sick vora rambles about writing

What's up gamers it's your girl Vora "Voracity" Vora here to talk about writing and the book and STUFF. I almost didn't get today's chapter out on time because I have been SICK with PLAGUE (i actually don't know what i have but i'm pretty sure it was partly brought on by taking 20mg and staying up way too late too many nights in a row, tanking my immune system). I'm still sick, actually, but I'm decently lucid right now and I've been wanting to talk about writing for MONTHS so here we are

Gonna kick things off by talking about that new chapter and also my plans for book 2 of TMGM, so if you haven't read it yet, GO DO THAT! READ 4.1 BEFORE THIS STUPID POST! Anyway.

Writing web serials is weird. Readers are signing on for a product that is in most cases very unfinished, and while some readers prefer to save up for massive binges, others are reading week-to-week. Paradoxically, these conditions create an atmosphere of impatience that would be completely absent from a tradpub reading. Because you can't keep turning the page once you've caught up, there's a need for threads to be developed more quickly and consistently than in a traditional novel. This is a problem that romance in particular struggles with, because there are major beats typical for a romance novel that are difficult to pull off when you're working with a web serial. If the reader doesn't trust the author, they might quit the serial during the parts of the story where our romantic pair is thrust apart. In tradpub, you can read through that chunk of the book in an hour. In a web serial, that might be a month or more of updates.

So, the direction I'm taking book 2 is kind of a risk, because as anyone who's read 4.1 has now learned... Thanksgiving has come and gone without Rachel confessing her feelings, despite her commitment at the end of book 1. This is not the only bit of backsliding you can expect to see in book 2, because despite her dramatic revelation in the moment, Rachel has not in fact conquered her anxieties about Sophia. She still has some work to do. I do want to make a promise to anyone reading this: by the end of book 2, Rachel and Sophia will get together.

Okay, enough about the future, let's talk THE PAST. And writing, and work, and lessons, and all that good stuff. If you are a writer yourself who wants to make it in the web serial space, this is the part to really pay attention to.

So, as some of you already know, This Magical Girl is Mine is not my first web serial. Before TMGM, I wrote Feast or Famine. FoF was... well, it had its fans. There were a handful of people who felt really seen by it and treasured its existence, and I will always be grateful to those readers. But, by and large, FoF was not particularly popular (it currently sits at 1,200 followers on Royal Road). Certainly not popular enough that I could make writing my career.

It's very easy to blame other people for your failures. There is a massive temptation, especially in creative fields, to defend your ego by castigating the masses for failing to understand your vision. To say, "No, this was brilliant, you just didn't understand it." But the role of a writer is to promote understanding. My job as an author is to communicate ideas in a way that reaches as much of my target audience as possible, and failure to communicate those ideas is my fault, not the fault of my readers.

So, what did FoF do wrong? A lot. Fundamentally, Feast or Famine is a story too in love with itself to ever stop and wonder if the reader is in on the joke. The protagonist is presented poorly in the opening chapters where presentation is most important (it is incredibly hard to overwrite a first impression, and most readers will simply stop reading if the first impression is poor), the story repeatedly stops to drag on about metaphysics and philosophy that is not sufficiently integrated with the action of the story, and poor planning combined with burnout led to most of the first two books having very little to do with what the story wanted to be about.

FoF's first arc is atrocious. It takes 9,000 words to introduce another character for the protagonist to have dialogue with, 18,000 words to introduce a character who will actually be relevant to the broader book, and 51,000 words to introduce the primary love interest. Most of what goes on in those early chapters is not indicative of what the rest of the story will look like. The protagonist simply isn't given enough opportunities to bounce off other characters and develop interesting dynamics with them, and the few opportunities she is given, well...

FoF is trying to be too clever. It wants to be a deconstruction, so it's peppered with situations where the protagonist assumes she's operating in one genre, only for the world to inform her that actually, it's a different genre. She constantly makes decisions that make sense to her but have incredible risk and often backfire. The problem is that the reader does not see clever deconstruction, they just see a protagonist who fails at half the things she tries, and that creates the impression that when she does succeed, it isn't earned, because their perception of the protagonist is not as someone competent.

FoF hides its premise for the sake of twists. Here's a lategame reveal that should have been in chapter 1: the protagonist of Feast or Famine, Maven Alice, is an artificial human made in the image of the creator of the Lucid Demiurge, Nyarlathotep, who created the FoF universe in-story. She's not the only splinter of that goddess running around, and the central mystery of Feast or Famine is why the Demiurge keeps making these splinters only to kill them off, burn their worlds, and try again. But we don't learn any of this until the tail end of book 2, which means we don't really get to explore these ideas until book 3, which ended up being the final book due to burnout pressure and the desire to move on to a new project that might actually succeed on Royal Road.

So, when I started writing This Magical Girl is Mine, I was thinking about these failings and how I could avoid them. It still took a lot of talking with friends and peers to internalize those lessons, but I think the success of TMGM speaks for itself.

The most important lesson to apply was to not hide the premise. In my earliest drafts of TMGM, Rachel didn't learn that Sophia was Striga until either the end of the first book or somewhere in the second book. Atrocious! What was I thinking!? In that draft, I was really struggling to write a compelling, entertaining version of the scene where Rachel becomes a witch, because of course Rachel didn't know that doing so was a path to get her closer to Sophia. As soon as I realized that Rachel should start the story knowing Sophia's secret, everything clicked into place.

I also made sure to put Rachel and Sophia together right up front, at the very start of the very first chapter, so the reader can immediately see the chemistry they have. Getting to bounce off Sophia makes Rachel a more interesting character, and it sells her motivation when she's approached by the cat and receives the offer to become a witch.

And, of course, giving Rachel some wins. In FoF, the protagonist has to pay a blood price for basically every victory she gets, and half of them barely feel like victories. In TMGM, Rachel crushes her first opponent. She's the new kid on the block, but she's got the sauce.

I don't think TMGM is perfect, of course. Arc 3 feels a little clunky (it opens with a bunch of politicking setup when the actual meat of the arc is about planar exploration), Delilah is underdeveloped as a villain, and the dynamic between Rachel and Erica doesn't really hit the levels of toxic yuri promised by the cover. I think you can tell that I didn't have a complete sense of where the series was going when I was writing the first two arcs.

Damn this is a long-winded post. Okay, I think I've said about all that was rattling around in my brain. I hope this was an interesting read! I love talking about writing. I love peeling back the curtain and showing people that writing is a process and you have to work through a lot of failures and mistakes to get good at it.

I'm still learning. There's always more to learn.