The Quest for the Legends

Thought I'd write a bit of an update. I'm on the seventh page of chapter sixty, as my signature says, and the going's pretty fast when I'm actually working on it. I don't know when I'll finish, exactly, because I'm still not quite sure how long it's going to be (I'm going to wait for how things evolve organically to decide whether and how certain things should happen), but I'm at least definitely more than halfway done.

I quite like this chapter so far. Writing it feels like writing Scyther's Story/The Fall of a Leader. I'm a little worried about how this chapter will come across to people who haven't read the spin-offs, though; maybe it'll just seem to be introducing a bunch of tangential stuff without going into it properly. Oh, well. It all does serve a purpose and I don't think it's confusing without having read the spin-offs, so it should be okay.

I dreamt something about Mark and May being engaged for an arranged marriage or something (it could also be that they somehow got engaged by accident or that it was necessary to save the world or whatever; either way, they were still twelve). They were having lunch somewhere talking about how annoying that was and how they're kinda friends and all but why do they have to get married? I really enjoyed that dream because they were delightfully in character about it and I just generally love dreaming about my characters. Also, it just amused me that even in a dream where they're somehow engaged, they're just there going "yeahhh no".

Chapter 60: The Swarm

Sorry it took longer than I thought. I figured it would be in the six-seven pages range, but it turned out to be thirteen, and then I kept redoing bits that didn't seem right.

As I said, it's about Scyther. I'm not sure how well this chapter works for people who haven't read the spin-offs; nothing about it should be confusing without it, but some lines probably won't really have any meaning to you. I don't know how much that hurts one's ability to enjoy the chapter on the whole.

Thanks enormously to opaltiger for beta-reading.


Then it's chapter 61. I don't know how long it'll take. It is a plot chapter, though, which is nice. Will it intrigue you if I tell you the working title is 'Mewtwo'?

EDIT: I added to Nightmare's character ramble.

Chapter 61: Mewtwo

There is plot! Gasp.

Fun fact: If you read Morphic or follow my Twitter or whatever, you may know of the time I made a typo and wrote "He was fucking scientist" instead of "He was a fucking scientist". Well, apparently there is just something with me and forgetting articles before phrases in the form [expletive] [noun], because I'd read this chapter many times over before opal (who betaed the chapter) found out I'd managed to write "It doesn't mean he's goddamn Destroyer", instead of "It doesn't mean he's the goddamn Destroyer".

Another fun fact: this chapter has way too many italics tags.

As of today, Mark Greenlet and his poorly-thought-out adventures have been part of my life for a decade, and at my current writing speed he's going to be for at least a few more years (and then it's the IALCOTN, if I ever finish that). It feels strange to think he ever wasn't or ever won't be.

Happy birthday, my dear slightly-slow brainchild. I don't think most people would be proud of having spent ten years of their life writing a Pokémon fanfic, but I am.

Chapter 62 is coming along, not very fast but I don't think it'll take that long. (Then again, you should never take my word for that.)

opaltiger has convinced me to attempt to finish the fic for NaNo this year.

It's not quite as much of a stretch as it could be: the projected remaining length of the fic shouldn't be that much longer than fifty thousand words, I have planned out what's going to happen in the rest of the fic, and it does happen that motivation is probably the biggest hurdle on the way right now, because the next of those chapters I'm actually excited about writing because I've been planning them for years is quite a way off at this point. Also, there are some chapter splits I'm not actually sure of in the plan, for which it could actually help considerably if I wrote the entire rest before I started posting everything - otherwise we might get a repeat of chapter 46.

Hoping to finish chapter 62 before that. It turned out a bit differently from what I expected, so it's shorter than I thought it would be. I really just need to go and get it done.

I finished the chapter a few days ago and have now read over it again making revisions. Unfortunately, however, I'm at elyvorg's place right now and can't actually update the site or even access the Internet from my own laptop. I'll probably put up the chapter on Friday, when I get back to Iceland, and if everything goes according to plan, by that point I'll be well on my way with chapter 63 if not done. You won't get the NaNo'd chapters until sometime after November, though I hope to be posting here regularly reporting on my progress.

The Quest for the Legends Word document is currently 301,878 words. This will be our starting point. This isn't primarily about 50,000 words, of course - if the average chapter remaining is so much shorter than the average chapter so far that there are fewer than 50,000 words left, I'm not going to go pad it out or something - but it's fun to keep a word count anyway.

I actually already started chapter 63 yesterday, but like I said, we're treating this as the starting point, which simply happens to be a bit closer to the end of the fic. I'm hoping to post daily progress posts in the hope that this will shame me into getting a decent word count every day instead of putting it off.

Right. It's on, fic.

I'm probably not done writing for today yet, but so far I'm at 303,960 words, which means 2082 words since yesterday, and chapter 63 is done (as well as the "Chapter 64:" with which the title of chapter 64 starts). Which is a pretty good first day! Only thirteen chapters left.

Also, fun things are happening. There is Robin Riverstone. (Look! She wasn't Random Side Character #451 with too many random personal details!) And Chaletwo is now in May's head. I don't think I'm going to be able to resist making gleeful comments about what I'm writing as I progress, which will probably make increasingly less sense as I go on.

Also also, I am using opaltiger's computer! This is exciting.

Technically I should have posted this (and chapter 62) yesterday, but shush, I was ridiculously tired.

Basically, I didn't get quite as much writing done as I would have wanted because I was traveling most of the day and my laptop's battery was limited. I'm at 305,096 words, which means 3218 words in altogether, which means I'm almost on schedule (115 words behind) thanks to having been comfortably ahead yesterday. And it's the weekend, so I should have plenty of time to get ahead again today.

That being said, I don't think I should deprive you of chapter 62 any longer, so before I get back to frenzied writing, I'm going to make some final tweaks to chapter 62 and get that up. Watch this space.

I should never post chapters while trying to write, because when I post chapters I spend the rest of the day uselessly refreshing the places I posted them. And then suddenly I went and started rereading Morphic extras, which really didn't help.

So I'm still a couple hundred words behind - the current word count is 306,674, which means I've written 1578 words since yesterday if I'm not mathfailing again. I really am hoping to make it up tomorrow, and definitely to finish chapter 64 (one of those chapters that turned out a whole lot longer and more interesting than I thought it would - it had "stuff happens" in its plan, but once I started writing it my brain took that to mean taking on May's issues).

I'm at 308,616 words: 6738 words into November (where I should be at 6667 for regular NaNo, so I'm slightly ahead now), with 1942 written since yesterday. So I'm back on track! Whoo.

(Well, technically it's twenty minutes to four AM, so it's not quite today. But I attended two parties today, so I don't think you can blame me for making up for it by writing into the middle of the night.)

I might still write a bit more before going to sleep - I'm thinking about getting something to eat, and I'd write while eating - but anyway, I'm feeling reasonably good about my progress now, as well as about my determination to write. I finished chapter 64 this afternoon and am on the third page of chapter 65 at the moment; it'll probably be somewhat on the long side so I don't know if I'll finish it tomorrow, but hopefully the day after that.

There are a lot of bits that are going to need substantial additional work during the editing - I'm really feeling the oh-dear-this-is-way-too-fast-to-be-any-good. Remember how I'd edited and posted the entirety of The Fall of a Leader by sometime in January, when I did that for NaNo? Yeah, no, that's not going to happen here. Still expect I'm going to spend my days being I FINISHED MY FIC MUST EDIT enough for it to not take years or something, but definitely longer than TFoaL.

310,362 words now - that's 8484 words written total (I should be at 8333) and 1746 since yesterday. Still doing chapter 65; I just started the seventh page of it. There's a battle going on, which is always good for NaNo because so long as I can concentrate on writing (which I admittedly wish I could for more than ten minutes at a time) they flow a lot quicker than dialogue/character-heavy scenes - the action is much more spontaneous than having to think up vaguely intelligent lines in a conversation.

I haven't read over any of this battle at all yet. Part of me thinks once I do it's not going to make any sense whatsoever. Let's keep it that way. It's NaNo.

I've discovered I kind of like writing Preciure. He might get more lines when I edit.

Meanwhile, holy hell it's late and this is not healthy. I think instead of the past few years where I've kinda sorta intended to do NaNo but it just fizzled out, my brain has now decided that my 1667 (or preferably more) words a day must be finished AT ANY COST and the procrastination I do makes me stay up ridiculously late in the night finishing the writing instead of going to sleep thinking falsely that I can make it up later.

I'm really digging how well I'm keeping this up. After the past several years where I've failed pathetically at pseudo-NaNoing, I thought I might just have lost the ability to write terrible fast nonsense.

I'm at 312,398 words now; I've finished chapter 65 and am now on the third page of chapter 66. That's 2036 words since yesterday and 10,510 total NaNo words, 510 ahead of where I should be assuming 50,000 words for the final product. In terms more in line with what I'm actually doing, I've written just over three chapters out of the nearly fourteen I had left when I started, which is promising since that's more than a fifth - of course, that would be assuming the remaining chapters are about as long as these three, which I have no idea about. The next few chapters are probably the ones I'm most unsure about content-wise; some spur-of-the-moment stuff that happened in the past couple will affect what happens in them, and as always my ideas like to flow best while I'm actually writing the fic so now I've thought of a bunch of things I'd rather do with them than I'd originally planned (which is fine, because I wasn't that wild about the original plan). This will be interesting. Hopefully I can keep up the pace and the result will not be irredeemably nonsensical.

Chapter 72 is probably the next one I've been looking forward to for an appreciable amount of time, so getting to that will be exciting.

Also, it's not quite as ludicrously late as yesterday! Victory!

I have not had a good day today. Lack of sleep and being generally tired at work and then missing half of the evening trying to take a nap and bleh.

I was so tempted to just leave it at the few hundred words I'd typed on the bus to/from work, but because I'm taking this way too seriously, I forced out more words and I'm now at 313,549. I only wrote 1151 words today, swallowing up 505 of the 510 words I'd gotten ahead yesterday, but I'm still on schedule, just barely.

Now to go to SLEEP.

It's mine and Shadey's anniversary today; we went to see Skyfall and I otherwise spent a lot of the day with him. So again, not enough writing. I finished chapter 66, but now it's nearly half past four in the morning and I'm starting to get a headache, so I'm calling it quits even though I'm only at 314,754 words - 1205 today, 457 words behind where I should be for NaNo. I'll do my best to make up for it this weekend.

Even without being part of the revised plan, two interesting things happened as I was writing this chapter: Alan's issues came out like whoa, and despite my having decided several times that Mitch was not going to be in this chapter, he was in it anyway. So in the end this chapter is wayyyyy far off what I originally intended it to be. I barely even remember what it was supposed to be. Something that didn't seem like it could fill a chapter.

Right. No update yesterday because I was sick, slept most of the day, and only managed to write a few hundred words in the evening.

Today I've been doing a whole lot more writing, however, and now I'm at 317,552 words, which is 2798 since the last update two days ago. That's still 435 words behind what I ought to have written in two days, and being that I was already behind at that point I'm now 992 words behind the goal (I'm at 15674 words so far in November where I should be at 16666), but considering I lost almost a whole day there on top of an existing slip, I think I could be doing a lot worse.

I just finished chapter 67 (unless I decide to reconsider the chapter splits, which I might). The end is in sight - this was a problematic chapter to write because of its somewhat transitionary nature, but now that that's past, chapter 68 is fairly well defined now, and chapters 69 and 70 should be basically according to the chapter plan. So from there it's back on track, and hopefully I can catch up fairly soon.

With chapter 67, I've also now written nearly five chapters out of fourteen left during NaNo, which fits fairly nicely with the fact we're now a third of the way through November.

I'm at 319,595 words, or 17,717 words into November, when the NaNoWriMo target is 18,333. That means I'm 616 words behind, having written 2043 words today and cut down my lag by more than a third. Whoo.

Chapter 68 has been fairly smooth sailing. Some transitional material, some of which may end up being cut if I decide the flow works without it, but it has both Sparky and Carl in it, which has been making a lot of it write itself. I've been in a really good writing mood today and yesterday, probably partly because of the prospect of Sparky and Carl. Unfortunately, though that would be lovely, it's not so much in the sense of managing to write for very long uninterrupted (though I did manage quite a bit in one session just earlier, I also managed to waste a couple of hours rereading the entirety of chapters 1-3 of Unsounded - highly recommended, by the way - because the PDF version of the print edition that I backed on Kickstarter just came out). But it's a really good writing mood in the sense that I feel like my output for these days has some reasonably non-terrible bits (well, non-terrible for me, at any rate) and they flow pretty naturally given I am writing, as opposed to the slogging, tortuous 'just shut up and write some words that say something like what's happening' thing my NaNo experience otherwise consists of.

Granted, this did come at the cost of going to sleep ridiculously late again. But at least unlike some of the previous days here I wasn't actually that tired, instead of staying up watching my sanity slip and my eyes dry into dust as I tried to type something coherent.

321,312 words, 1717 today. That's 19,434 words total for November where I should be at 20,000, or 566 words behind. I'm slowly but steadily catching up.

Chapter 68 is not done yet, but it's on page nine. I might move a scene that was supposed to be in this chapter to chapter 69 instead, in which case I'm on the last scene of the chapter; otherwise it's the second-to-last. Or, you know, I might shuffle these chapter splits around even more.


I took a nap today, where I had yet another dream about finishing the fic. In it, the end involved there being a bunch of legendary eggs, many of them shiny; most of them had already hatched, but one still remained, and there was a bunch of suspense around what was in the last egg. In the closing scene, it dramatically turned out to be a Togepi. When I woke up I was thinking, "Wait, that ending really isn't any good. I need to make up a new one, quick." Thankfully I then remembered that wasn't the real thing.

In the meantime (in the dream, not the actual fic) there was something with psychics ruling the world (I think my brain was mixing it up with Negrek's Clouded Sky) and Mitch being a Dark-type and sneakily taking down the psychic leader, which led to the reputation of invincibility that had been holding up the psychics' reign being broken as the story spread. This was somewhat bittersweet, as while the characters didn't like the psychics' reign, they felt making them lose everything in such a manner was cruel.

323,090 words. That's 1778 today, and I'm now behind the goal of 323,544 (a.k.a. 21,666 NaNo words) by only 454 words. Still keeping it up!

Chapter 69 might be more interesting than I thought; we'll see where this conversation goes. (God, I can't believe I'm almost at chapter 70 after which it's the LAST FIVE-CHAPTER ARC THING.)

325,004 words. 1914 words written today, 23,126 done altogether, only 207 words behind the NaNo goal of 23,333. I expect to catch up tomorrow.

Chapter 69 is finished, and I'm a couple of pages into chapter 70, which incidentally means I'm now done with more than half of what I had remaining at the beginning of November, chapter-wise. Which fits pretty nicely with the fact it's the fourteenth of November (well, technically six in the morning of the fifteenth, but that's because of my screwed-up sleep patterns).

I took a shower today and had a sudden burst of inspiration for making chapter 70 more interesting than it was meant to be, which was great; I'm now looking considerably forward to finishing this chapter. And then it's the freaking last five-chapter arc. This is insane. I can't believe I'm doing this.