User blog:Boomdodger/The Future of ULTIMATES

Well, long time no see. It's no secret that The Clone Wars: Ultimates, the fan series written by myself, DarthJaciuss, and Thorun Ordo, has been on hiatus for several years. Since its conception back in April 2016, it's seen the publication of 2 full short stories, and about half of 2 more that have yet to see completion. There are several reasons behind this--slow production, ever-expanding stories, and most prominently the disappearance of some of its team members. Since then, however, the group has come back together and are now determined to actually start and finish the stories set up for the Ultimates timeline.

The END of ULTIMATES
The headline basically sums it up. Ultimates was the title of not just a fan-fiction series set during the Clone Wars era, but an entire timeline that was developed to stand side-by-side with official Star Wars canon. This means that the stories told in Ultimates could connect seamlessly with official canon like a jigsaw puzzle, interfering with none of the pre-existing Star Wars lore. This involved a LOT of hard work and research to ensure accuracy and maintain quality.

But now, Ultimates has been done away with. It no longer exists.

And so, I officially welcome the introduction of Clone Wars: Adventures.

If you thought we were ending the Ultimates story, then you'd be very wrong. We're actually rebranding Ultimates to Adventures, to better fit with our vision and original inspiration for these stories. The roots of every single member of the team are with the Clone Wars Adventures video game developed by what was Sony Online Entertainment which ran from 2010 to 2014. We all met in that game, and have since remained connected with one another. We started off writing stories for our characters in the game itself, which slowly and eventually evolved into what was The Clone Wars: Ultimates. Furthermore, we see "Ultimates" as a title that better suits a comic book series, as opposed to stories written as basically novels.

And so, Clone Wars: Adventures is the new title for this series.

The Story Structure
While the story is pretty much all the same (save for a few revamps here and there to better quality) we will actually be approaching the writing very differently. Originally, since its conception, the stories followed an episodic format in which we periodically release short stories as a part of "seasons," in the same way that The Clone Wars TV show released its episodes. However, this has proved to be a difficult task for us as we try to set ourselves to write several different short stories; the motivation was lacking and this ended up being too much of a hassle.

As opposed to the EPISODIC format, Adventures will now be composed of several NOVELS. You may be thinking, "Aren't novels bigger than short stories?" Of course they are. But this approach will actually allow us to compile what was originally several short stories into a singular, cohesive story. This also allows us to fill in various gaps in the plot that would otherwise prove too long for a short story, such as a short scene for context such as a brief discussion between characters that would otherwise be considered a "background event with more meaning than is realized."

These novels would cover entire arcs, rather than individual sections of an arc that would go over several short stories. And each novel would follow basically a three-act structure, where they are divided into three parts, each one with its own set of chapters. These parts can more or less be considered the "episodes" from before, only now they are packed with even more story!

To summarize these changes, this novel approach will make our workload much more organized and feasible. They would be much less of a hassle than writing various individual short stories that would have to each stand on their own.

A Taste of What's To Come

 * The Battle of Poluros - the FIRST novel
 * The Battle of Balmorra - the SECOND novel
 * Nu Squad - a unit of clone commandos struggling with trauma and stress following the Battle of Geonosis
 * Balmorra's story will continue well beyond the battle at the beginning of the series, following the endeavors of Torm Amadis
 * A certain assassin belonging to the Kaleesh species...

Hopefully these changes end up being for the better. We believe they will, and we are now determined to finally complete the story we started so many years ago.