Progress report (03/05): Moving, jet lag, exams and more

In the past two weeks, I’ve moved back to Denmark from Canada, dealt with jet lag, and plunged straight into crunch time on an exam project for a university course on game engines that I’m taking (I’m doing CS). I’ve been rather busy, having failed to anticipate how much effort was involved in cleaning out and moving, how time consuming it would be to get started properly on my team’s project back home, and how tired jet lag would make me in the evenings after work where I’d planned on writing since I usually don’t suffer jet lag much.

How are we doing?

Frankly, not a lot of writing has gotten done. I’ve opened the IFF files every day, and written at least one sentence – but that sadly doesn’t amount to much writing overall. That lore post on chakra that I’ve been mentioning is halfway finished, which is the largest chunk of writing that’s happened; I managed that just before I left Canada. Otherwise, a meager 201 words have been added to the chapter nine draft – nothing complete enough to even be added to the online draft I have open for high level beta feedback.

The next two weeks

I’m not really good at deadlines, as I should have proven beyond any doubt by now, but I do hope to provide the chakra post at some point these next two weeks. Just a matter of sitting down for two hours with a clear head and hammering the rest out and proof-reading it, perhaps shoot it past a beta or two. Story-wise, I will restate the apparently unrealistic goals I had for the past two weeks: to finish up the chapter nine draft and be well into chapter ten.

I’m optimistic about the next two weeks, so I think cautious pessimism is in order (given precedent). That project crunch I mentioned took a lot out of me, especially on top of the jet lag, but we’re now ahead of our schedule and the jet lag is gone. I can afford to (and somewhat need to) go a bit easier on work now.

The next two weeks look a lot brighter for getting back into writing and I’m definitely feeling the mojo now – I just need the occasional right confluence of time and energy, and both are looking to recover from their brief dip downwards. I am taking a tip that has been given me and planning ahead, designating specific hours each day as dedicated writing time. We’ll see how that works out.

So that’s the bi-weekly update from me. It’s brief today – sorry about that.

See you in at least two weeks, if hopefully before that!

Progress Report (19/04): Chugging along, moving back to Denmark, and a lore post preview

These past two weeks I’ve been finishing off the work I’ve been doing during my stay in Canada, and preparing to move back home to Denmark after three and a half months abroad. It’s been busy, but I found the energy and time to start this blog and to write quite a lot on the story – mostly in the past week.

How are we doing?

The first draft of chapter nine is now almost finished. Two weeks ago, the “usable” word count of chapter nine stood around 2000 (I forgot to make a note, so I can’t recall the exact number). It now stands at 11.446 words. One part needs to be rewritten a bit, though a lot of it can be reused, and a few scenes have gaps in them that still need to be filled out. I estimate that the finished first draft will be about 13.000-14.000 words. I might have to split it up later for readability reasons, but since I shall be in full control of the final publishing schedule, I could just have them go up as a quick one-two punch and retain decent chapter sizes for later binge readers.

The lore post on chakra is still in progress, as I’ve channelled my writing mojo into the story instead this past week. I have determined exactly what will go into the post and how, and have already written some of it. It will be an excerpt from the introductory chapter of the academy textbook, Chakra Fundamentals.

The book is fairly heavy reading, and is intended for the first year of students who are selected for the ninja educational track of the Konoha Academy. It serves as a comprehensive introduction to and overview of the entire field of modern chakra theory and its applications. As such, it is the first book on the subject that most children who grow up to be ninja will encounter. I hope it shall prove to be interesting reading.

Many of the chakra-related lore posts will be excerpts of various chapters in this book. As a quick taste, because I see no reason not to put it here, here’s an excerpt of the book’s foreword that I wrote yesterday, which might or might not make it into the chakra lore post itself.

Chakra Fundamentals is intended as an attempt to demystify chakra as part of the standardization of modern academy teaching material. Chakra has, throughout history, most often been considered solely in the contexts of spirituality and mysticism. The first lesson you will learn in the classroom is that chakra is not magic.

While it was once regarded as an inscrutably mysterious, esoteric and dangerous topic, and is still held to be so by many among the masses, the phenomenon of chakra has seen much study throughout the centuries. Even though there are still many more questions than there are answers, we know far more today than we once did.

As the field of knowledge is vast, and much of it is restricted, it is outside the scope of this book to delve into any one subject in great depth. Instead, Chakra Fundamentals aims to offer a solid grounding in and overview of the most basic and commonly accepted fundamentals of chakra theory and the ninja arts, and touches only briefly on more advanced fields to guide and focus further independent study. In many cases, additional reading material is suggested in the margins. In all other cases, such is left to the initiative of the student.

— Umino Kohari, “Chakra Fundamentals, Fifth Edition.”

The next two weeks

This Wednesday, I will be flying back to Denmark, and I hope to post the chakra lore post before that happens. I expect a turbulent schedule at least until next Sunday, where I will finally move in back home. The week after that I should be more free and I anticipate getting a lot of writing done then. I want to spend it finishing the chapter nine first draft completely and moving on to chapter ten so that I’m at least a few thousand words in by the next progress report.

On a final note, not publishing chapters immediately turns out to be the right choice for me. I’ve had a much easier time writing, this past week. The current draft of chapter nine is not at all “ready”, but I can move on, safe in the knowledge that it’s solid enough that I can come back to it later and touch it up.

So far, I haven’t touched the old chapters either. I expect that I shall get around to that sometime in the next month, but I anticipate no progress on that front before the next update. Travelling can be tedious, so I expect I’ll have my hands full already.

Until next time!

The next progress report will be posted on May 3rd.

So what’s taking so long, anyway?

I feel like I owe everybody an update and an explanation. So that is what the first post of my In Fire Forged focused blog shall be about, to provide context for its continued existence.

Let’s start out with the obvious part: IFF is not abandoned, nor was it ever. IFF is in fact still being worked on, and the work hasn’t stopped in the time that I have not been posting updates. Granted, the writing of the story itself has been going very slowly, but the lore and overall story and arc plot and structure have seen major revisions while the story has been on hold.

I have mentioned, earlier, the 50.000 words of lore and plot that I started the story with. Most of that is now utterly irrelevant or outdated. So a lot of things have happened since last summer.

Why did I stop writing?

When I originally began my aggressive schedule of one update every two weeks, it was to keep on the pressure and ensure that I would actually write because I was in constant panic mode. This ground to a quick halt after a few months. I think that there were several reasons for this.

First of all, a series of real life events happened that quickly stripped me of the mood, will and time to write. Mostly this has been very non-dramatic, mundane stuff. My laptop broke down during the winter where I’d been planning on writing a lot. University projects can be very time consuming, and I often found myself without the energy and motivation to sit down in the evenings and write.

Second of all, the pressure to write stripped me of the pleasure of writing. This one I had not predicted and it came as a surprise to me, though it seems obvious with hindsight. Especially the part about needing to publish chapters immediately after writing them got to me. If I had to do that, the chapters had to be perfect. If I realized that I’d committed a mistake down the line, it would be too late to fix it since the prior chapters had already been published and committed to.

Third, the arc I was trying to write, beginning with chapter eight, is really complicated. As I started writing chapter nine, I realized that the plot simply didn’t work. Several characters were holding major idiot balls to make the whole thing work out as I wanted it to, and the plot had huge, gaping holes in it. I had the choice of either proceeding and committing to the impending train wreck (see point two), or calling a full stop just in time and re-examining in detail the entire plot of the arc, and volume one of IFF by extension, to make sure that everything was sensible before I proceeded.

This process turned out to be sorely needed.

Writing something really complicated turns out to be kind of difficult

Who’d have thought, right?

Trying to write characters who are not holding idiot balls is very difficult. Trying to write several of them attempting to one-up each other, and having your protagonists survive the process, is even more difficult. I try not to fall prey to tropes like Why Don’t You Just Shoot Him – if they can, and ought to, then they do. If there is something that a character couldn’t possibly miss, then they shouldn’t. And if any of this breaks the plot, well, then I need to change the plot, or make up a consistent explanation.

As quickly became apparent to me once I started writing, the fact that a character is holding an idiot ball is not always immediately obvious in a plot summary written for your own benefit. It is not until you start trying to explain the plot to somebody else, or until you are faced with actually writing a scene with the character who is holding the ball, that you start asking yourself, “Actually, why doesn’t the character just do this instead? Why is this character even in this situation in the first place?”

And then you have to make them drop the ball, and everything changes, and you start over again.

I am starting this blog now, because I think that I am getting to a point where my plans are solid enough that I can finally write this plot without outright feeling ashamed of myself, or thinking that my story is populated with idiots. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s at least good enough. Additionally, I’ve been quiet for too long, and I don’t want people to think that the story is dead when this is far from true.

So what is The Forge?

The Forge is my pretentiously named blog about In Fire Forged. It’s going to contain, amongst other things, updates on the progress of the story and any other musings that I think my readers might be interested in. Sometimes, I might be faced with an issue regarding some obscure piece of lore, and, supposing the readers are into it and no spoilers abound, a discussion might take place.

Also, did you like those intro and exit info blurbs in the story? Then you’re going to love this blog, as I will be writing longer lore posts in that style when my muse does not have the stomach for writing on the story itself. This shall a) hopefully prove to be interesting reading if you’re into world-building and b) force me to truly flesh out many different parts of the lore, since writing notes for yourself in bullet point lists is one thing, and trying to write for another’s comprehension is another thing entirely, and finally, c) provide a handy lore reference for myself and others to refer to.

So far, this is the list of topics that I intend to explore in lore posts, in the rough order in which they should appear:

1. Chakra sciences (or, what is known about chakra generally)
2. Hand seals and their workings
3. Written seals and their workings
4. The core three techniques (body flicker, substitution and transformation)
5. History of bijuu seals and jinchuuriki
6. How exactly Sakura’s explosive scrolls work
7. History of the Land of Fire
8. Fire Court politics
9. The Royal Guard
10. History of Konoha
11. Konoha politics and administration
12. Konoha’s military organization, divisions and force distribution
13. The Chuunin Exams
14. Ninja psychology and culture
15. Ninja recruitment and training in modern society

If you’ve any preferences or suggestions regarding this, please leave a comment with your thoughts and desires so I can take them into account. This is still all very up in the air, though all of these are topics which I plan on eventually writing about.

What am I doing now?

I am currently writing the whole next arc of the story, to be posted once it is finished and consistent. This means I can write without worrying about the chapters being perfect straight away, since I can always go back and revisit the first drafts later before I post the entire arc. This is the best compromise I can think of, between writing the entire story and then posting it, and posting it chapter by chapter. I am counting on the arc spanning around 50.000-80.000 words, and I predict (though I do not state with certainty, as I have learned my lesson) that it will be finished some time in the summer. I appear to have set a much faster pace for myself lately, with seven thousand words written on chapter nine in the last four days, but I don’t know for how long I can keep this up.

I am also touching up the original chapters of IFF, to make sure everything fits with the new, slightly revamped plot and lore. The necessary changes are mostly minor and cosmetic. For example, some early mentions of too advanced technology need to be culled, and more mentions of the world’s current tech level should be inserted here and there. If possible, there are a few larger things I would like to change, such as the whole beginning scene of the first chapter, but writing more on the new arc takes priority. These changes will go into the story as soon as they’re done, before the next arc is finished.

Commitments for the future

I plan on updating this blog twice a month with progress reports, every second sunday – however brief they must be. Any other content shall not be on a schedule, though I hope I will be posting more often than that.

If you’ve any requests or suggestions for different kinds of content you’d like to see, pages that should exist, or lore topics that are not on the list above that you’d want me to expound upon, then please comment to let me know. If you want to be updated whenever something new happens, remember to subscribe.

That’s it for now!