Hello, and again, welcome to the Plotstains Perspective. This time around, I’ll be talking about Shadows Rise 2.12, so please consider clicking the link and reading it before we go any further. Additionally, I want to talk a little further about Neovel. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry, I’ll give a brief explanation later. For now, onto my perspective.
Shadows Rise did really well last month. More people read it than any other month this year. If you’re a new reader, welcome! Go read the rest before you read this! (if you’re all caught up and have no idea what this is, follow this link to learn more) Glad you found us. For the rest of you, thanks for the continued support. The more of you who read, the more we want to write. I mean, we’ll write anyway, but we’ll have more fun while doing it.
This was a great chapter to edit. I had oodles of fun editing this chapter. I think part of it was for the fact that I didn’t have to make too many technical edits to the chapter. That can make a big difference when you have a limited time to work. It let me focus my time on the smaller details.
As an example, the bridge that appeared in this chapter was written to be wooden, originally. I was able to focus on this detail and explain that a bridge that must have existed for as long as it did would eventually be replaced by stone. Blackbird told me that this ruined something for her, but she’s said that she will write out her own explanation once I’ve written this, so I’ll leave that alone. I made a lot of other little detail edits like this in this chapter. Hopefully the continuity police won’t come to arrest me.
The biggest change in this chapter came from the conversation that Dani had with her father in the cemetery. Blackbird and I had a long conversation about what this scene was about. We talked about where the emotional beats should be and how exactly the scene should flow. Was her rambling as impactful if it was placed before or after she talked about her responsibilities? What should the tonal and emotional purpose of the prose be between one part and the other? When everything was said and done, how should the reader have felt? We talked about all of these things, and it was incredibly important that we tried our best to work that out.
We’d love to hear what you thought about that. How did that scene make you feel? Did it speak to you? If you want to leave a comment, we’d love to hear from you.
If you don’t remember, Neovel is a website where authors can post their stories. It is among the few places we’ve decided to publish. What is great about this website is that the creators are greatly interested in making this a viable option for professional publication. They pay their authors from their advertising and subscription fee. You can choose to subscribe for a couple of bonus features, or you can just scroll through the library and read the many wonderful stories. Either way, we’ll see a portion of profits. In the end, the more people who read our stuff on this site, the more money we’ll have to put back into creating cool stuff for Shadows Rise.
Enough of the advertising, though. If you don’t want to read there and instead wish to read it on our blog or on Royal Road, or even on Patreon, you’re more than free to do so. I just want to talk about the wonderful community we’ve discovered on this new Neovel site.
The people on this site are wonderful. The website creators are all about making their platform something amazing and get very involved with the authors. But more than just the web designers, there are the people actually writing all the stories on this site. Every single one of them with whom we’ve had conversations are wonderful people.
This is the first real group of authors that I feel a good connection with. I’m not much of a community person. I like doing my own thing, finding a corner and just doing it. It was sort of what we did when Shadows Rise was originally a roleplaying game on RoleplayGateway. We kept to our corner of the website. Neovel is different in that there are lots of talented people there and all of them are interested in getting involved with one another. You can’t hide from them, and while with most, I’d find that annoying, this group isn’t abrasive. They’re encouraging and they’re fun to talk to (or just sneakily spy on while browsing Discord).
That’s enough rambling from me. I’ll talk to you all next time. I hope you all have a great labour day weekend, and until next time . . .
Written In Shadows 