User blog:Atarumaster88/Fleet Books and FErustrations

At this time, I'm very relieved to (finally) be done with the main draft of the Yanibar Guard Fleet Sourcebook. What a relief! What a pain! (Told you I was still working on it) I'm not quite ready to tackle the challenge of formatting and uploading it yet, and I'd like to get some nice EGTFE content bundled in there, so hopefully this month. Probably not any new stories this time or we're looking at end-of-the-year.

I'd also like to pass along some lessons learned for anyone who's both writing stories and articles and trying to interlink them.

Lesson #1: Don't duplicate effort
My original thought was that the sourcebooks would be secondary sources to the novels, along with a smattering of other new information to fill in the gaps. Cool! But then there was also this other secondary source that had fill-in-the-gap information. The two have a lot of overlap, and as such, a lot of what I write about in EGTFE will be recording information that is also listed in YGS, except broken out for that specific weapon/character/ship.

It's pretty redundant. Don't do that. Don't feel the need to write a giant treatise on say, your favorite planet, and then write a whole bunch of largely-repetitive articles on each city, plant, etc. You don't get points for repetition, and if you can spend your time on SWF doing actual creative things instead of saying the same thing in a slightly different format, do that instead. Satisfying your OCD usually isn't worth it, unless you have patience for literal years-long effort. Hundreds and thousands of hours that could've been spent dreaming up new stories, characters, and ships sunk into. . . repetition. That pains me just thinking about it.

Lesson #2: Pick a primary source and a secondary source
One other related thing I learned has to do with that fill-in-the-gap material. I started writing EGTFE first, to post cool ship pictures and designs. When I started filling in that fill-in-the-gap material for EGTFE, I hadn't written the appropriate sections in YGS yet (which is where that was supposed to go), so I had to go check the ship pages to see what I had written there. That's a huge pain and stifles creativity. What I should have done was probably limit the EGTFE entries to just design specifications and notes and did all the history in YGS. Which I may do yet if I don't feel like filling out all the EGTFE entries with the new information in YGS. Not sure yet. Either way, there was a better way to do that.

Make one source or set of sources primary (either your articles or your stories), and then make the other one secondary. Definitely don't have two sets of primary or secondary sources if you can help it. It's really hard to manage the material and keep it internally consistent when both of them can drive events in the other. As you write, pick your favorite medium (articles or prose), and do that one. Then write the other one based on what you wrote first.

I did it in a really convoluted manner. It took me years to finish because I had little motivation to do so. Even if I do finish it in such a manner, I don't recommend it.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and good luck with your writing efforts! Atarumaster88 ( Talk page ) 18:25, September 4, 2015 (UTC)