Author: Wildbow

End – Beyond the Pale | Pale

Where to even begin?

Pale ended up being my longest work, which really wasn’t the plan when I started.  When I started writing Worm I wrapped up and felt like I had another fifty years of writing in me.  Then I finished Pact and that took a year and a half and I kind of mentally revised that number downward.  I could see where I’d get tired, maybe I’d write for thirty to forty years.  Then Twig came and I changed that to ten to twenty before I figured I’d need to stop or consider other options.

I loved writing those works, I love writing in general, don’t get me wrong.  But that end date kept closing in by lurches as I figured out the parts I don’t enjoy.  The worst parts of having a community, or, say, being self employed and having a new curveball thrown my way in terms of taxes every year for five years running.  There’s also some lifestyle stuff and psychological stuff that happens when you put so much of yourself and your time into a project.  I’ll talk a bit more about that below.

I wasn’t even done Ward when I hit my zero.  I hit the point where I wanted to quit altogether, I was frustrated.  Only the support of a select few very kind people and my personal feelings about leaving a project unfinished got me to the end.  I talk about some of that stuff in my retrospective, but even in writing that retrospective, I had people insisting they should double check what I was saying to make sure I wasn’t offending segments of the parahumans sub-community, with various voices angry, insistent, and persistently negative coming from all directions.  It had been years of dealing with a large number of people who’d wanted Ward to be something it wasn’t and I think a lot of that came through.  I was pretty miserable.

When I started Pale it was at the point of being overly cautious, not wanting to throw myself into a project that could be another few years of that misery and negativity.  I told myself I could do something smaller because I thought if it went badly, it would be easier to wrap up and move on.

Except I enjoyed it.  So I kept going.  For the first time ever, the number went up.  It had to, but it went up a lot.

In my interview for All Pact Up, I talked about how my first love with writing was in this genre.  It was a crappy emo-ish emotion dump where I was overly mean to my characters, and the fact I called my work ‘City of Woe’ was really all that needs to be said.  That was my first fiction that wasn’t for school, and a big part of what bummed me out about Pact was that I took a shot at my first love, like being in your twenties and dating the great girl you had a crush on in grade six, and I wasn’t in a position to put my best foot forward.  I had some stuff like a mom in and out of the ER, I was trying to move, I was trying to pivot to writing full time.  Just a lot.  Some will say I did okay, and a handful may say it’s their favorite work, but it wasn’t what I wanted it to be.

Pale was more of a naked, uninhibited shot at trying that again, when life wasn’t so much in the way and it was much more of what I wanted it to be.  Is it perfect?  No.  Some of that’s because a serial work will have its ups and downs as the writer does, some of it was miscalculation, like introducing a threat and then realizing later that the threat wasn’t a good fit for that moment in the story (Witch Hunters, Wild Hunt).  But where I think I wrote each other work and wrapped up feeling like I’d been ready to be done with that work three months to a year prior, I didn’t feel that with Pale.  Where I was keenly aware of each work’s flaws right off the backs of them, I felt more able to be focused on what worked and was good in Pale.

So that’s where I’m at.

Going back to the psychology thing I mentioned earlier, I think one thing that I keep running into is that I’m not very good at finding room to think stuff out while on the move, and in writing a serial, I’m constantly moving.  I’m not sure if that makes a lot of sense, put that way, but in general terms… if I’m not putting something into the story somehow, or digesting it by putting it in and having the audience feedback help me ruminate on it, then I’m not very good at sorting it out in my head.

Which means that a lot of the time, the only times I’m stepping back and taking a look at what I’m doing, big picture, or what the implications of some moves might be, it’s when I’m writing retrospectives.  The rest of the time, my mind’s caught up on story stuff.

With that in mind, I want to spend a bit more time on the retrospective part.  I want to digest out loud, think, and put stuff out there for you readers to know why I’m doing what I’m doing, what’s going on, etc.  So this post is less a “all my thoughts about the story” and more a heads up:

I’ll be writing some individual posts (essays?) over the next few weeks.  Of those essays, loose topics include, subject to change:

- The slowdown in my writing, extra materials falling off when they did, writing process, writing mentality, and ‘burnout’, for lack of a better word.

- Characterization, how I approached starting and making Pale and setting elements.

- Personal stuff- and how the personal ties into the writing.

They’ll be posted here on this site and mirrored on Pig’s Pen.

If anyone has a topic they’d like covered, do ask.  I’m open to writing a fourth and if a suggestion sparks thoughts, I could do that.

In ten days, on October 20th through to the 22nd (keep time zones in mind), the podcasters at Doof Media who have been following and discussing Pale from the start are running a 24+ hour livestream with lots of Pale stuff going on.  It’s All Pact Up 2 (APU2), information at that link, there may be changes or updates to that information as they add to it.

Various community members including Doof’s Malia and Jenny will likely be making cameos.

As part of APU2, I’ll be doing an interview, and for those who had thoughts piqued by 100 Years Lost (100YL), I’ll be doing a bit of a themed contest for Elliot and Reuben, where they can put Finder/Path Runner skills to the test to get hints and information about 100YL.  If enough money is raised for the charity, then there will be a similar segment where the audience can participate, using knowledge Elliot and Reuben picked up to carry on, done with submitted answers and polls.  Information on Word of Author already shared on the subject and the loose format for the challenge/contest can be found here.

That may mean there may be awkward timing around the essays, just to warn, while I’m doing those things.

Past that, when the essays are done, I’ll be taking a break.  I’ll be using the time to try to get things in order, in hopes that when I resume I can get back to a two chapter a week schedule, to work out some story ideas for future projects, and as stated above, it’s hard to put my mind toward a task when I’m focused on the writing, and I’m looking at moving to another province.  I’m leaning into four months, aiming to restart in March, but my patreon page, discord, and reddit are probably the best places to get updates.

I’ve got a sci-fi story in mind that I think I’ve finally figured out how to approach, a smattering of actual shorter story ideas, some breaking from my usual patterns in big ways, and I’ve already gotten overexcited and written a bunch of chapters for Plex, a future Pactverse anthology that I will get to after I write some other stuff first.

I don’t know if my income stream will flatline as a result, I’m honestly a bit spooked, but if I don’t take a break now, I won’t ever.

Thank you for reading.