The Quest Blog
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11/26/2011: Chapter 59 up
Chapter 59: DecemberYeah. Sorry it took so long.
Chapter sixty, I might as well tell you now, is entirely about Scyther, hence why I've been saying it'll be quick. The downside of that is, of course, that if you don't care about Scyther you probably won't give a damn about that chapter, but at least chapter 61 has plot happening.
11/25/2011: Chapter 59 done
In the sense that I've written the last sentence and there's just editing left.Man, it's been ages.
At least I genuinely expect chapter sixty to be quick.
09/20/2011: Progress at last
So chapter 59's been stuck on the first page for a while now, but now suddenly it's on page three. I've written a certain fun revelation (it's not that interesting, but it amuses me because it's this little thing that nobody's seen coming or had any real reason to see coming even though it was very vaguely hinted a long, long time ago) and hopefully the rest of what I'm planning to put in the chapter is enough material to not make this chapter too ludicrously short to be worth it after the wait.Then it's chapter sixty, which I've been rather looking forward to for a while even though my ideas of what will actually happen in it are still pretty vague. I have reasonably good reason to expect it'll be one of those chapters that write themselves. You'll see why.
07/21/2011: Molzapart and Rainteicune + character rambles
I randomly made a new page for Molzapart and Rainteicune, with all-new author commentary (the old one had far too many emoticons and unnecessary comments for my current tastes) and a fancy feature to toggle the commentary on or off.Also, I updated a few character bios that I'd meant to update before but for some reason didn't: I added some rambling about Stantler on the page for May's Pokémon and updated May's ramble with recent developments. (If you haven't seen the updated Letaligon ramble, that's on the page for Mark's Pokémon, too.)
07/16/2011: Chapter 58 up
Chapter 58: Sins of the MotherI'm in the process of adding to Letaligon's character ramble as a result. Hope you enjoy it.
Also don't miss the previous Quest Blog entry about the Best Thing Ever.
07/14/2011: The Best Thing Ever
So Chibi Pika hasn't yet responded to my plea to crosspost this here but I imagine they won't mind.BASICALLY this makes every goddamn minute of the nine years I've spent writing this fic completely worth it. Chibi Pika is God. The end.
(Context: a silly joke in the QftL thread on Serebii about how Chaletwo is going to decide to become a pimp and stop caring about the War of the Legends. But you shouldn't care about the context, damn it.)
And, uh, chapter 58 is almost done. But who cares about the chapter when you can have pimp!Chaletwo? :D
06/29/2011: Chapter 58 progress
Chapter 58 is coming along at a surprisingly decent speed. It's going to be quite short and I'm already on the third page. I've been looking forward to it for a while, which probably explains how it's so much faster than the past few chapters, but I'm still rather pleased with myself after thinking my ability to write faster than a snail had permanently left TQftL for silly Morphic extras.This chapter is all about Letaligon, and I hope fans of her subplot will appreciate it. This and chapter sixty are, in the current chapter plan, the last purely character-focused chapters in the fic, and I'm hoping to make the most of them because I like character-focused chapters.
06/20/2011: Chapter 57 Up
Chapter 57: Three ConversationsYeah. It really is just three conversations, so if you don't enjoy the characters babbling on, you probably won't be too thrilled by this chapter. Also, I'm not in a good enough writing mood right now and had a really hard time wording a lot of things in there, which rather detracts from it in my opinion. But I do like some of it.
06/20/2011: Ninth Anniversary
On June 19th 2002, I sat down and started writing a silly little Pokémon story about a boy named Mark. Today, I'm putting the finishing touches on chapter 57 of that same story, on page 637 of the Word document (albeit one started in 2004 with the HMMRCIG version).In the intervening nine years, I've completely replaced my plot plans several times, rewritten the story even more times, discovered uncountable fascinating new tidbits about the characters in my journeys exploring them, and grown to love this stupid thing to an obsessive enough degree to make a mini-website for it with far too much rambly content, code my own forum for it, write two novella-length spin-off stories and, perhaps most glaringly, still be writing it at all despite that it's a barely-coherent mess started when I was twelve years old.
The chapter will be put up later tonight. I just wanted to get the birthday update up properly before midnight (my time). Happy birthday, dear fic. Looking forward to next year when I'll be able to say I've been writing a Pokémon fanfic for more than a decade.
06/06/2011: Plot Recap
So here's a plot recap page, covering chapters 1-55 of the ILCOE. Once chapter 57 is put up, it will be updated with stuff from chapter 56 and so on, ensuring that the page will never contain spoilers for the latest chapter (so that you can use it to refresh your memory before you read a new chapter).Tell me if you think something worth mentioning is missing. This is just off the top of my head. Also if the organization is way confusing. It's hard to tell.
06/05/2011: Progress (finally)
So you know chapter 57? The thing I haven't been talking about or making any real headway with for a couple of months?Basically, I've been having something of a confidence crisis recently, realizing suddenly that this chapter is going to be awful and the whole chapter plan sucks and I can't write and so on. And it didn't help that I was stuck on a really stupid part of the chapter, one of those places where I need a transition from thing A to thing B and it just can't seem to work out in a way that doesn't sound ridiculous. So I haven't been getting a lot of writing done.
Well, the other day I realized it was almost June, and since the fic's ninth anniversary is on the nineteenth of June, I should probably hurry up with the chapter to try to get it out on TQftL's birthday. At first this resulted in about two new sentences of the chapter, which I promptly deleted after deciding they were awkward. Then earlier I got past that annoying little part and started writing again, and then all of a sudden the characters swooped in to the rescue by suddenly making the chapter interesting! I love it when that happens. (Oh, Chaletwo, in my Morphic-extra-writing spree I'd almost forgotten how much I utterly love you and all the new things I keep discovering about you.)
It's still a sort of a talky in-between chapter, but at least I like it a lot more now and don't feel like I'm a horrible writer making a chapter out of uninteresting chatter anymore, so I expect this time I will actually be able to find the motivation to finish it. If everything goes according to plan, you only have two weeks to wait now. Look forward to it.
Oh, and somebody a while ago suggested I should make some sort of a plot recap thing, so I've been drafting up a page that would go on the minipage somewhere containing a basic summary of both the main plot and the current status of that and the ongoing subplots, so as to make it easier for readers to refresh their memories on what's going on after a long wait between chapters. This would be updated every time there is a chapter update to feature information as of the chapter before the latest one, so as to allow you to read/skim it before you read the new chapter. Sound good?
03/20/2011: Chapter 56 up
So I did break that longest-wait-for-a-chapter-ever record. Ouch.Chapter 56: The Ouen Safari
Even worse, unlike the other two longest waits (chapters 34 and 37), this chapter is neither long (seven pages and a bit) nor especially remarkable, so I can't really say it's especially worth the wait. Sorry. I'll… attempt to write the next chapter faster, and chapter 58 at least should hopefully be pretty quick.
Thanks to opal and elyvorg for beta-reading.
02/14/2011: TV Tropes
Since I just discovered yesterday that apparently TQftL has had a TV Tropes page for a while and I never noticed, I figured I might as well link it on the menu, because we all love TV Tropes.As with the Morphic page, I prefer to be minimally involved (…though I permitted myself to rewrite the description because the old one was ridiculously long and went into oodles of completely extraneous details that only served to make it spoilerrific and thus defeat the entire point of a description, and then I couldn't resist adding a couple of really obvious tropes, but I hope to never be tempted to do that again), so by all means go nuts.
Yes, yes, chapter 56 is coming. At some point. When I've finished the fourth "Dave and Mia Discuss" Morphic extra that I'm writing right now and is really fun.
02/09/2011: Well.
Chapter 56 is actually almost done; I'm just having a hard time getting it to end. It's a rather lousy six pages, and you deserve a whole lot more after all this time, but.Really sorry for the wait. I could start excusing myself with Morphic/ReGenesis/White/university/work, but really, I've had plenty of time where I've just been lazing around rather than writing. The truth is just that now I'm getting into chapters that I actually haven't been planning in detail for years on end, and the lack of pent-up excitement is bad for my motivation. Sorry. I'll still try not to make this the pace of the next chapters.
11/24/2010: 'Razor', part III
I'm actually cheating a little because I haven't finished this part yet; I'm only halfway done at the most. But eh; I have so much other stuff to do that I really don't know when any of this'll be finished, so I figured I might as well post an update in the same vein a the previous two to show something is going on.So, part three. This part is home to one of the most noteworthy changes to Scyther society in the revision: Scyther no longer spend a full year as adolescents.
The thing is, Stalker was right when she told Shadowdart this was stupid. Why would any species of wild predators whose young spend three years unable to hunt and dependent on the older ones to feed them cheerfully add a fourth year on top of that? I mean, if it takes that long to teach them all that stuff (which is kind of silly in the first place), couldn't they at least just give the Code lessons while they're still Descith, with the bits they can't do then being taught in a hurry after they evolve? I was already facepalming at this by the time I wrote The Fall of a Leader, but because Scyther's Story had already established it and I didn't exactly have time to rewrite that then, I just handwaved it (um, the Leader needs to think up his lessons! And that takes ages for each one! Totally!) and hoped nobody noticed.
But now that I am rewriting it, I am addressing this. Descith still evolve in the spring, but now they have their First Prey in the early autumn. Why then, in particular? Well, because of another thing that was rather problematic with the old version, namely timing. We know Stormblade and Shadowdart meet Razor when Mark and company are walking through Ruxido, in early June, and at this point Shadowdart is not yet Leader. Furthermore, we know that Stormblade meets Nightmare at some point after the Ouen League that Mark participates in, since at that point she's just been released, and Shadowdart only dies after this. The League finals were on August 31st, but okay, Michael Willows was supposed to attempt to keep training for a bit; technically I can stretch that to sometime in the winter, though that seems unreasonably long.
Where it gets problematic is that Mark and company are supposed to cross paths with the swarm again in the fairly near future of TQftL, at which point Shadowdart is supposed to have been dead for at least some time. And right now, in the fic, it's early September, whereas Shadowdart, according to The Fall of a Leader as it stands, won't die until sometime in the middle of the winter. This is a problem because Mark and company are going to Ruxido very soon, to release Letaligon - wouldn't it be kind of silly to either stick around there for several months or leave and then randomly come back?
So what we want, now, is for parts five, six and seven of The Fall of a Leader to all take place sometime in the time period between early June (when Stormblade and Shadowdart meet Mark and company at the end of part four) and sometime in September (near-future second meeting). Part five already has Shadowdart defeating the Leader the day after the first meeting, at a quick skim (at most it's the day after that), so that's taken care of. Then the First Prey lessons start soon after that, and Stalker can't have had her First Prey when she dies, so the First Prey needs to be sometime late enough for it to make sense that the entirety of part six happened before that point. So early autumn it is.
This really doesn't change that much for the actual story, interestingly enough; it just means that Razor hasn't evolved by the time of Stormblade's First Prey and Shadowdart hasn't evolved by the time of Razor's, a couple of seasonal indicators change, and a few lines of dialogue in The Fall of a Leader get messed with.
Preview, as usual. Leader-POV! I really don't like how I originally wrote the Leader's lessons in Scyther's Story; there are just sentences all over the place that are ridiculous and it beats the reader over the head with "THE LEADER IS BAD, M'KAY?" and his personality kind of jumps all over the place and I never formed a coherent picture of how he viewed the Code like I did for Shadowdart in The Fall of a Leader. Most prominently, I never properly decided whether he actually had a coherent view of it to begin with or was just a bully using the Code as an excuse to oppress everyone (because HE'S BAD, M'KAY?).
So here's the first part of my attempt to fix that. The answer is: he does have a view of the Code, but it's quite different from Shadowdart's in the details and overlaps suspiciously with his need to keep everyone else down to retain his feeling of being in control. And, well, he's still pretty bad, but I hope the fact he's more coherently so makes him feel less mustache-twirlingly evil.
Most importantly, there is a new emphasis on fear here that was only very vaguely present before. The Leader is someone who would very much think of fear as a tool, because he has never had anything to fear: he's unusually strong from birth, gets into a position of power at a young age and has retained it with relative ease ever since. He's familiar with a distant sort of fear - fear of the idea of losing his position, which he has employed various means to secure himself against - but not really as that crippling, immediate thing. He then views fear as a quick method of manipulation, an easy shortcut to keeping others in line - and, more importantly, genuinely believes it's simply the best way to teach them. So now, instead of appealing to reputation - something rather arbitrary that the Scyther are never subsequently shown to really care about - he just appeals to the adolescents' fear of isolation and rejection to make them obey the Code.
This also fits better with the effects his lessons turn out to have on Shadowdart, because of course piling on a fear of failure is just going to make a previously nervous, insecure individual like him have a breakdown when what he's attempting proves unexpectedly difficult. And the Leader would never properly get that because real, immediate fear and insecurity are so alien to him. Until Shadowdart starts challenging him, of course.
11/14/2010: NaNo Rambles
Still not doing very well at actually catching up with NaNo, but it is getting written, slowly but surely.I'm thinking about renaming Scyther's Story to 'Razor'. After all, Scyther's Story is just a pretty terrible name, it makes no sense if you haven't read the main fic (I can just picture some puzzled reader going "Shouldn't it be A Scyther's Story?"), and I'm bad enough at titles that I can't really think of anything other than my beloved "name of character" cop-out. Besides, the story is just "Razor's life", so it seems reasonably appropriate as a title.
I've rewritten Part II now and started Part III. I'm… reasonably satisfied with what I've done with Part II, story-wise; the main aching problem with the old one was that they were just being all chipper and making friends for no reason like in some horrible happy high school adventure, so instead, I now went and tried to portray a little better just how desperate and weird it is for Stormblade to start trying to talk to some year-old Descith about clouds (and hint at just how many of his peers he's alienated with it by now).
Likewise, their first encounter with Shadowdart isn't quite as forced and out of nowhere. I'm scrapping the whole females-are-darker-in-color thing; Scyther already has a gender difference that makes perfect sense and that was just a silly added complication and I have no idea what I was smoking when I put it in. Besides that everybody teasing Shadowdart because he looks like a girl is just horribly grade-school-esque and headdesk-worthy and doesn't fit in with the Scyther's otherwise quite sexism-free society. Scyther now officially don't give a damn about gender except when it comes to who they want to do the deed with.
So, uh. Another preview-scene. It references a new bit, where Stormblade briefly exchanges words with Razor at Shadowdart's acceptance ritual. Razor also makes a big deal of "sky Pokémon"; that's because the explanation of the clouds now includes a bit about how the sky is something analogous to the ground, with its own Pokémon that live in the sky (as opposed to ground Pokémon that can fly; according to the logic of the mythology, gravity is the force that pulls you to the plane where you belong, and hypothetically, a cloud "flying" towards the ground would "fall" upwards). Thus the assumption that "sky Pokémon" are a special class of Pokémon that can operate by different rules than "ground Pokémon".
11/10/2010: Update
So. Status report.I am doing NaNo, no matter how little it might look like it when I'm at less than a third of what I'm supposed to have done so far. As I've been saying, it's a rewrite of Scyther's Story, and hopefully at least a revision of The Fall of a Leader is to follow as well, what with Scyther's Story being only 30,000 words (in the original version, anyway).
I've finished Part I. It's less changed than I might perhaps have liked, as I didn't really have enough opportunity to plan this ahead properly, but improved regardless, and of course the writing isn't quite as cringeworthy. The main change is in emphasis, since originally the purpose of Part I was very nebulous and mostly consisted of "make Descith as cute as possible". Now, instead of devising some new story elements to introduce the fic in a less utterly fillerish manner or cutting ahead and sacrificing my precious word count, I decided to tell more or less the same story except with more focus on Razor's parents and introducing the way Scyther think, which should hopefully feel slightly less pointless than the original opening. This is helped by the fact that as of The Fall of a Leader, Razor's parents actually have some semblance of characterization and an actual history to explore. I don't know if this makes it way too cheesy and soap opera-ish, but whatever.
Preview. Because why not. It's not a greatly changed scene, but hey.
10/25/2010: Chapter 56 started!
I'm actually writing! Would you look at that?So, um, yeah. It's not an overly remarkable chapter, but all progress is good, so.
I never knew the Ouen Safari's warden was Robin Riverstone's mom. Huh.
10/05/2010: D:
Oh, my poor precious neglected fic.So here's the deal. I'm writing the last chapter of Morphic (after which I can then rewrite the whole thing). And a series of Morphic-related… things. And working and doing university homework and trying to work on my site and so on and so on and long story short, I still haven't started chapter 56, or done much in the way of planning it or the like. Even that explanation of the Waterberg principle is sort of hanging in limbo right now.
So I suppose I owe you at least a little bit of an apology for making you wait. At least chapter fourteen of Morphic will hopefully be up sooner than later if you read that, and after that I may be in a more TQftLy mood. And I may still rewrite Scyther's Story/The Fall of a Leader in November.
08/29/2010: Character Updates
(If you missed it, chapter 55 is up.)I've updated the character bios for all three of the kids. The most interesting one is Alan, who has a bit in his character ramble now about the reasons for his departure.