was actually searching ("searching") anyhow. Another possibility is Absol going to get him when the child doesn't immediately leap to go to Orre after Nate leaves. That seems a bit hasty for her, though, and I certainly didn't want more faffing about until it would be enough for her to get up and go do it. More so than logistical problems, though, attempts at writing the scene where Mewtwo actually showed up didn't go very well. There have already been plenty of scenes of Mewtwo pushing the child into doing something, and there are many yet to come, and in general this one didn't bring anything new to the table and was simply dull. At least the scene we get in the final chapter introduces Mewtwo to the child's amazing brain-chemsitry-altering abilities, which means we won't have to cover that later. But at the same time, "Mewtwo shows up and browbeats the child into taking him to Orre after all" doesn't feel like it's a scene that could really happen offscreen.
Thinking back on it now, having Mewtwo show up at the end of the previous chapter all "why hello there," smash cut directly to Orre might work. Perhaps the problem was trying to start the chapter off with him. Something to try when reworking this chapter, perhaps.
My favorite part of the chapter is probably the little bits devoted to the boat itself. I didn't know a great deal about boat travel before writing this, and especially not cargo ships, so it was fun to do a bit of research into the topic--mostly reading travel websites devoted to it and watching some video diaries from people who'd take that sort of trip on Youtube. Work on this chapter also coincided amusingly with the blockage of the Suez canal by the Ever Given--for a little while I had a personal joke, which would happen first, the boat getting unstuck or the chapter getting published? The boat won by a mile, of course.
I don't have a lot of positive things to say about this chapter, but it's out there now, and the next couple are pretty solid, I'd say. We're leaving behind the squishy middle of the fic and starting to gather some forward momentum again. The next chapter will finally actually be in Orre, and I'm excited to be there at last. I'm also expecting to have it done in a week or so; I may hold it back a little to give me some more time to work ahead on Chapter 49 and the subsequent NaNo chapters, but it needs very little additional editing.
Also, all that time spent investigating cargo ship travel makes me think I'd like to give it a shot, albeit not by myself. So if you ever feel like you want to take an unnecessarily slow trip across the Atlantic or something, hit me up. ;)
