Progress Report (02/09): Settling In

I bring you a more sizeable update than usual this month. Sadly, I missed the update in early august due to being busy with moving, and I figured I would do a solid update this month instead to compensate.

I’d intended to accompany this update with a lore post, but said lore post is seeing some major rewriting and adjustments right now due to feedback from a collaborator (mentioned later in this post). Ideally, I will be releasing it sometime this next week. I’ll have time to work on it in the weekend, and I might be able to snatch some time during the working days of next week. At the very latest, I should be able to finish it by next weekend.

Things to report

In terms of progress on the story itself, not much has happened on the writing front, but many things have happened on the development front. A whole slew of issues have been resolved:

• I now have a fairly comprehensive overview over how exactly it is that chakra works, its characteristics, all of its states and variations, and how it is used to perform techniques and create written seals.

  With this system, I could now take most, if not all, techniques from canon and describe roughly how they work, which seals are necessary and how they are performed by the user. Or I could gauge how one might achieve certain effects with written seals. It also conveniently explains why inventing techniques is far more difficult than performing them, and why certain kinds of things are doable with hand seals but not with written seals, and the reverse.

  In short, I finally have something to base all of the Naruto brand “magic” on instead of just hand-waving everything with “magibabble” and bullshit-on-demand, as is the general trend. While I will generally not be going into much detail, even privately for myself, I will now be able to constrain myself to operating within the rules of this system, so that I know that I can always generate detailed post hoc explanations if necessary. As a result, the story will see an overall increase in consistency even without belabouring the reader with any technical explanations of anything.

  It should be noted that I have had an explanation for the existence of chakra (and all other ‘supernatural’ elements) for some time now; this is different. This is not the interior of the chakra black box, this is what the exterior looks like to the people who use it. It will be the subject of a later lore post, in the guise of excerpts from an academy textbook.

• There’s been a total rework of the Sharingan, its exact nature, and how exactly its various abilities work — it is now seriously cool, while still remaining at its core fundamentally the same.

  Like many other things in IFF, the low-level nature of the Sharingan has been tweaked so that it logically results in high-level behaviour that is very similar-feeling to canon, but which is ultimately far more grounded in the ‘reality’ of the world, so to speak.

  For example, I now know exactly how one might go about doing things like implanting Sharingan abilities with highly complex, hidden triggers into other Sharingan users, something which I’d previously had great trouble explaining. Also, Amaterasu will finally be given its due justice.

• Events that must happen in volumes two and three have always had some prerequisites, both in terms of foreshadowing and elements that must have been introduced in the story before in order for said events to be able to occur.

  Before, I was not sure exactly how I would meet some of these prerequisites, but I now have a much better idea of how I am going to foreshadow certain things, and the exact nature and timing of the elements that must be introduced.

  Sadly, explaining more about this would be rather spoilerish and would give some heavy hints towards what kinds of events we’re going to be seeing in the story’s endgame, so I’ll refrain from going into any detail.

Introducing: the mysterious collaborator

All of the world building and story work on IFF has not been done solely by myself. Much of what is described above is a result of collaboration with another person, who is also working on a Naruto story of their own. This collaborator shall remain unnamed for now as I’ve not asked their permission to identify them, but they will likely feature heavily in the future of IFF. This person has been instrumental in developing many parts of IFF, pointing out flaws and offering possible corrections, and has introduced countless ideas and concepts into the work, like the meat of the Sharingan rework. The effect they’ve had cannot be understated.

And of course, some of my time has also been occupied with performing the same role for them. In the course of our countless long, rambling discussions, I’ve been the cause of some similarly major changes (and improvements, I think) to their story. So even when it looks like IFF is standing still, I’ve still been productive in other ways.

In the future

I moved at the very end of July, and I spent most of August settling in and working. Said settling in is still not quite done with, but every day becomes more routine. While I still make no guarantees regarding IFF, which is difficult to get started with, I can only say that I am writing more and more every day. Whenever I get the chance and feel the inclination, I sit down and write something. Anything at all. I’m doing more and more of this every day, and I can only see it as promising. My muse is still weak, so I pounce upon any idea that strikes my fancy even remotely, but the muse is still returning, slowly but surely.

Many times now, while writing, I will feel a vague urge to open up the ever-present Scrivener tab in my taskbar and begin getting to grips with IFF again. I feel more and more like returning to it, every day, and I feel more and more like I’m beginning to have the energy to do it as well.

So that bodes well!

The next progress update shall be sometime in early October (I have learned that I cannot keep precise deadlines, so I will state something fuzzier instead). But before that, I shall see you sometime soon for the lore post on the modern ninja in the elemental nations, and the history of ninja in general, featuring excerpts from The History of Ninja, 3rd Edition, by Takumi Kichirou, a well-known historian from the Land of Fire.

Until next time!

Progress Report (03/05): Reasons & Ruminations

Hello everyone. Today, a slightly different kind of update.

First, however, I’ll quickly start with the regulars. IFF has seen perhaps 100 words or so written, so not much. I poked at the next lore post, and wrote about 500 words there. This month was busier and more stressful than I anticipated, so work on IFF suffered correspondingly.

I have a deadline this week, which has been pressing me for almost a month, now. However, past this deadline lies at least a week or two of planned company-wide chill time. Still work, but not concentrated crunch work. Rather, work on whatever pleases and interests me, and keeping more regular hours. I hope this will prove a boon for writing, as I can get away with being more distracted at work.

With that out of the way, let’s get on with it…

The Unholy Trinity

I think I am finally beginning to really grasp the reasons why I’ve been at a standstill for so long. I’ve talked about some of this before, of course, and mentioned certain experiments trying to counter it. But now I’m laying it out: this appears to just be how it is, at least for now.

I see a trinity of reasons that interweave to block my efforts: 1) quality, 2) complexity and 3) concentration.

Quality

After a few attempts at writing more IFF this month, I decided to try to kickstart my writing process back up by just writing literally whatever came to mind. So I have, this past month, written the first chapters of two self-inserts, three Worm fanfics, one Harry Potter fanfic and two original stories. All told, this is easily about 15-20k words (at a guess, I haven’t counted), written over half a dozen late evenings.

So, what gives? Why isn’t that 15-20k of IFF right there? Well, these stories were all objectively horrible. I just hold IFF to a higher standard than I do these stories, which means that writing it is much harder and requires me to get a groove going of far higher quality than usual. It’s very difficult to think “well, I’ll fix this in revisions”. It’s a mindset I haven’t managed to get down yet.

Complexity

The next arc is kind of complicated. I’ve tried to trim it down a lot, and even wholly removed one party’s involvement that I decided I could do without, just to simplify things.  I’ve spent hours and hours with a beta, going over everyone’s motivations and actions, trying to ensure it all made sense and that nobody was holding an idiot ball.

But even so, it’s still not exactly easy to credibly pull it off. I even fear it might seem rather straightforward. It’s not that bad, on the outside. At least, I suspect it won’t appear as such, reading it. I might be overthinking the behind-the-scenes happenings, of which there are a lot, but nevertheless, here we are.

So, in short, if past-me walked up to present-me and suggested the current plot, present-me would punch past-me in the face and go, “You’re trying to be too clever! Haven’t you ever heard of KISS?!”

I do, however, still think that writing this would be completely awesome, so I am still totally going to do it.

Concentration

Back when I was really pumping out words, I was doing nothing but that. The first draft ~50k words of IFF were written pretty fast, and the ~130k version before that went even faster. I constantly walked around thinking about the story and how it would go and how everything fit together. I can’t do that right now; my job just takes up too much mental space. I am out of working memory.

It remains challenging to keep the entire plot in my head while writing, especially since practically every time I try to write, I have spent the hours immediately prior preparing pitches, or mulling over marketing material, or worrying about funding, or trying to hold an entire program architecture in my head while I solve a weird bug, or trying to fathom the oddities of the user’s mind. It’s a difficult context switch to make. At least, I’ve yet to master it.

Essentially, I need an entire day or two of peace, doing nothing but ruminating on IFF and going over old material, before I can actually start writing properly. I know this because the few times I’ve done it, the words began flowing much more easily and previously impossible-to-write scenes were vanquished before my keyboard like so much dust.

The problem is that I very rarely get this time. A weekend is not quite enough, and I have not had a consecutive three days truly off more than once or twice going on almost a year, now.

Prophesying the Future, or Some Such

So, you ask me: “What does all this mean? I simply sense more authorial excuses and whining about being busy.” And, well, yes, in a way you’re quite right. Trying to predict solid IFF progress is trying to predict to predict my future work environment.

But it turns out that even I don’t have a clue where my future work environment is going right now. Trying to start a company is busy work. Trying to start a game company is very busy work, and completely insane on top of that. Every time I talk about my much-desired vacation year, my partners wince. And so it is put off by another month. Or made implicitly conditional on whether funding for this or that project is forthcoming or not.

And that sort of thing is rather difficult to predict.

So I suppose, in the end I can only shrug and say, “Well… I’ll keep writing when I can, because I still want to. And I’ll keep updating the blog, because that’ll keep me on my toes and assure whoever cares that I am not gone.”

That’s really all I can promise for now. And really, that’s essentially what I’ve been doing so far anyway, so the status quo hasn’t changed. This is simply me informing you of the reasons behind the status quo.

And there they are.

And so, whoever you are, reading this, I’ll see you next month, for your regularly scheduled IFF update.

Progress Report (05/03): Work, work…

This update is a bit delayed, because I’ve been rather preoccupied preparing for my business trip to San Francisco this month; I’m attending Game Connection, an event held in tandem with GDC (Game Developer’s Conference). A lot of planning and up-front work is involved, and we’re crunching hard to get our game presentable in time. It looks like we’re going to make it, but it is uncomfortably close.

In short, my workload has picked up again this past month and is spiking this week and last week, but is set to calm back down in a couple of weeks for a much longer period of time – as far as I currently know, at least.

That said, I did have a less busy period in the beginning of this month, and the story saw some progress in that time: ~2.5 k words were written in sessions spread out over a week. The words I write are still rather loosely distributed over the next arc (and a few hundred words fell beyond even that), rather than concentrated on the next chapters specifically, but progress is progress. Alas, the lore post saw no work at all.

As I was still a little busy and preoccupied with work even back then, I see this as a positive indicator for the future, though it’s still nowhere near the speed of writing that I would like to maintain when all this fuss calms down, as it is indeed beginning to.

For now, though, the hiatus remains in effect. The light of day is slowly eating away the dark night of hiatus, the horizon brightening as the sun creeps closer – but it’s not quite dawn yet.

Until next time.

Progress Report (02/12): Crazy Times

So, I missed the update last month. I missed this one by a day as well. Work in the two weeks surrounding the beginning of November was particularly insane, and eventually I’d missed the update so badly that I decided to just skip it entirely. As you might surmise, when I can’t even write updates properly, there’s hardly any work being done on the story. A little bit has happened, but it amounts to little more than a few hundred words and some notes, written one night when I couldn’t sleep right and had nothing better to do.

The reason is that I’m currently busier than ever. I keep saying that, and yet it’s still true. It’s just been ramping up steadily for a while. I already have trouble enough keeping up with work, so frankly, I’m in no state to be making any promises about how much I can work on the story for the next few months. The lore post that I was working on (“On ninja in modern society”) hasn’t been touched at all this past month.

The post, for those curious, includes one of the topics suggested in the comments two months back: ninja economics. In fact, it’s quite a bit broader than that. It covers the history and origin of ninja and their techniques, the rise of the ninja villages, the general internal organization of ninja villages (it differs a lot in specifics from village to village), general ninja village economics and culture, and finally various facts about the kinds of lives ninja lead and the roles they serve in society, both culturally, politically and militarily. The main focus is on Konoha as it’s the focus of the story and also the first, biggest and strongest ninja village around, but there’s also a bunch of information about the other villages since they’re each unique in their own interesting ways. It’s a big chunk of info, but it all fits in together so I’d rather not split off the currently finished parts and publish those separately.

I’ll work on it when I get the energy and time to do so, but since my plans of one lore post a month have already slipped so far, I won’t make any promises that I can’t keep. It will get there when it gets there. Right now I won’t commit to more than an update around this length every month.

That’s all for now. See you in the new year!

Progress report (14/06): And so the holidays begin

A brief update this time, hopefully with more to follow during the next two weeks.

So how are we doing?

As anticipated, nothing new has been written since last week and the story’s word count remains unchanged. I had a revelation regarding a certain plot which will occur later, but which I can start foreshadowing soon. This has been put into the notes for the relevant chapters. Other than that, truth to tell, I’ve been busy working on my exam project, which I turned in this Friday, so while I have written a lot, it was alas exclusively academical in nature.

The next two weeks…

…are looking up!

I do have a bunch of stuff I need to see to, but none of this stuff particularly requires my full attention or focus, apart from a single day (next Wednesday) where I have to defend my exam project. After that, I start getting lots of free time on my hands.

I am really hoping that I can finally get a lore post out (if not the chakra one, some other one which is less complicated), and I also think I can start getting a fair bit of writing done. I don’t know if I’ll really hit my writing stride in the next two weeks (if I do, anticipate a large word count increase), but I should certainly be able to write a whole lot more than I’ve had for the many past weeks. I’m frankly aching to get started.

Until next time!

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!