A Return to Neverland

SHE'S BACK!

THAT’S RIGHT.

Normally at this point I would begin a long spiel telling you how I never meant to let The Neverland drop but ~things got in the way~, and then explain in great detail what those things were and how crazy it all was, and then what inspired me to pick the project back up and begin working on it again. But that’s pretty boring for you to read and it’s not that interesting for me to write either.

So to cut a very long story short, a few weeks ago I started working on The Neverland again, starting with some notes which I wrote on my iPod, which snowballed into plot development, character ideas and filling in some holes which have been plaguing me ever since I first attempted this story for NaNoWriMo over three years ago. (God, it’s been a while).

Here’s a brief summary of what I’ve achieved since I picked The Neverland back up and dusted it off:

• I’ve sorted out what happens in the climax of the story, which has been my biggest persistent issue with the plot. It employs some very handwave-y computer science and I’ll probably improve on it as I come to write that part, but I’m happy with the basic idea and it ticks all the boxes of what I wanted to do with the plot climax.
• I’ve written up a detailed plot outline to replace all the scattered and conflicting notes that formed my outline before. (Going back over all my notes with fresh eyes also made me realise what a mess they all were – and how many little details had got lost or been changed over the course of writing the story).
• I’ve also managed to tighten up the pacing, particularly towards the end. (Leave it to me to mess that up the minute I start writing, though).
• I’ve added to my Character Arc notes for Peter and Wendy and also written a character arc for Tinkerbell and part of one for Tiger Lily. I still have a lot of work to do in terms of developing the story’s side characters.
• I’ve drafted part of the “Saving Tinkerbell” scene, one of the climactic scenes of the novel. It’s only a few hundred words so far, but it’s good to get my ideas down for me to come back to and expand on later.
• I’ve broken down the plot into a series of conflicts, which has really helped me to sort out the key elements driving each stage of the narrative and not lose sight of where the story is meant to be going at each point.

Lots of progress! In general I think that coming back to the story after a break has helped improve my focus, and I’ve been able to determine which bits are just cluttering up the narrative and get rid of them to tell a cleaner and more coherent story. That’s one of the things that is hard to do during NaNo; the goal is just GET TO 50,000 BY WHATEVER MEANS, so you throw everything and the kitchen sink at your story to pad it out, but not much of that makes for a good end result.

With that said, there are some things I’ve lost in the two and a half year break from The Neverland. I remember very little of my extensive research into BBS culture and late 80s internet and technology, which is going to take a lot of picking back up and revisiting. Like I said in the bullet points above, a lot of little details I’d planned on including when I started writing the story got lost or didn’t fit as it developed, but it makes me wonder what kind of a story it would have been if I’d stuck to my original plans for some parts. I read back over some of my old blog posts before writing this, including ‘A Blast From the Past’, in which I talked about how re-reading the novel Peter and Wendy had given me a new perspective on the original canon. Towards the end of the post, I wrote:

After re-reading Peter and Wendy, I think I have a better idea of how the middle of the story is going to go. I was always pretty sure about how it would start and end, but the middle has always been sort of up for grabs.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what I was referring to or whether the idea I’d had for the middle of the story has survived in the current version. Hopefully it has!

So, what next for The Neverland? I’m happy with the level of plot planning I’ve reached over the past few weeks. There’s still a lot I can do in terms of character development and research, but I think it’s time to take the plunge and start (re)drafting the story; I can figure out the rest of it as I go along. I have a specific plan for writing the story which I will reveal in another post in a few days’ time. Also, look out the day after tomorrow for my first Recommendation Tuesday of the revived blog!

On Writing Fluff

Wow, it’s been a while. I know, I’ve really dropped the ball on the regular updates to this blog so far – in fact, on having updates at all – and my own tendency to constantly switch my focus between different projects has thrown a spanner into the works, as I knew it would before too long. But I also have another theory as to why I’ve been reluctant to update this blog: I’ve been setting the bar for myself too high. Lately, at least, I’ve been trying to make each post absolutely meaningful and worthwhile on all levels – either saying something insightful about writing; containing a lot of info about, or a new instalment of, the story; or doing a kind of review-slash-informational-piece about someone else’s work for Recommendation Tuesday. And I figured it was better to update the blog less frequently with more meaningful posts than to scrape the bottom of the barrel for interesting content.

To Serialise Or Not To Serialise?

Or, ‘On Making Rough Drafts Public’.

Originally I was going to have this Friday’s post be about The Evolution of Setting, but I couldn’t remember half the points I wanted to cover, and I decided that I should probably save most of these backward-looking posts for when I’ve actually, y’know, finished a first draft or something similarly outlandish. So instead I’m going to talk about an important consideration for any writer who wants to build up a following online: namely, how polished does my writing have to be before I post it on the Internet?

Recommendation Tuesday: 'Digital: A Love Story'

It’s Tuesday! I’m posting something! Yaaaaay!

For our first ‘Recommendation Tuesday’ I wanted to flag up a Visual Novel that’s been a huge influence on this story and especially my choice of setting. If you haven’t heard of a VN before, here’s a quick primer. I always describe it as a cross between a game and a “choose your own adventure” story – except that having said that, this VN is so much more than that. It’s called ‘Digital: A Love Story’ and you can download it for free from Lemma Soft Forums right here.

Excerpt 2 | Durham University Computer Lab | 10:09 PM

Author’s Notes: This is the same excerpt of the story that was on my NaNo profile, but there’s extra context at the beginning and end so that there’s new stuff to read even for those of you who’ve already read it. I chose it for my profile excerpt because I think it’s a good representative of the story content, plot and style. There’s a mixture of narrative and online chat (and I admit, I’m not sure how accurate my descriptions of BBS chat are, but I based them on the information I have available), a bit of late 80s technology, some familiar names from the Peter Pan canon, an interesting revelation or two and hints towards the larger plot. I wanted to give people a flavour of how the characters will be depicted in this universe, and give them a sense of the setting. By and large, I used the same criteria when I picked the first excerpt to post in this blog.

On with the show!

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The building was dark, but not deserted at this time of night. There were a couple of guys sitting at terminals who looked up and nodded as Wendy came in, then went back to what they’d been doing. Wendy sat down and dialled in the number for the CompuChat BBS, which by now she knew off by heart. It felt like forever since she’d last accessed the board at home.

By now, Wendy’s reply to the secretive user ‘Tiger Lily’ had disappeared off the board, and in the week or so since she’d made the post, nothing had come of it. Wendy was relieved and disappointed in equal measure. Her search for ‘The Neverland’ had already hit a dead end and she wasn’t sure where to go from here.

At almost the exact second she thought this, her screen split in two and a chat opened up on the right-hand half of the screen, headed by the words,

TIGER LILY WANTS TO CHAT

The Evolution of Characters: Peter Pan

When writing an alternate-universe fanfiction, I tend to make sure that the characterisation is as consistent with the original book/series/film as can be, and the same goes for crossovers. If you’re going to change the setting, the time period and the what have you, then all that’s left for the readers to recognise are the characters; without those it wouldn’t even feel like a fanfic, just your own work with some familiar names and faces slapped on. Plus, aren’t the characters what we love the most about any given fandom? I know I do.

With that said, this has to be the AU fanfic where I’ve changed the most about the characters. Some of it is necessary to the setting – this is (almost) the real world, so Peter can’t fly and he does grow up, extremely reluctantly and resentfully. Other stuff, I’ve changed just because it seemed like a cool idea at the time. I’m actually enjoying seeing how much of my own spin I can put on the characters while still keeping them recognisably faithful to Barrie’s original.

Excerpt 1 | Peter's Room | 04:34 AM

Author's Notes: So here we have an excerpt from Peter's point of view. I wrote this as an exercise in character development and titled it "Random Scene From Peter's POV" in my Word document, but I think I know whereabouts in the plot it will come. That's a secret, though ;3 I decided it would work best as the first story excerpt for this blog, because it pretty much stands on its own. There's some context that you can probably infer, but not so much info as to give everything away. Enjoy!

(The setting is in the late '80s, for those of you who got interested in this story back when it had a more modern setting - I decided to push the setting back a bit because late '80s Internet was SUPER COOL).

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It was always dark when he woke up these days. Peter supposed that in the time zone of some country he might be keeping normal hours, but he had yet to figure out what it was. When he peeled himself from the pillow after two, three, four hours of sleep he always felt groggy, but then he never really rested. The clicks and beeps of his modem wove themselves into his dreams, creating bright patterns. He watched the patterns spin themselves into being around him, admiring the interplay of colours. If the pattern ever broke, he would wake up immediately, stumbling towards the computer to fix whatever bug had presented itself. He couldn’t sleep at all when there was a break in the pattern.

Greetings from the Other Side of NaNo

So, November is over for another year and I can chalk up my third consecutive “loss” after my first and only “win” in 2009 (70,425 words) to the blackboard of my various attempts at NaNoWriMo. At 15,924 words, I’m pretty damn far from the target of 50,000 words in 30 days that NaNo sets for each of us. But I’m also finding it hard to be disappointed with my efforts this month. First off, nearly 16,000 words of anything is not to be scoffed at, as I’m sure any writer will agree. (Well, 16,000 words of Lorem Ipsum is perhaps not the most useful thing, but even that could be used as website filler).  Moreover, I’m still as excited about this story and where it might be going in early December as I was in late October when I first decided to do it for NaNo.

Part of that is because of the epic background research I’ve been doing. (The early years of the Internet and synaesthesia – two subjects that are so damn fascinating I feel like I can’t cram the information into my head fast enough. I also get to pass off reading cyberpunk fiction and various adaptations of Peter Pan as research). Secondly, the characters are coming alive in ways I could never have imagined when I started. (I don’t want to spoil too much, but I owe a lot of fascinating plot development to AuthorXIV’s idea about Tinkerbell. Thanks!!)

Third and most surprisingly, people really like this idea. I’ve had interest in my stories before, but the enthusiasm over the idea of a cyberpunk Peter Pan has just been unexpected. It scares me a little, because what if the story I eventually write isn’t what people had hoped for? The story has changed a lot since the synopsis I initially posted on NaNoWriMo, so what if the people who were interested by that don’t like what it’s turned into? Are my characters too different from J.M. Barrie’s? Am I shooting myself in the foot by trying to stick to the basic plot of Peter Pan – or am I deviating too far? Does my story even class as cyberpunk or is it just a story about people with computers? There is no end to the questions I subject myself to.

On the whole though, I’m psyched to have an audience of interested folks who want to see this story finished as much as I do, and so I’m creating this blog for you all. And for me, because the accountability that it provides will hopefully keep me chugging along with the writing and editing. I will still be serialising the story on my FF.net and AO3 as promised; but until it’s in a fit state to be published online, this blog will be home to progress updates from the battlefield, excerpts of the non-awful bits, background information and whatever else I can get away with classing as “relevant”. (*cough* Peter Pan GIFs *cough*)

I have ambitions for this blog that include reader input on the plot and characters and an old-timey BBS look for the site (providing I can rope Emi into helping me with the CSS… *makes a note*). But for now, all I want to ask is: how was your November? :D