Tsaimath
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Wandered Off - Change of route
🕑 Added 2022-12-08 13:02:04 +0000 UTCAs I have been writing Wandered Off, especially trying to write the great reveal of Dani's memory-troubles, I realised more and more that I made a fundamental error. I even know where that error is coming from, how it came to be, but that didn't mean I know how to cleverly fix it.
The problem is, Wandered Off is, in a way, two stories, two different ideas, that were mixed into one and not in a well-distributed manner but in a clunky manner that leaves me at a loss. Originally, when I first began to write the story, my idea was that Dani's amnesia would fade quickly, within a few days of arrival, and the story's initial focus would be on the challenge to be reconcile her memories with the world around her and the realisation that, despite having gone through years of schooling, she has little ability to work in the real world. An exploration of a mind that the character themselves cannot fully trust (the realisation that she can understand the language but it is not a language she has ever learned makes for quite an interesting conundrum, what can you understand if the framework your mind uses to process the world is not your own) - The Pokéworld was chosen almost at random, as I had just started playing Pokémon Go and it gave both the character and me a bit of a framework to use, while also giving me an interesting, topic for later chapters, as Dani experiences the differences between game and reality
Ultimately, I gave the idea up somewhere in chapter three, I think. I was simply not "good" enough to get my ideas into a written form that satisfied me, thus, I abandoned the project, left those first few chapters and the prologue lying around and wrote something else.
Until, something over a year later, the war in Ukraine started and the entire media was filled with doom, gloom and destruction. I had been writing on Don't label me, bringing it into its rather dark final phase but just couldn't write that any longer.
I wanted to escape. And where better to escape to, than "Wandering Off" into a different world. But with my desire to have an escapist, somewhat fluffy, somewhat realistic story, it clashed with my original idea. So I simply dragged the amnesia, kept it in the story to avoid having to deal with the problems I had set up initially and tried to come up with a good way to combine the two.
It didn't quite work. The plot I had in mind feels clunky and doesn't flow well, with just unneeded complications that would make the story poorer, in my opinion. I was almost at the point to say, 'screw it' and simply write something else but I decided to keep going - Only with a large alteration to the story.
I'll be cutting the Prologue and a few later scenes, taking away the whole "transmigration" idea, instead using part of the "word-around" I had in mind (to explain where Charm, her 'Dex and so on came from) while keeping a large part of the future plans.
I believe the story will be more interesting and have a smoother flow, if I get rid of the transmigration, without any overall loss.
Hope it will still be a good story, but it sometimes is hard to tell how well the text I write is received by the readers.
Anyway, I'll be changing a few past chapters (mostly the dreams of a modern world) and "archive" the prologue, before I write further chapters.
Toodles
Tsaimath
