My thanks to everyone who has read Pastiche Parade so far, I appreciate all of you a whole lot.
As said many times, Pastiche Parade is my first novel project.
Unfortunately, the project is beyond mere course correction, a rewrite is in order.
I will try to explain my thoughts, the issues, and maybe share this experience to help out any other author as well as to solidify my thoughts onto the future.
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My jump from writing in my native language to writing in English happened through Forum roleplays, which became a major hobby of mine, acting like collective world building projects.
In those, a habit you develop over time, because it works, is to "take out all the toys of the box", to put it all in the table and see what people will pick up, what will be developed.
In my foolishness, I didn't correct that habit for solo writing, where there aren't other players, where all I put on the table is my responsibility.
Plot wise, all the pieces on the table were sound, maybe they didn't connect well but they survived. But the real issue started to show it's head as I progressed.
But the character interactions suffered too much. Information bloat was already an issue, but the killer sin was to ruin the sense of progression in the slice of life. Too often I was about to write something important just to realize that oops, I already glanced over a major development without realizing. As it is going, the characters are going to sink into a limbo, where they will spend hundreds of chapters after speed running reactions in 12 chapters.
There is a lot that needs to be changed.
Pastiche Parade, became too much at once. I was eager, I wanted to make it my central series, and I think that was a mistake.
So. For a start.
De-Bloating
What is Pastiche Parade at it's core?
I would say "A Battle Slice of Life". The whole setup, in the end of the day, started with a Salem witches win, 300 years later there is Witch Coven NATO joke in a long lost discord channel. It is a world set up where pirates and ninjas do fight each other.
All this is experienced by the lenses of a trio of characters with very different approaches and abilities.
Of course, there is more to it than that. It is also a story about the Information Age of a fantasy world. A story about marketable magical girls. A story that at the start wasn't even about Cerberus and that weights on it too much.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
But to agregate everything I wanted to write about was a mistake.
That said. I am glad I published it. I am glad I tried. I am glad I tested my limits. With all that, I can think of a path forward.
So let's see it.
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Future of Pastiche Parade
Is the story dropped? Goodness no.
Some characters in the trio have been in my mind for over decades, and they aren't going away any time soon. It will be back, eventually, once I feel like I have addressed my issues.
But here are some key changes I will likely consider making.
- Not skipping their first meetings, when they see each other for the first time and their lives before Cerberus.
- Less magical girls hijacking, especially Rumi exclusive stories. Iro needs better timing and function to be introduced
- Alana. Major changes to her. The clueless stuff simply didn't work as I expected, and at points became a bit too much. This is a result, in parts, of introducing certain elements to the story that stole roles she needed to have.
- Decoupling the story from the whole "late 2000s" in favour of a more general theme. This also means Y2K aesthetic may be gone.
As for the content that is being taken out, there is a silver lining. A lot of it will be fuel for other projects.
Future Novels
Part of debloating Pastiche Parade to let it go for it's core themes and objectives has been send content away to other projects. Here are some, their status and when to expect them.
- A proper Y2K cyberworld novel
Currently under the name "Attached Files: Cybercrime and Melancholy in the Third Millennium" this is a story about a rogue program that ends up involved with a detective agency of web mysteries.
Inspired by all those excessive cyber world stories, both the originals (corrector yui, digimon world, battle network) and those made when those things were retro futuristic (Hypnospace, ENA, Deltarune Ch. 2) it will aim to be a story about the fun and woes of the internet, written as if I was a clueless 60 years old from 1992.
This story is very much ready, better prepared than Pastiche ever was. One big advantage it has, its that its smaller and has a single character lead. A project where I know the end, the beginning, and the story I am trying to tell.
It should be out in a week or two.
- Underworld Economics story
One thing I love doing in Pastiche Parade, and in basically any fantasy I write. Is to world build. Especially world build the architecture, culture and economy of people living in extreme environments.
Pastiche will still have it after the rewrite, but I am also allowing myself to not use everything I come up with, sending half of it into a project about a demon princess who is tired of the whole demon lord invades the world tango, and who wants to bring some industry and prosperity to the world of monsters.
It's a dark comedy, and possibly as close to a villain protagonist as I am willing to write. In Pastiche Parade I think the question is "how did fantasy survive the industry?" but in this project it's the opposite, it's making industry out of fantasy.
- Other stuff
Deep, in the far less cooked territory, there is one idea I have for the sake of acting as a sponge to my love of magical girls...
A magical girl story.
Lmao.
Or rather, a take on the most extreme LitRPG power fantasies there are, but through the lenses of a magical girl, which is a massive change. Training obsession, abusing systems, meets absurd levels of optimism. I haven't worked a whole lot on it, but I am liking the results so far. To turn the grimdark of litrpgs into grimbright, too bright, staring at the sun bright.
Speaking of the sun, sometimes I also think of a story about a lady who wants to kill the sun and bring on eternal night, and she makes a case for why that is good actually.
And a story about upgrading a wooden cart into a battle tank.
But yeah.
Thanks for reading Pastiche Parade!
I am sorry for the hiatus. But I promise to come back stronger, wiser and a better writer. Maybe I will ever learn how to write in English.
See you soon!