All right… for about a year or so, I’ve been working toward a strict alternating schedule with respect to chapters of NoFP and Team 8. With my new work situation (i.e. not working at the moment), I thought I’d be able to accelerate things better than I have.
Unfortunately, things haven’t always been cooperating too well.
I had a couple thousand words added to NoFP, including some wonderfully purple prose from Rita “Harry Potter is Making my Career” Skeeter. Unfortunately, when I tried to save the file, it corrupted. Worse, the .tmp backup didn’t have the added text, which also included some breakfast conversation the article sparked.
Sometimes you need to acknowledge signs from above.
Coincidentally, I also managed to figure out a sticky scene for OoTD – to such a degree that it pretty much wrote itself.
My goal for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writer’s Month) is to kick out 50k words – but use those words to advance my fanfics, as my original works are doing some different things at the moment (more about that later). That’s definitely not going to happen if that 50k includes three chapters of NoFP – the beta process that story has eats up a lot of time. I don’t mind, because my betas do exemplemary work and the continuity issues that have to be managed grow larger with each chapter.
To make a long story short, I’m going to write for whichever stories are ‘working’ for me at the moment. You may see several different ‘in progress’ chapters listed here at once. Trying to focus on one at a time, knocking them out linearly isn’t working nearly as well as I’d like it to, so we’re going to see how some parallel processing works. Technically, I’m a little ahead on NaNoWriMo already, so maybe this will work better.
Congrats on doing NaNoWriMo! I’m doing much the same thing as you, bending the rules slightly by using a preexisting story and just shooting for the boost in daily writing. In ways, it’s much harder than working with an original story because you don’t get the same rush in Week One where you can make up three hundred new characters and pad your story to 30K.
Aside from that, I’m rather sad the heavens saw fit to destroy your latest chapter. I know that it’ll come back to you, and Rita’s prose will be even more purple than before.
So, good luck!
What Mock said, good to know you’re still alive, and as always the teasers are creating an itch that I’m gonna have to scratch soon!
I’ve been worrying about NoFP lately (seriously) … your first story, which *flew* in those first ten or twenty chapters when you were previously unemployed … but now it’s been dead in the water for the last one and a half months, when I’d hoped there would have been a resurgence in your output, reminiscent of those good old days.
A few months ago someone posted a pessimistic message on your Yahoo group, reasoning that extrapolation of the lengthening delay between chapters of NoFP showed that the novel/series would likely never get finished. He got shouted down pretty quick, but I can’t help but feel he may have a point. Your policy of “I’m going to write for whichever stories are ‘working’ for me”, in conjunction with a possibility that NoFP may, in fact, never ‘work for you’ again (or rarely), means that NoFP may, perhaps, never get finished.
Which would be a great pity, given my memory of those early days when your NoFP came out of nowhere and nova’ed into the HP fan fiction universe, and the brilliant quality and power of the story. Not to mention the ‘tip Matthew for NoFP’ drive way back then.
As a selfish reader, of course, all I can do is cross my fingers and hope that NoFP will ‘work for you’, or that this new policy is only for the duration of November (which is implied, but I’m a pessimist). Best of luck! Try not to let that Naruto person hog *all* of your time!
Dude, you do what you gotta do. The whole NoFP situation kind of sucks, I’ll admit, but seeing as how I’m personally a bigger fan of Team 8 then NoFP it’s all good. Anyways, I hope you keep on posting your kick ass stories.
Don’t Panic:
I’ve been in the fanfic scene (mostly anime, and as a “beta” as well as reader) for more than a decade now, and I’be seen many fantastic authors stop writing with treasured stories uncompleted. I’ve also seen some who’ve kept writing with ever higher quality though this period. (And if slower output is partly due to an author holding himself to higher standards, I don’t think we should unduly complain….)
So based on that, I observe:
0: Matthew is a dedicated author. This is not a hobby for him, and while I can’t remember any such writers in the anime fanfic community, plenty who dropped out did so because they moved away from what was a hobby.
1: As long as an author keeps writing, you don’t have to worry in general.
2: As long as a writer does not take a LONG vacation from a particular work, such that it gets so cold they can’t put themselves back into the right frame of mind to continue it properly, you don’t have to worry too much. In this case, Matthew’s muse is just telling him to write something else for the moment. (Heck, if he can transcend this problem in general, there’s hope for Blackwand….)
3: Slow but steady and high quality output on a particular story is a VERY good sign. It e.g. shows the author’s heart is still in the work. The STUNNING quality of recent NoFP chapters causes me no worry at all.
There are also some signs when an author is in trouble or a story is so, e.g. when an author punts new chapters and goes back to rewrite the whole thing to their new, higher standards and abilities. I’ve NEVER seen an author succeed in this; I’m watching Lady Alchymia and her Emerald Tablet with particular interest, because she may be an exception that proves the rule: she’s not stopped writing new chapters and is a dedicated author—in fact, I believe she’s editing and republishing the first part of this story in part to get experience that will improve her as an author.
There are a variety of other signs of trouble, and I see none of them here except the obvious one of severe RL chaos. So I wouldn’t worry TOO much. Even if you do the math and figure that it’ll take Matthew many years to finish NoFP, there are authors who’ve managed that feat. Heck, one goes by the initials JKR ^_^.
– Harold
One other note: as someone who is this fall celebrating his 30th year of programming, and even more years of writing non-fiction, there’s NOTHING more disheartening than to loose a large block of hard work in a glitch. For me, I have to switch to something else for a while simply to regain the necessary enthusiasm to redo that work. The very fast progress on _Out of the Darkness_ suggests to me that Matthew is doing the right thing; certainly beating your head against a brick wall can kill your muse for good. I’ll note that many if not most of the great anime fanfic authors who dropped out were only working on one great work.
Having two major stories and at least one backup—for those who can handle the complexity, which is clearly the case here—strikes me as an extremely wise strategy. Sure, if a reader is only interested in one of them it might seem to be annoying, but trade off the slower pace on your favorite story for the much greater probability it’ll actually get finished….
Patience is a virtue.
– Harold
I have to agree that working on whatever story you have an inspiration for at the time is the best idea. How many times when people have had a problem (and not just with writing), they go do something else and they have a burst of inspiration for their previous problem.
While I would like to see a new chapter for NoFP and Team 8, I can wait for a good quality chapter instead of one of lower quality. Working on your stories this way, maybe while writing part of one, an idea will strike you for another one of your stories. All I can say is that I hope you have Wordpad open to just write down the basic idea (that way it won’t slip your mind, unless you’re almost done writing for the other story).
I will add something here as well… As those of you who read my article on outlining can probably guess, LARGE sections of the upcoming years have already been outlines, detailed, or completely written down. Remember the scene with Harry’s Patronus on the Quidditch Pitch? Pretty much every word was written in spring of 2006, right after inspiration smacked me in the shower as I was getting ready for work.
As much as I am tempted to rush ahead and get to ‘the good stuff’, I don’t want to skimp on quality and rush the transitional pieces. There are a lot of things I still need to complete the groundwork for, if I don’t want to damage the reader’s suspension of disbelief.
Which is very good that you’re willing to take the time to do that. Some stories that can be really good or even great are ruined by people rushing to get to ‘the good stuff’. While it may not always be interesting to read about events that aren’t exciting at the moment (such as training, events that happen between other people/groups, or flashbacks to thoughts/experiences a person has had), they help to set the events later on. It’s always nice when something you read several chapters later has a connection to a part that didn’t seem that important earlier in the story. For example in NoFP take Harry sending a letter to Rita with the stick and carrot approach. That small event set up Harry being able to use Rita for his purposes instead of her being used against him.
The only problem is that sometimes people can go too far with setting groundwork or explaining things (as much as I like the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, it does get a little annoying). But you are one of the author’s who understands this and tries to find the balance to create a well written story.
Yeah, Unicorn is still after me about that Glock. = )