Friday, February 2, 2024

Author's Journal: Shaping (and Reshaping) a World

(Just a little glimpse into my creative process.) 

So I've just spent most of the last week giving the 3M roster an overhaul...

Fortunately I've built up a cushion of several chapters, so I had the time to do it. But initially, when I started writing this story, my approach was to envision the company that Mags would be walking into, to have an idea of who was already there. And that worked really well, at least in terms of informing the upcoming Chapters Two and Three.

The issues came when I started trying to book the shows.

Now, I've had the path Mags will be going down booked in my head for quite some time. I've known who she's gonna face, who she's gonna beat, and who's gonna beat her ass. But the things is, Mags isn't wrestling in a bubble. The company will have its own storylines going independent of Mags, even if the focus in the narrative won't be as intense on those storylines. And every match in the company has the potential to impact her story.  

So I've felt like I need to know what's going to be happening at every show.  Even stuff YOU might not end up seeing, I need to know. Unfortunately, when I sat to start the wider promotion with the original roster... it turned out that not all of the characters I had originally envisioned fit well together.  

Or matched up well together.  

So I basically started over from scratch, in terms of the make-up of the promotion.

Luckily, I didn't need to scrap any of the characters that I had already written, and that you will be meeting soon, dear readers. :P 

Over the last couple of days, I've been mapping out all the shows that will happen during the first arc of Maggie's saga. Only this time, the character creation process was informed by where each character fit on the shows, rather than just trying to imagine who was already in the company when Mags arrived. And I gotta say, I'm happy with the results. I think it resulted not only in some more vivid characters (that hopefully I do justice to when it comes time to start writing them) but also characters who fit into their roles better.  There's not the same level of "oh this character's too good to job out" or "she needs a push, but there really isn't room to push her."

But yeah. Just lettin' you guys know that I've been busy. :P

Chapter Two will go up next Friday. (It's already up on Patreon. Just sayin'.)

And again, a very heartfelt thank you to anyone and everyone comin' on board for this journey!

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