Thread:Sakaros/@comment-29301-20180903145046/@comment-104549-20190323174916

Your wish is...well, not my command, but conveniently aligned with my own wishes!

I hope you haven't spent too much mental energy worrying about the WAs; I'm not offended at all. If we take as correct Ataru's premise that the "Best Fan Fiction" award is for the work that's best standing alone—and Ataru's been around almost as long as either of us and was in the weeds of the Wiki way earlier than me, so I'm inclined to take his premises on most things—then the whole UNSWS is going to have a tough time in that category. I think I mentioned once that I'm keeping a massive list of TVTropes that apply to the series, which will eventually find its way into a blog post when the series is finally done. For Continuity Lock-Out, I have: "Happens early on; apart from 'The Price of Knighthood', readers can not really enter the storyline after Shots Fired and hope to know what is going on." Some works stand alone better than others (A Certain Point of View comes to mind), but since I largely avoid "Previously On"-style recaps and I try not to indulge in As You Know unless I have to, no work in the series after Shots Fired can really function well alone. I think the plots and storylines building on one another makes for a richer overall narrative, but I 100% agree that the series isn't designed for selecting individual works to peruse at random.

You're only 400 words away from that coveted "novel" designation! Do you keep outlines and/or plot documents for your works? The UNSWS has quite a lot to keep track of too, and I initially used one big Outline document with plot ideas, quotes, and elements I wanted for each installment, as well as general information about the series (e.g. who all twelve members of the High Council are at a given time). I still have and use that, but since Danse Macabre I've taken to having a Notepad document for each installment as well; I use those to keep track of what happens in each part and who the narrative perspective is, as well as little plot ideas that occur to me along the way (rather than adding them back into the Outline—there's seldom a point to that when I've already started writing the work in question).

And yeah, I sympathize with wanting a softball; I have such fervent, desperate hopes that Chapter 16 will content itself with being a novella...The Liberator kind of got away from me...