User blog:Lordkenyon/Blog Post Shittery

The Upcoming Changes 

Up until recently, I have been trying to maintain a weekly release schedule for Silver Talon. While that approach has its advantages, I was often finding myself without a lot of time to complete a new part. At first that worked out fairly well, but I kept slipping. Part four was a sort of breaking point for me. It provided very little in the way of story advancement, lacked content, and was poorly written. I felt that it was not ready to be released, but at the same time felt obligated to release it due to my planned release schedule. Thus I ended up pushing utter crap out, in order to fulfill an arbitrary deadline. After thinking on this problem, as well as receiving some advice from Shille, I am altering the release schedule. Rather than a weekly release, I will aim more for a release every two weeks, but will for the most part be operating on a whenever-the-hell-I-feel-like-it schedule. Flashback portions will remain around the same length they are now, as I feel the pacing and content level for them is about where I want it. However, current event portions will be much longer. As things are currently, I feel that the flashbacks are more interesting than what’s happening with Calen, Breldon, and Uvaryl. Hopefully with the change in length their story can get started sooner, and at the very least things will even out.

What the hell is going on, anyways?

There are two parallel stories in Silver Talon. There is the current story, which centers around Breldon, Uvaryl, and other characters who have yet to be introduced. Then there is the “past” story, which is told via flashbacks and centers around Vorth, Vivyrtha, Anrielle, Elianwen, and the rest. Flashbacks tend to have words or phrasing that relate to memory and/or time in their titles, while titles of the current story generally identify whose PoV the part will be from(for now). If anything is unclear about the stories and how they interact, feel free to ask, I’d be happy to answer.

Ramble

It's a blog post, I feel a bit of rambling is needed. Wouldn’t be the same otherwise. Anrielle’s part is the first time I’ve written a PoV for a female character, and really the first time I’d written a female character who wasn’t a kind of abstract background lore piece or something. I was fairly nervous about writing her. I didn’t want reading her to feel like reading one of my male characters, but I didn’t want to differentiate her by making her overly stereotypically feminine or having her be hyperbolically emotional or some shit. I decided to just go with it, and have no idea if she feels like a caricature or a clone of another character or her own genuine character. And then of course, after that I went and wrote for Vivyrtha. I had initially never planned to write from her PoV. Not only is she blind, which is already intimidating enough to write properly, she is also a female character. I really liked where she ended up going, and think I captured perfectly who she is. Anrielle is a little more mortal though, and is meant to be a fairly relatable character. She is scary as fuck to write for, one sentence could really trivialize her. Writing for Breldon is also tricky. He is naive, yet knows the world he lives in is kind of fucked up. He is a mercenary, yet insists on being called an adventurer. Maintaining who he is as a person while also demonstrating that he is a lot more seasoned is a delicate balance. And these are just my worries for my characters. Trying to keep the pace of the story interesting, while still saying everything I want to is a pain in the ass. Its really starting to get to the point where Breldon and Uvaryl need to get their show started and stop dawdling around in the inn, but there is still things to do before that. Writing Silver Talon is on one hand the funnest thing I’ve done with writing in a long time, and on the other it is the most nightmarishly stressful thing I’ve done with writing in a while.