Collections of Elegant Formulas: Notes
Masterlist | Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Epilogue | Notes
This post will have notes later. Right now: OH GOD IT'S DONE, I AM GOING TO BED. <3 Oh hey, it's later.
Hi! Just to warn you, this post will contain spoilers.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed the story --- while it didn't do everything I hoped it would and there are a couple of scenes I wish I could just completely redo, it was hell of fun to write, and there are places that I really like how the story works. Like I think pretty much everyone who starts a Big Bang (at least everyone I talked to about it) I began the summer with a ton of thoughts and enthusiasm and then had a lot of trouble turning that into a long fanfic. The outline went through tons of drafts, and I have lots of little text files like notes with who has what Pokemon, and what moves they know, and where everyone is in relationship to each other at any given time... some of which I never used. :P Sitting down to write, though, was very challenging --- I couldn't hit a groove, I didn't like anything I was doing, &c. &c. You all know the drill. <3
A couple of things in particular helped me. First,
pseudogeek totally went above and beyond just being an artist and beta'd some early chapters (including one or two instances of "oh I fixed this paragraph for you" out of the blue), drew things on spec to the outline which led me to say ``Oh wow I like what you did there, let me change the story,'' and spent a lot of time online bouncing ideas back and forth with me. Thank you, again! Second, knowing a couple of other people participating and talking through that and having this be something we were all working on together was really inspiring. The last week after work I've mostly just spent on AIM talking with writers and artists, all of us being like "We can do this!!" and it was great, and we can, and we did! (Or will. :)
Working with an artist was so cool! I've always wanted to do that --- a friend from college and I had graphic novel plans out the wazoo but we were much better at planning than producing, isn't that always the way? Like I said, I changed the story around the pictures a couple of times, and we bounced tons of ideas back and forth. I really like that pseudogeek used different styles for different pictures, too; it kept a balance between THIS IS SERIOUS and oh god these people are adorable and ridiculous, which is a balance I think the Pokemon canon is always playing with too. I'd love to work with them or with another artist on a project again. Reverse bangs sound interesting? (They didn't have notes to add at the moment, but they do add: "Whoever who can guess why I gave Julie this yellow dress for the final battle gets an imaginary cookie. Hint: a sci-fi short story." I'm willing to up that to a real cookie, actually, so... post away and force me to bake, I guess?)
For better or for worse, I think it's quite clear that I read Homestuck between last year and this year. ^^;; The only way this changed the writing style directly was including the chatlogs, though I might have done that anyway; I have very strong headcanon feelings about Fennel and Amanita and writing chat clients while in tech school. My biggest problem was that Fennel kept trying to turn into Vriska on me, and I had to be like *thwap* no! *thwap* bad Fennel! until she stopped. In general I've been playing with collage-y techniques in writing prose, bringing in bits and pieces of things that aren't just running narration, so this was a natural thing to try; hopefully it worked for you. If you know the whole troll relationship quadrant thing, also, you can say Crobat<>Silver (arguably my Pokemon OTP at this point) and maybe also Zoroark<>N/Julie. (Which I totally got from reading Flight by clear_bell , thinking about it.) The main protagonists are sort of auspisticey maybe? that stupid fandom makes shipping in every other fandom so much harder
Having B2W2 announced while I was in the middle of outlining, and details come out when I had already started, was really frustrating. I mean, I'm super excited for the games to be out, but also... Ghetsis coming back? Using Kyurem to wreak havoc? Giovanni battleable?? I mean I guess I could say I called it, but I wasn't actually trying to call it and it completely ruined my fanfic continuity. :P I mostly decided to ignore it, although I pulled a few things (Shadow Triad pokemon teams, Iris ending up as Champion, &c.) from what I couldn't help but run into on Bulbapedia. Probably for anyone who reads it right away this won't be a big deal, but it's definitely not going to age well.
If I could do it over I would do a number of things differently, but here are the big ones:
Oh, and I've now written more words of Pokemon fanfiction than I have words of the novel I've been working on since 2003 on and off. That... is definitely a thing that happened.
In conclusion: <3 <3 <3 <3 the pokebigbang makes me write fiction and even though it stresses me out I love it.
This post will have notes later. Right now: OH GOD IT'S DONE, I AM GOING TO BED. <3 Oh hey, it's later.
Hi! Just to warn you, this post will contain spoilers.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed the story --- while it didn't do everything I hoped it would and there are a couple of scenes I wish I could just completely redo, it was hell of fun to write, and there are places that I really like how the story works. Like I think pretty much everyone who starts a Big Bang (at least everyone I talked to about it) I began the summer with a ton of thoughts and enthusiasm and then had a lot of trouble turning that into a long fanfic. The outline went through tons of drafts, and I have lots of little text files like notes with who has what Pokemon, and what moves they know, and where everyone is in relationship to each other at any given time... some of which I never used. :P Sitting down to write, though, was very challenging --- I couldn't hit a groove, I didn't like anything I was doing, &c. &c. You all know the drill. <3
A couple of things in particular helped me. First,
pseudogeek totally went above and beyond just being an artist and beta'd some early chapters (including one or two instances of "oh I fixed this paragraph for you" out of the blue), drew things on spec to the outline which led me to say ``Oh wow I like what you did there, let me change the story,'' and spent a lot of time online bouncing ideas back and forth with me. Thank you, again! Second, knowing a couple of other people participating and talking through that and having this be something we were all working on together was really inspiring. The last week after work I've mostly just spent on AIM talking with writers and artists, all of us being like "We can do this!!" and it was great, and we can, and we did! (Or will. :)
Working with an artist was so cool! I've always wanted to do that --- a friend from college and I had graphic novel plans out the wazoo but we were much better at planning than producing, isn't that always the way? Like I said, I changed the story around the pictures a couple of times, and we bounced tons of ideas back and forth. I really like that pseudogeek used different styles for different pictures, too; it kept a balance between THIS IS SERIOUS and oh god these people are adorable and ridiculous, which is a balance I think the Pokemon canon is always playing with too. I'd love to work with them or with another artist on a project again. Reverse bangs sound interesting? (They didn't have notes to add at the moment, but they do add: "Whoever who can guess why I gave Julie this yellow dress for the final battle gets an imaginary cookie. Hint: a sci-fi short story." I'm willing to up that to a real cookie, actually, so... post away and force me to bake, I guess?)
For better or for worse, I think it's quite clear that I read Homestuck between last year and this year. ^^;; The only way this changed the writing style directly was including the chatlogs, though I might have done that anyway; I have very strong headcanon feelings about Fennel and Amanita and writing chat clients while in tech school. My biggest problem was that Fennel kept trying to turn into Vriska on me, and I had to be like *thwap* no! *thwap* bad Fennel! until she stopped. In general I've been playing with collage-y techniques in writing prose, bringing in bits and pieces of things that aren't just running narration, so this was a natural thing to try; hopefully it worked for you. If you know the whole troll relationship quadrant thing, also, you can say Crobat<>Silver (arguably my Pokemon OTP at this point) and maybe also Zoroark<>N/Julie. (Which I totally got from reading Flight by clear_bell , thinking about it.) The main protagonists are sort of auspisticey maybe? that stupid fandom makes shipping in every other fandom so much harder
Having B2W2 announced while I was in the middle of outlining, and details come out when I had already started, was really frustrating. I mean, I'm super excited for the games to be out, but also... Ghetsis coming back? Using Kyurem to wreak havoc? Giovanni battleable?? I mean I guess I could say I called it, but I wasn't actually trying to call it and it completely ruined my fanfic continuity. :P I mostly decided to ignore it, although I pulled a few things (Shadow Triad pokemon teams, Iris ending up as Champion, &c.) from what I couldn't help but run into on Bulbapedia. Probably for anyone who reads it right away this won't be a big deal, but it's definitely not going to age well.
If I could do it over I would do a number of things differently, but here are the big ones:
- For whatever reason, earlier this summer, I was obsessed with making the Pokemon battles game-realistic. I calculated speed stats based on hypothetical IVs/EVs, y'all. This was basically a waste of my time and if anything made a couple of battle sequences read kind of choppily. Unfortunately
pseudogeek pointed this out too late for me to do total rewrites, so. Learning! You'll note that the last couple of battles were a bit less like that, and I think and hope they worked out a bit better for that reason. - I really wish I had had time to write the Iris and Ho-Oh scene as well as the Iris and Lance battle scene. When it got to around a week ago and I had 10k words to go basically, I started tearing up my outline. Some of those cuts probably made the story better (ugh they did not need to try to go get every gym badge once it was clearly not working), some of them were okay but changed the shape of the story a little bit (cutting the Ghetsis/Giovanni alone on screen interaction works like the games work but I had initially planned to have them be a bit less Stereotypical Evil Villain Who Is Bad), but cutting from Iris made me really sad. IRIS IS AWESOME, YO, and woefully undercharacterized in the games in my opinion so I pulled a bunch of stuff from the anime. And I wanted her to have a more central role than she ended up having. Still, I'm glad she got as much space as she did.
- More worldbuilding. I don't think this story tells as much about the Pokemon world in general as New Game + did, and that's a shame. With how much plot I had to work in I am not surprised. Writing is hard. :P
Oh, and I've now written more words of Pokemon fanfiction than I have words of the novel I've been working on since 2003 on and off. That... is definitely a thing that happened.
In conclusion: <3 <3 <3 <3 the pokebigbang makes me write fiction and even though it stresses me out I love it.