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negrekWay back on November 1st. 2012, I started posting my third novel-length fanfic to FFN. Ten years later, a lot has changed, but I in fact still posting that same novel-length fanfic to FFN! It's been quite a ride, so I figured I'd take this opportunity to indulge in a bit of reflection.
But first! There is no chapter update or extra this year--instead I went ahead and set up a space for Salvage on my own domain. A number of people have asked me to make the full version of the fic available somewhere other than FFN's increasingly-sclerotic platform, and now it exists! It's pretty basic, but I hope good and readable, and it will never, ever ask you to identify which of these images contain a horse. It will also update automatically when I finish a chapter without me having to do anything, which is always nice.
So, what to say about Salvage? I for sure didn't expect it to run to (more than) ten years. Digging back through the Serebii thread for extras, I had to cringe at my NaNo from 2018 where I was hoping I might finish this monster off. But the story, as originally conceived, was supposed to be quite short--probably around fifteen chapters or so. I've talked plenty already about how this story was originally conceived of as something very different, and that's why the opening chapters are Like That, but that shift in genre also meant a serious shift in scope, and that is how we ended up with the behemoth I have on my hands today.
I've posted four completed chapterfics to date. The first, The Ninetales' Curse, is 50k words long and took slightly over a month to complete--I was NaNoing before I knew what NaNo was. I expected to finish the ambitious four-fanfic series I'd planned for it to be a part of, by the time that I graduated from high school. Instead the second fic in that series, Clouded Sky, ran to 250k words and took eight years to complete. Salvage now sits at around 350k published words (FFN word counters do be funky) after ten years--which means that my writing speed has actually increased slightly since Clouded Sky. Just not enough to counteract my ever-increasing tendency to ramble. :P
Despite that, I've never had any doubts about finishing Salvage one day; as I've often said, I knew both the end and the beginning when I started, and I've always been pushing towards that goal. We're reasonably close now, too! The fic is absolutely not getting finished in 2022, and 2023 is possible but very unlikely--but at this point I don't think it's pie-in-the-sky at all to expect the story to finish in 2024. As I have, once again, often said (seems this post is a lot about retreading ten years of familiar ground), the last third to a quarter of the story is my favorite, and we are really teetering on the edge of the good stuff now. I can't wait to show these final chapters off!
As is typical, I remember the good times with this fic much more acutely than the bad. Deciding I needed to go back and restructure the middle part to prevent the Kanto -> Orre -> back to Kanto -> back to Orre thing was definitely rough, and undeniably added two to three years to the fic's total run time. But I'm finally past that bit and very satisfied with the result--it was definitely the right choice for the fic overall. Similarly, I think Chapter 11 took either nearly a year or slightly more than a year to get published, with numerous false starts along the way, but it remains one of my favorite chapters out of the entire story. Another big favorite is the far more recent Chapter 45, where Nate shows up to be reunited with his pokémon and then proceeds to immediately leave again. It was fun to have him there again for a few pages, heh.
What am I most looking forward to in the not-nearly-ten-years that we have left, God willing? One thing that's been delighting me recently is a later chapter where the protagonist thinks to themselves, "Hmm, what can I do to get out of this situation? I know--an absolutely massive lie would solve everything!" Lots of fun stuff comes out of that. :P I'm also looking forward to the payoff of something I set up back in Chapter eight? Nine? Back on the whirl islands. More than ten years ago, easy! It'll be loads of fun to tie that up at last. And, honestly, I like the final chapter of the story a lot, too. It'll be extremely satisfying to put a bow on this fic, and I hope that people find the end of it all satisfying, too.
I've learned a great deal over the course of writing this story, not least of which is that November 1st is an incredibly bad date upon which to publish a story if you care at all about its anniversaries; do expect my next fic to begin auspiciously in the doldrums of March or thereabouts. I look forward to the end of this story, as well as everything that comes after. Thanks so much for spending part of the journey with me, however small--I've gotten to meet so many amazing people in the course of writing this fic! I hope it brought you at least a little bit of enjoyment, and I hope to see you when this all finally comes to a close. At least two years out, and I'm already hype! I'll see you soonish with Chapter 52--NaNo always throws a wrench in things, but the writing's going fine.
But first! There is no chapter update or extra this year--instead I went ahead and set up a space for Salvage on my own domain. A number of people have asked me to make the full version of the fic available somewhere other than FFN's increasingly-sclerotic platform, and now it exists! It's pretty basic, but I hope good and readable, and it will never, ever ask you to identify which of these images contain a horse. It will also update automatically when I finish a chapter without me having to do anything, which is always nice.
So, what to say about Salvage? I for sure didn't expect it to run to (more than) ten years. Digging back through the Serebii thread for extras, I had to cringe at my NaNo from 2018 where I was hoping I might finish this monster off. But the story, as originally conceived, was supposed to be quite short--probably around fifteen chapters or so. I've talked plenty already about how this story was originally conceived of as something very different, and that's why the opening chapters are Like That, but that shift in genre also meant a serious shift in scope, and that is how we ended up with the behemoth I have on my hands today.
I've posted four completed chapterfics to date. The first, The Ninetales' Curse, is 50k words long and took slightly over a month to complete--I was NaNoing before I knew what NaNo was. I expected to finish the ambitious four-fanfic series I'd planned for it to be a part of, by the time that I graduated from high school. Instead the second fic in that series, Clouded Sky, ran to 250k words and took eight years to complete. Salvage now sits at around 350k published words (FFN word counters do be funky) after ten years--which means that my writing speed has actually increased slightly since Clouded Sky. Just not enough to counteract my ever-increasing tendency to ramble. :P
Despite that, I've never had any doubts about finishing Salvage one day; as I've often said, I knew both the end and the beginning when I started, and I've always been pushing towards that goal. We're reasonably close now, too! The fic is absolutely not getting finished in 2022, and 2023 is possible but very unlikely--but at this point I don't think it's pie-in-the-sky at all to expect the story to finish in 2024. As I have, once again, often said (seems this post is a lot about retreading ten years of familiar ground), the last third to a quarter of the story is my favorite, and we are really teetering on the edge of the good stuff now. I can't wait to show these final chapters off!
As is typical, I remember the good times with this fic much more acutely than the bad. Deciding I needed to go back and restructure the middle part to prevent the Kanto -> Orre -> back to Kanto -> back to Orre thing was definitely rough, and undeniably added two to three years to the fic's total run time. But I'm finally past that bit and very satisfied with the result--it was definitely the right choice for the fic overall. Similarly, I think Chapter 11 took either nearly a year or slightly more than a year to get published, with numerous false starts along the way, but it remains one of my favorite chapters out of the entire story. Another big favorite is the far more recent Chapter 45, where Nate shows up to be reunited with his pokémon and then proceeds to immediately leave again. It was fun to have him there again for a few pages, heh.
What am I most looking forward to in the not-nearly-ten-years that we have left, God willing? One thing that's been delighting me recently is a later chapter where the protagonist thinks to themselves, "Hmm, what can I do to get out of this situation? I know--an absolutely massive lie would solve everything!" Lots of fun stuff comes out of that. :P I'm also looking forward to the payoff of something I set up back in Chapter eight? Nine? Back on the whirl islands. More than ten years ago, easy! It'll be loads of fun to tie that up at last. And, honestly, I like the final chapter of the story a lot, too. It'll be extremely satisfying to put a bow on this fic, and I hope that people find the end of it all satisfying, too.
I've learned a great deal over the course of writing this story, not least of which is that November 1st is an incredibly bad date upon which to publish a story if you care at all about its anniversaries; do expect my next fic to begin auspiciously in the doldrums of March or thereabouts. I look forward to the end of this story, as well as everything that comes after. Thanks so much for spending part of the journey with me, however small--I've gotten to meet so many amazing people in the course of writing this fic! I hope it brought you at least a little bit of enjoyment, and I hope to see you when this all finally comes to a close. At least two years out, and I'm already hype! I'll see you soonish with Chapter 52--NaNo always throws a wrench in things, but the writing's going fine.
