Megazver posted:Has he? Would you mind elaborating? Apparently, Wildbow has stopped editing Worm for publication and stopped putting it before people for that purpose (especially after that bit where he mocked an editor on the subreddit, oof...) What he's doing now is creating a "Worm bible" to give to someone so they can ghostwrite the series, providing he gets to sign off on any and all changes. I'd argue that WB's seeming unwillingness to change Worm-the-million-word-serial into Worm-the-300,000-word-trilogy is where the roadblock in the editorial process is, however, and so that last point is the wrench in the process. I mean, Worm up until Leviathan is something like 250,000 words. Cramming that into a YA novel, which don't tend to even hit 100,000 words, would be a tough job unless you were prepared to rewrite from scratch. Otherwise, you could turn that itself into a trilogy with like Bank Raid Climax, Museum Fight Climax, Leviathan Climax, but that would also require a flat rewrite.
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Dec 13, 2018 02:08
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Incidentally, editing Worm for commercial publication is something I've thought about tons of times and I plain can't figure out how to do it. (That's all this huge block of text is, so feel free to skip it if you don't wanna read one random internet person speculating.) The genre bait-and-switch is a somewhat major stumbling block, and I'm guessing it caused a lot of problems when he shopped it around to publishers- you can't present a coming of age spiderman ripoff on page 1, and turn it into a nihilistic misery-filled cosmic horror story around page 3,000. Balancing setup and payoff would be another challenge (too many threads are introduced, then never followed up on), and I suspect most publishers would want content changes he would balk at (remove all the nazi references and turn E88 into a generic street gang, make Aisha not a cartoon, some publishers would want Alec yanked out of the story entirely). Assuming you convince WB to be cool with all of that and find a publisher willing to run with it, you need to settle on a genre- is it a YA story with darker story elements (in which case it needs to be sliced into much smaller units and have the lion's share of its story beats shortened up so every section has a setup and parallel payoff), or an adult deconstruction of the coming of age story (in which case Taylor's internal monologues need to be cut by about 75% and the story's "Woe is me all authority figures are incompetent and yucky" stuff has to go). Let's assume we get a publisher willing to market it as an adult novel- deconstructions don't sell that well, so it needs to be a more straightforward story in a genre the publisher has an upcoming slot for. Let's say it's a sci-fi thriller, because that kind of works. That means each book can run around 100,000-130,000 words, and will need to introduce a plot element in the first five chapters to be solved before the final two to three chapters roll around. There are also likely to be some structural edicts- structure and number of romantic subplots to be introduced and resolved, an action scene every so often, and all that jazz, but that's usually publisher- or sometimes editor-specific, so it's not worth speculating. Publishers prefer trilogies to single books, but they get really nervous at long series, because people don't really read, so Worm would either need to fit into 300,000 words (hah, hah), or work as a series of loosely connected standalone stories (not really). So let's say we want it to be a trilogy, since that's the easiest thing to get on shelves. So, okay, our budget is three 100,000 word stories, and that's more like 85,000 words because we'll need a setup and cooldown period at the start and end of each story. I haven't read Worm in ages, so I might be missing a lot, but as far as I can recall we need to hit the following beats: Taylor is a bullied jerk kid with superpowers Taylor joins villains Undersiders rob bank Undersiders play dodgeball with bombs Undersiders fight a kaiju Undersiders fight a band of serial killers led by johnny depp Undersiders take over faux-Boston Undersiders come together with heroes to fight Echidna <gigantic mess of jumbled storylines in my brain> Undersiders bully cthulhu to death. This is obviously way too much stuff, and refining it into publishable books is where I'm going to lose 99% of existing fans, myself included, because WB has a tendency to write islands of fascinating content in a big sea of bloat and needless exposition, and his stories have tons of stuff that's really interesting, but doesn't need to be there. You deal with such severe space limitations when editing novels that I tend to tell clients "I'm going to cut everything you don't need, and then cut another 25% that you do need". So, what do we need to tell this story in as minimal a fashion as possible in three 100,000-word books? The first two books are actually pretty easy- book 1 can do origin story through Leviathan, and follow a pretty traditional three-act structure: the bank robbery is the climax of act one, all the villains coming together to capture Lung is the climax of act two, then the villains and heroes working together to fight Leviathan is the climax of act three. It ends on a nervous but tentatively positive note, Taylor and Lisa hanging out on the docks, Lisa offering her a slot back on the team. Book two is equally self-explanatory: act one introduces the slaughterhouse 9, act two is the Undersiders and S9 going back and forth, act three is the prosopagnosia virus and Jack fleeing the city. Book ends on a downer: Brian is PTSD-man, Victoria is squid-girl, they didn't really stop the S9, and worse things loom over the horizon. Then we hit book three, and we're just absolutely screwed. You'll note that I cut out Coil, Echidna, and most of the brockton bay wards/protectorate stuff, and that'll help keep books one and two really tight, but that also leaves us no real springboard from which to jumpstart the last plot. We want to cut the wards, the timeskip, and last two endbringers, because they don't really matter, so the best place to start book three would probably be with the Undersiders riding to the Behemoth fight, but that's a big and really emotionally exhausting setpiece to open on. Regardless, let's take that as the least-bad of a bunch of bad options. They run around and do endbringer stuff, Taylor runs into Cauldron under New Delhi, and they all go "What's this" A secret society of super-super villains up to no good? This won't do!" From there the first act is hunting down Cauldron and discovering its roots in the protectorate, the villain groups, and wherever else. They finally get a meeting with Contessa and whats-her-face, who deliver their whole "Scion is a crazy space bug man who's gonna kill us all" spiel, act two is a quick countdown to the apocalypse as they prepare as best they can, and act three is everything getting scion-ed, followed by the power of bullying saving the day, but at what cost *dramatic music*. Book ends on a sad but cautiously optimistic tone as humanity crawls out of the wreckage and sets about finding a way to move forward. (Also, Taylor is either dead and buried or alive; no abstract is-it-or-isn't-it coma purgatory nonsense.) So, that's as good as I can possibly get it, and it's still not great; Teenage Villain Breaking Bad is a neat storyline, and the slaughterhouse 9 is a really neat story, but there is *so much stuff* in the last book, and it's so poorly set up, that finding a way to get from a bunch of plucky teenagers fighting johnny depp to Dr. Manhattan going crazy and killing everyone is a really tough proposition. Omi no Kami fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Dec 13, 2018 |
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Dec 13, 2018 03:03
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Of course, that's not touching on small things like how you'd probably scrap Glory Girl's first interlude, so you'd need to set her up somehow before the bank robbery and, ideally, you'd setup the Wards too so you don't get the chapter where Taylor goes through them one by one. I feel like the bank robbery could be a climax in and of itself, but that'd require unpacking the things Wildbow skips over early in the story, putting more emphasis on the 'will she join them or not' plotline, and so on. I think the Folding Ideas guy did a series of videos on Fifty Shades of Grey where he talks a lot about the problems of neatly editing a piece of serial fiction, especially when the author is unwilling to brook changes, and while he's talking about movies, he does often talk about how the work went from serial fanfiction to a set of novels.
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Dec 13, 2018 03:35
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Of course, that's not touching on small things like how you'd probably scrap Glory Girl's first interlude, so you'd need to set her up somehow before the bank robbery and, ideally, you'd setup the Wards too so you don't get the chapter where Taylor goes through them one by one. I feel like the bank robbery could be a climax in and of itself, but that'd require unpacking the things Wildbow skips over early in the story, putting more emphasis on the 'will she join them or not' plotline, and so on. Yeah, one of the big problems with editing Worm in particular is that WB's interludes are often the most interesting parts of the story. Off the top of my head, I would probably try to deal with that by chunking out each book into 4-5 slices, and putting the best of the best interludes between each slice; Glory Girl and Incest Lass for sure, Jessica Yamada and the Ward Team Full of Jerks, maybe something from Dragon or Defiant early on to more clearly telegraph that authority figures being huge jerkasses was (mostly) an unreliable narrator thing? I don't think this works for Worm in particular, but I think short stories might actually be a better commercial vehicle for WB: I know Worm was originally going to be a series of self-contained stories from around the parahuman world, and if you were to do something like World War Z (except good) and tell an interesting story through scattered letters/interviews/isolated bits of relevant narrative, I think you might end up with a short, very readable story that highlights the best of his style while avoiding most of the worst excesses.
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Dec 13, 2018 03:47
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You could probably get the interludes in as prologues and epilogues, but that'd require changing them to fit that role. They're definitely some of his better stuff so it'd be a shame to lose them in any adaptation. edit: Like, if the bank robbery was the end of Book 1 or whatever, the epilogue could definitely be the Ward chapter where it ends on Panacea writing Skitter up on the board or whatever. That feeling of even if Skitter still has reservations, the authorities have pegged her firmly as a villain.
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Dec 13, 2018 04:06
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Hmm yeah, from a commercial standpoint I wouldn't recommend this, since it's unlikely he'd remain serialized long enough to get to the good stuff, but if you wanted to maintain more fidelity to the original material you could go for tons and tons of shorter, almost one-shot adventures; Taylor and the Crowd Covered in Dog Blood, Bakuda's No-Good, Very Bad Day of Urban Terrorism, and so forth. The only problem there is that you're eventually going to hit a point around S9 where it's no longer possible to satisfyingly encapsulate plot beats in a single, shorter novel (unless you're willing to do, like, three full books of S9, which would be almost as agonizingly paced as reading a particularly slow serial online).
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Dec 13, 2018 04:12
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One thing I liked is that it felt like Twig was a lot more deliberately paced, all the arcs to start with were their own stories (connected to the bigger story) and each one advanced the timeline by a quarter of a year. Definitely felt like an exercise in pacing to me, and I think that was a good thing for Wildbow to practice. I can't remember if the arcs ever really went off the rails although I think the time advancement did by the end, but if they did it was when Sy went off the rails, I think?
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Dec 13, 2018 05:15
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Yeah... Twig is my very favorite WB story by a huge margin, and I suspect one reason is because he very intentionally set out to remedy some writing habits that people criticized in prior works. The story mostly stayed on track, although I found some of the later stuff less interesting; at least for me the very best parts of Twig were when the entire group was together and working/socializing/joking around, and (big Twig spoilers) when Sy and Jaimie left the academy we lost a lot of that, and didn't really get it back until the very end. I did find a lot of the later sections harder to get through, though- I felt Sy/Jaimie starting their own revolutionary group was far-fetched and not particularly engaging, the last few arcs where Sy was nuts and we had to listen to him rant and rave and not perceive things good weren't as fun to read, and since the earliest parts of the story heavily emphasized the fact that, as little kids, they were physically incapable of combat, I was a bit let down when it started to stray back into Worm-esque hyperviolent beat-em-ups. But yeah- for me personally I've always put Worm/Ward/Pact in this nebulous box where half of it is good, and the other half have serious issues, but I always thought Twig was only an edit and maybe some last-act retooling away from being super polished. To his credit, I think WB also said that he wasn't happy with how it wrapped up; apparently his original plan was for it to have a more diplomatic and espionage-focused climax, but he bowed to pressure from fans/perceived expectations and started punching up the action in each arc.
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Dec 13, 2018 05:33
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Omi no Kami posted:To his credit, I think WB also said that he wasn't happy with how it wrapped up; apparently his original plan was for it to have a more diplomatic and espionage-focused climax, but he bowed to pressure from fans/perceived expectations and started punching up the action in each arc. I really should reread Twig sometime, it was so good. I'm quite enjoying Ward (and I know you're enjoying it less), but Twig is always going to be my favorite, I think.
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Dec 13, 2018 05:53
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Apparently, Wildbow has stopped editing Worm for publication and stopped putting it before people for that purpose (especially after that bit where he mocked an editor on the subreddit, oof...) What he's doing now is creating a "Worm bible" to give to someone so they can ghostwrite the series, providing he gets to sign off on any and all changes. I'd argue that WB's seeming unwillingness to change Worm-the-million-word-serial into Worm-the-300,000-word-trilogy is where the roadblock in the editorial process is, however, and so that last point is the wrench in the process.
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Dec 13, 2018 05:57
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PetraCore posted:I really should reread Twig sometime, it was so good. I'm quite enjoying Ward (and I know you're enjoying it less), but Twig is always going to be my favorite, I think. Twig's great- I actually want to re-read it, but I'm making myself wait so I hopefully forget more of it beforehand. And yeah, Ward's a really mixed bag for me- the good parts are great, but especially coming on the back of Twig I was hoping for a super-tight paced, really well-formatted take on his original setting. Knowing what he can produce at his peak seeing a return to some of his more problematic pre-Twig habits is really frustrating. I'd probably enjoy it a lot more if I wasn't familiar with his prior work, but as-is it's like seeing a bunch of great ideas tarnished by subpar execution. Like, on a scene-for-scene basis it probably has fully half of my favorite moments across all of WB's work, it's just that the connective tissue isn't there. (Note, though, that Ward might as well be custom-written to irritate me; I imagine that my 6/10 is most people's 7-8, and will happily admit to letting grumpiness and disappointment outside of the core narrative reduce my overall opinion of what is, on balance, a pretty okay work.  )
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Dec 13, 2018 06:04
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Huh, spurred on by this publishing conversation I decided to check what Wildbow was making in patreon dollars and it's currently less than the Wandering Inn author to the tune of 1k (5k to 6k per month)
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Dec 13, 2018 09:43
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Sure, but Wildbow also offers nothing (unless that's changed?) and Pirateaba is a very savvy marketer who gives you a cute nod if you donate even just a dollar. Also, the isekai audience is way bigger than the more general fiction audience in the serial world.
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Dec 13, 2018 09:54
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Omi no Kami posted:Incidentally, editing Worm for commercial publication is something I've thought about tons of times and I plain can't figure out how to do it. (That's all this huge block of text is, so feel free to skip it if you don't wanna read one random internet person speculating.) I don't know why that's even necessary, though? Just hire an editor to help you polish it up a bit, break it up into volumes, maybe write some exclusive chapters for each volume so that people would want to buy it again and self-pub it on Amazon, like loving everyone else who's ever written a web serial has. Everyone's who's been a popular web novel is selling great on Kindle as well and looking at their numbers the money should be pretty amazing. People have started, finished and self-published huge complete web novels in the time it took him to just sit on his work and not take advantage of it in any way.
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Dec 13, 2018 10:37
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Megazver posted:I don't know why that's even necessary, though? Just hire an editor to help you polish it up a bit, break it up into volumes, maybe write some exclusive chapters for each volume so that people would want to buy it again and self-pub it on Amazon, like loving everyone else who's ever written a web serial has. Everyone's who's been a popular web novel is selling great on Kindle as well and looking at their numbers the money should be pretty amazing. People have started, finished and self-published huge complete web novels in the time it took him to just sit on his work and not take advantage of it in any way. Well yeah, if you want to make money that's a good (and probably the best) course of action. I was more thinking along the lines of "How would I break this up and edit it for commercial release as a series of traditional novels," because it was an interesting challenge. Worm isn't bad, but it's structured in a really weird way that makes it super tough to chunk out in any meaningful way.
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Dec 13, 2018 11:06
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Wildbow just needed to edit up the story, drop it on kindle, and pay for someone to do an audiobook and roll in sweet audible money. I really don't understand wanting to be published, for seemingly just the sake of being published. I mean there is always the chance you become the next MEGA-hit(unlikely), but outside of that self-publishing would probably just work out better.
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Dec 13, 2018 15:44
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Sure, but Wildbow also offers nothing (unless that's changed?) and Pirateaba is a very savvy marketer who gives you a cute nod if you donate even just a dollar. Also, the isekai audience is way bigger than the more general fiction audience in the serial world. ShinsoBEAM! posted:Wildbow just needed to edit up the story, drop it on kindle, and pay for someone to do an audiobook and roll in sweet audible money. I really don't understand wanting to be published, for seemingly just the sake of being published. I mean there is always the chance you become the next MEGA-hit(unlikely), but outside of that self-publishing would probably just work out better.
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Dec 13, 2018 23:16
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PetraCore posted:I think he should have edited to improve the pacing and story and then do an ebook/audiobook. I want Gilbert Gottfried to record it, just so we can hear him description-loving Brian and really passive-aggressively fashion policing everyone in Victoria's eyeline.
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Dec 14, 2018 01:32
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New Practical Guide to Evil chapter is up, and it is very interesting. Thread favourite Anaxares, Tyrant and Amadeus all combine to make a wonderful christmas gift. PracGuide on hiatus until January 14th, and next book will conclude the tale.
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Dec 14, 2018 08:21
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so who are the claimants to black knight do you think? or is he claimant to something else? squire? is malicia dead?
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Dec 14, 2018 08:35
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violent sex idiot posted:so who are the claimants to black knight do you think? or is he claimant to something else? squire? is malicia dead? Claimant to Dread Emperor, perhaps? Malicia's struggling so she doesn't have a strong hold on the name at the moment.
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Dec 14, 2018 09:08
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It's clearly a prompt for him to become a claimant to dread emperor - it's what the bard's been angling at since book 2. I didn't realise you could lose a name short of death or metaphysical fuckery (see Cat becoming Fae)
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Dec 14, 2018 10:48
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:Wildbow just needed to edit up the story, drop it on kindle, and pay for someone to do an audiobook and roll in sweet audible money. I really don't understand wanting to be published, for seemingly just the sake of being published. I mean there is always the chance you become the next MEGA-hit(unlikely), but outside of that self-publishing would probably just work out better. Yeah, I'm getting the vibe he just has weird legitimacy hang-ups that are preventing him from doing the obvious.
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Dec 14, 2018 10:49
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Maladictus posted:New Practical Guide to Evil chapter is up, and it is very interesting. Thread favourite Anaxares, Tyrant and Amadeus all combine to make a wonderful christmas gift. PracGuide on hiatus until January 14th, and next book will conclude the tale. Anaxares is the best. Going to judge the angels for judging the People. 
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Dec 14, 2018 17:29
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Fun theory I took from the comments for Practical Guide to Evil: Black is actually Dread Emperor Benevolent I, who shows up in several of the chapter epigraphs. e: Including the one for the most recent chapter. SerSpook fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Dec 14, 2018 |
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Dec 14, 2018 22:04
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SerSpook posted:Fun theory I took from the comments for Practical Guide to Evil: Black is actually Dread Emperor Benevolent I, who shows up in several of the chapter epigraphs. I just went and read those epigraphs and I am in love with this theory.
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Dec 15, 2018 00:37
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Silynt posted:I just went and read those epigraphs and I am in love with this theory. Every last one is pretty much a perfect part of Black's own philosophy, it actually works really well.
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Dec 15, 2018 00:58
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Is there a list of his epigraphs somewhere that doesn't involve me skimming every chapter?
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Dec 15, 2018 01:04
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tithin posted:Is there a list of his epigraphs somewhere that doesn't involve me skimming every chapter? Here you go
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Dec 15, 2018 01:06
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Ok yeah wow, that is black
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Dec 15, 2018 02:21
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Didn't he mention suggesting that Alaya take on the name Dread Empress Friendly, or Honest, or something along those lines? I can definitely see him following through on the joke if he took power.
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Dec 15, 2018 03:42
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That's an excellent setup if it ends up being true.
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Dec 15, 2018 05:46
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This time, on the Wandering Inn, its the most boring sport in the world!
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Dec 15, 2018 20:59
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A big flaming stink posted:This time, on the Wandering Inn, its the most boring sport in the world! A fair chunk of the cast agreed with you, but I think adding magic (or shotguns) to most of the boring sports would make them more interesting.
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Dec 15, 2018 22:25
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Kalas posted:A fair chunk of the cast agreed with you, but I think adding magic (or shotguns) to most of the boring sports would make them more interesting. Although the best way to improve most sports is to require one golden retriever on the field for every human player at all times.
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Dec 16, 2018 03:21
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A big flaming stink posted:This time, on the Wandering Inn, its the most boring sport in the world! Hey, it worked for Twilight!
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Dec 17, 2018 12:49
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I caught up with the Forge of Destiny sequel (Threads of Destiny) and it is still really good and I like the changes to the system from what I've seen so far. It's cool that they've introduced one of the new students already and give Ling Qi a way to witness/interact with the Outer Sect (and thus Gan Guangli and potentially others still in the Outer Sect) through the whole tutoring/spying arrangement with her. It's also neat how that dude with the swamp spirit is another non-noble cultivator like Ling Qi (and a potential love interest?). It's cool how his previous actions (with loving off into the forest and fighting random beasts) kinda make more sense in light of the fact that he has no clue how to navigate cultivator culture and (unlike Ling Qi) doesn't have the connections to help him with doing so. It's also nice to see that Xiulan has her groove back. Regarding recent updates, I'm hoping that readers don't choose the edgy dark-element Art (the first one listed) to focus on; I'm partial towards the one that involves mitigating damage through being batted around like a leaf in the wind, because the visuals are cool and I generally like the idea of focusing more on the music/dancing aspect of Ling Qi's character than the "dark and stealthy" stuff, and would rather her go the route of...whatever that moon spirit that Sixiang is related to.
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Dec 17, 2018 21:59
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TGAB is done with the side stories, for people (like me) who weren’t totally into it. Looks like the gang is back together.
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Dec 17, 2018 22:56
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I have no idea who half the people in TGAB are anymore
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Dec 17, 2018 23:06
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I finally caught up in Ward. The first time I'll ever be reading one of these web serials live. I already miss the ability to binge.
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Dec 17, 2018 23:52
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