I have just finished the first draft of Shadow of the Dragon King, almost a year and a half after posting the first chapter. There are six chapters (some 40,000 words) to go from the current update so it'll be a while before the readers see everything. It won't even be the same text because whoa, hella editing to do, but still I have the base of the thing. Dragon King could end up a lot of bad things, but at the very least it will never be an incomplete story, not according to the current outline anyway.

Since the project will change and grow from this point (hopefully smaller, not bigger), and because I am stupidly excited about the whole thing, here is the current snapshot of Scrivener's Project Statistics. Disregard the top part, I have no idea what that 3,619-word section is and I'm going crazy trying to figure it out. The Selection below it, current selection being the top-level Project folder, is closer to the actual word count. Pages (paperback) is at 350 words a page, which is the default option.



Still left: One or two possible interludes and two or three side stories to write, beta-reading to be gotten, editorial decisions to make like what scenes to add or delete or how to arrange them (in one chapter the scenes are more or less in random order right now), lower-level editing and, when all is done, chapters to print out and check one last time before posting.

Since there's still so much work left on the story I'm happy I got the first draft out of the way before the end of summer, since the upcoming semester is going to be hectic. I've met my writing goals for the summer, and can move onto... uh... the giant tottering pile that is everything else in my life. *panics and runs away*

My badass beta-reader Amy Raine (though, internet nomenclature aside, she's my editor) amyraine and I have been hashing out the same three chapters of Shadow of the Dragon King for months now. She identified huge pacing and focus issues with the chapters, and thanks to her criticism and suggestions I've come up with a solution that is light-years better than my original. It did mean throwing away some 21,000 words, but it is so worth it. The trashed chapters were fun to write, and I've learned to get my outline critiqued ahead of writing it all out.

( The whole process got me thinking about the reasons I write. )

This is the link and text I've used in my update Shadow of the Dragon King, Interlude 3: Dreams of Fire. Rather than try to disguise a long link on fanfiction.net, I'm simply posting it here.

The passage I've used is Sign Fifty-One: Shock, excerpted from the Hexagram part of the reading. In full it reads:

The hexagram Chên represents the eldest son, who seizes rule with energy and power. A yang line develops below two yin lines and presses upward forcibly. This movement is so violent that it arouses terror. It is symbolized by thunder, which bursts forth from the earth and by its shock causes fear and trembling.

I don't know much about the I Ching (or Yi Jing), just that it's a means of divination with a number of different combinations and meanings. It's supposed to be all philosophical and so on. I thought the omen sounded appropriate for the tone and content of the chapter.

In a long-ago fanfiction.net forum post about why people write fanfic, I remember my answer being "because I can't not." For as long as I can remember I have been trying not to be a writer and my family has been trying to keep me from that path. Fanfiction was a compromise where I could keep fiction writing as a strictly non-monetized hobby. Besides, when I really like a particular story I get obsessively into it. I watched Crimson Tide 17 times, for instance, and when I like a game a lot I tend to clear it twice or more, usually four times or more. Fandom participation was a good way to work out that kind of obsession.

( Shadow of the Dragon King was also born of such obsession. )

I am making a number of small changes to the Shadow of the Dragon King as I write the last chapter of Part 1. I thought I'd document the changes as a reminder to myself and to give information to others.

1. What Was the Place Called Again?

For some reason the island where all the action begins was Zhoran in the first chapter, then became Azhoran the very next and stayed that way. It is now Azhoran in all instances, or at least it had better be.

2. And Where Was It?

Originally I called (A)Zhoran the island at the southern end of the Fire Nation archipelago, mostly because I wanted to put it in some out-of-the-way corner. Then I came up with the later travel sequence with Zuko trying to get home, and decided to place it to the east instead in the chain of islands between the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom. (See also map.) I never really changed the location in the first chapter, though, so I went back and did that.

3. Wait, When Is This Taking Place? 

At first, in Chapter 2, I set the time at early summer, then decided to change that to late spring. That came from Zuko and Sa Ye's conversation about the date she expected to have the baby. Not a terribly important point, but I just wanted the consistency.

4. How Old Are You, Dear?

From that same conversation with Sa Ye, I set Mai's age as one above Zuko (due to lines from the show that indicated she was 17 when Zuko was 16), but it seems the official Nickelodeon character bio places her at one younger. So I changed that.

5. The Hyphens Have It

As long as I was re-uploading the chapters as .odt files, I fixed the hyphens as well. You know that annoying thing fanfiction.net does with the hyphens, shortening double hyphens into a measly single hyphen? Turns out that doesn't happen when you upload an .odt file, and a decent word processor will consolidate the double hyphens into a nice-looking long hyphen--which will show up as such on the site.

Having made the transition from coding HTML by hand in a text editor, I highly recommend writing stories on OpenOffice or LibreOffice and saving the documents as .odt for upload. Word processing features like spellcheck are pretty convenient (you can simply right-click and add the words the dictionary doesn't recognize by default), and especially if you exchange files with a beta-reader for comment, features like notes in the margins, edit tracking and highlighting are all but indispensable.

6. A Question of Organization

Another slight change I made was to group the first ten chapters into Part 1: Dragon Dreams and the next ten chapters (or so) into Part 2: Shadows. It's possible that the last few chapters of Part 2 will be split off into a third part, Flames or something, but I'm not decided on that yet. The whole thing is still one story, but the first and second half of the story have different ambience and happen in different places, hence the separation into parts. I guess I could make Part 2 into a sequel, but then I'd have to come up with a new title and that's a pain. Besides, both parts were always planned to fall under that one title, even in the early stages of the outline when the second part was like two chapters long.


On a side note, when I downloaded the full story for editing it turned out to be 130 pages by word processor. Since this was between the dates of March 13 and July 9, that comes down to 130 pages in four months. I was ridiculously obsessed with the story for the first few chapters, and poured out more words during those weeks than is sustainable or desirable. That pretty inevitably resulted in temporary burnout, a couple of months during which I couldn't bring myself to touch the story. Now that I'm back on it, hopefully I can take it to the finish line at a steady pace.