I was the opposite. I didn't really think about sequels until that 2003 OF and Gobosei because they were originally planned as serializations (more like an ongoing storyline in a comic than a novel and sequels), so that's when I started thinking in terms of "there's a story, but that story is just one part inside what can be a bigger story." I blame my obsession with manga in high school for that; pretty much all the ones I read were multi-arc juggernauts rather than short collections. The rest of my Backstreet fanfic, or writing in general, wasn't like that though. Heck, even PBox wasn't originally meant to be in a series when I first envisioned it; yet, it became that probably around the time Nick refused death -- maybe because he was adamant that he had a story to tell beyond the scope of PBox, lol.
I think that's a fair stance to have. If the initial stories are the ones getting completed, but the sequels weren't, then I think I would also put the kibosh on sequels. There's a happy medium for it though. It seems like a lot of your ideas back then were "a little more than what was there, but maybe not enough for a whole novel." So something like your short SAMS one-shot is the perfect alternative. I think it's a good exercise for us novel writers. How can we convey a complete arc in a shorter medium? It's why I wished I'd taken on more of Mare's challenges back in the day; I just never had strong enough ideas for any of them. That could have been because they were the photo challenges back then, rather than the more broad "basic premise" ones though.
I think it's natural for big ideas to evolve that way, starting as one story and eventually turning into more than one as the idea gets bigger and branches off in different directions. I don't think any of my sequels were planned from the beginning either; they came about toward the end of or even after the first story, when I either realized I had another story arc for the same characters or thought, "That was fun. I wanna write more stories like that!" The ones that work best are the ones where there really is another story arc that seems like a logical progression of the overarching plot. My failed sequels of the past were more along the lines of, "I got tired of writing the first story, so I decided to end it early and save the rest of the idea for a sequel I'll never actually write," or "I enjoyed writing this story about the Boys surviving a plane crash, so now I will write a sequel where they get shipwrecked!" Lessons learned! LOL
I do think one-shots or short stories are a nice way to expand on a story without committing to another novel. I wrote a little one-shot companion to Curtain Call after Nick's All American album came out because I was so inspired by a couple of the songs on it, and that was a fun way to revisit those characters. I don't think anyone would want to read a novel-length sequel to that story or SAMS, nor would I want to write one. And that's something to consider, too - not only whether or not I really want to write a sequel, but whether or not there's an audience for it. If no one else is going to read it, then I have to weigh how much I really want to write it. Is the idea worth spending that much time on when I could be devoting that time to writing something people will actually read? Some ideas are, and some aren't.
I agree about the challenges. I had a lot of fun with the few that I did, but I only did the ones I felt inspired to do. I do think those few helped me broaden my horizons and experiment with different genres and writing styles, so there's definitely value in them. It sounds like you have plenty of other story ideas to play around with, but if you ever get bored, you could always look back through the threads and pick out one to try. The April Fool's challenges and the Fairy Tale Beauty and the Beast one were my favorites to do.
Do you hold a lot of your story ideas because you're not quite sure if you'll see them through to the end?
Yeah, I guess so. I have a lot of ideas that made it as far as being written down, but never progressed to the point of having an outline or a first scene or anything. I have other ideas that have a solid outline - as in, I have at least a general sense of the beginning, middle, and end - but I haven't tried writing them yet. And then there are stories I've actually started writing and never posted because I stalled out on them before I hit that point where I felt they were going well enough to post. Heroic Measures and MBK both started out that way, and I eventually came back to them, so there may be hope for a couple of those. Guilty Roads was also an idea I'd had in one form or another for like 6-7 years before I finally started writing it, but that one did not turn out so well LOL. I've had better luck jumping on fresh ideas and writing them right away than going back to old ones I've been holding on to for a while.
I agree, getting in front of a place to write is half of the struggle. That's why in the beginning of getting back into it, I worried less about word count and more about "writing any words." I think now it only bums me out if I feel like I'm writing a lot of words, but I'm actually not, lol. Those days are jarring. And yes, using my phone to post on the forum is really hard and more time consuming than the effort it takes to get on the computer.
I guess I don't either. Those two weekend of really high days were the last five chapters of PNecklace. I think my highest word-count day was my over 5,000 one in November, but I think the day afterward was average? I just looked it up, I lied. The next day, I wrote about 4,000 words. I guess if I have a really high day, the next day will usually be really high as well. If only I could aim to have only high word count days, lol. I'm guessing these are untamed bursts of inspiration rather than the day to day? I had these with PBox too, but back then it's when I would get the chapters done, rather than trying to put in even mediocre effort on a daily basis. I try to live by the "you can't edit a blank page" adage these days, but I don't know if I was in the right headspace back then to commit to daily (or near daily) writing. I do need to get back into doing some other things besides writing. There's many books and movies I've been meaning to give some attention to.
I agree, just making yourself open the story and write anything, even if it's just a word, is important when establishing that routine. Once it becomes a routine, it's easier to write more than one word, but there are still days when I may only write one paragraph or even just a sentence. Thankfully I haven't had many of those days this summer because I have more time and energy to make myself keep at it until I come up with more than that, but I still usually don't write as much as I feel like I should be for the amount of time I've been spending in front of the computer LOL. I would have to write over 2,000 words a day these next few days to make my goal, which I am capable of, yet can't seem to do on this story. It may just be the the nature of the story and where I'm at in it. There aren't a lot of big, dramatic, pulse-pounding scenes, and those are the ones I get sucked into and write fast. This one I'm just kind of strolling along through, slow and steady LOL. But I'm making progress either way, so I guess that's what really matters.
I had really gotten away from reading for fun, so I'm trying to get back into that routine. I have been plodding through "Where the Crawdads Sing" for about a year, so my first priority is to finish that book. Everyone says it's so good. It's not bad, but I get bored easily with it. I'm about 3/4 of the way through, so I'm getting there! I have a hard copy of that book, but I also took advantage of Prime Day and bought myself a new tablet to replace my broken Kindle Fire so I can read ebooks on a bigger screen than my phone. That should help too.
I have been trying to do some other creative-type activities, too. I finished building the Lego Knight Bus from Harry Potter that my niece and nephew got me for Christmas. I hadn't played with Legos since I was a kid, so that was an experience! I also started working on the BSB puzzle I bought during the pandemic and never put together LOL. I hate doing puzzles, so I haven't gotten very far on it, but at least it's started. I want to finish it and frame it so I can hang it up in my writing room. And finally, I decided to redecorate my guest bathroom, which is the only room in my house I didn't do anything to after I bought it. I decided it needs a fun theme. I got the wild idea to give it a "The Shining" theme (so welcoming, right?) and went on Etsy to see if I could find any bathroom stuff to fit that theme, like a shower curtain or something... and OMG, I found so much stuff!! The people of Etsy are just as warped as me LOL. So I ordered a bunch of fun stuff that has slowly been coming in. You have to be brave to spend the night at my house!
Been there. Hubs and I were watching Trevor Noah once and he was doing a segment where he talked about a teenager that made bowties for all the dogs at the local animal shelter for an event they had; I was sobbing because they looked so adorable and all ended up getting adopted -- hubs made so much fun of me. Ugh, don't get me started on TLBT! Littlefoot's mom dying... heartwrenching!
I wonder why we don't cry at our own writing? Outside of laughing, I can normally feel myself feeling slightly anxious when I'm writing about the characters being anxious/nervous/afraid/worried about something (like a tight feeling in my chest), but I don't cry or get angry or anything like that. Can't explain it.
Anything with animals is sure to get me, too! Or those videos of military men and women coming home and surprising their families - I cry at every one of those, too.
That's a good question. My first guess was that it's because we came up with the ideas and probably already envisioned the scenes beforehand, but that doesn't explain why we still cry watching sad movies we've seen a million times. My other thought was that maybe it's because our brains are so focused on the process of writing that we're not feeling the emotions as much as if we were experiencing the story as a reader (or viewer of a movie). I also get that anxious feeling when I'm writing dramatic/emotional scenes, but usually not to the point of crying or shouting at my screen or the kind of reactions I have when reading/watching other people's stuff.
But that brings up another question: Have you ever cried while reading a scene you previously wrote? I don't mean proofreading or editing, but just reading for the fun of it. I have, but it's rare and not consistent. There are certain scenes that actually will bring tears to my eyes sometimes, but not every time. I think I'm more likely to cry if I've immersed myself in the story and read everything leading up to that point than if I just read a specific chapter in isolation. And even then, it's usually just a certain line that will get me more than the entire scene.
I wrote another short bit of the "Nick avoids being the main character" story and definitely added "conversate" to a piece of Nick's dialogue because I was thinking about it, lol.
I know. I need to stop asking and judging them, lol. My real qualm was that he remembers that he turned 19 in 1999. He remembers that Millennium came out in 1999. He remembers that IWITW was the lead single from Millennium. Yet somehow he thinks that they recorded it when he was 16 when they would have been busy touring for the red album and recording Backstreet's Back (the album). If he had said 18, maybe even 17, I would have accepted it. They really do need us to keep their timelines straight, or the more meticulous among us. Sometimes I have a vague memory myself, lol.
Yay, I love that you used "conversate" in your story LOL. It's fun to use those real life idiosyncrasies into stories when we can. I make myself laugh every time I have Howie say "and stuff like that," which is not nearly often enough - but I guess if I overused that phrase, it wouldn't be funny anymore.
Yeah, unless IWITW was actually recorded much earlier than any of us thought LOL. I guess we don't really know, but I also can't imagine him being younger than 18 when he recorded it. He clearly was not thinking through all that logic. And of the five of them, he should have the easiest time keeping track of dates and ages because of his birth year. It's easy math to figure out how old you were in a given year when you were born in 1980 LOL.
That was one Mare mentioned to me. I think she said she fudged around it for the less specific ones like calling Howie "D" by giving Howie's character a name that started with D. Whereas keeping "B-Rok" or "Kev" or something would be a big giveaway. That is the nice thing about an AU, many of those more obvious things just aren't in there. Or at least a super divergent AU. Something like Gobosei is an AU, but only in the sense that it's "alternate universe where the Backstreet Project is real" and not "alternate universe where the Boys are all working at a Target together" or something more like Secrets of the Heart is (That's this one, right? I'm sorry, I have a hard time keeping track of all the stories you published while I was away, lol). It's thankfully one of the things that I also don't have to worry about in PBox&Co (for the most part), since the chapters where it does make a difference, I've basically decided that cutting them or hacking/slashing them is just the better option; that and keeping Nick's name the same means I can reasonably keep all my "Nick/Nickolas/Nicky" without many issues.
That's true, though I think it would depend on how much time you spent paring down the fanfic aspects on any work. I think it would still be hard to hear "this won't work as a published novel" after working on something for such a long time. Not sure though, haven't tried it. I think there's hard things with self-publishing too. First the whole "print on demand" aspect is a monetary pain. But probably more than that is having to be your own editor, publicist, marketer, sales, and so on. Of course it's possible to hire people to do those things, but then that further cuts into your bottom line and so on. Not that it's only about making money, but all those things are full time jobs, so if writing the book you're selling isn't paying the bills, adding more of a workload might also not increase the ability to pay bills. Having worked two full time jobs at one point (one of which I wasn't getting paid for, because you know, student teaching), I can attest to the difficulty of working a job for a passion, but still having to work something menial to pay rent. And there's just not enough hours in the day to do all of that and take care of yourself; I wouldn't do it again. That said, I think if anyone's already a popular fanfic writer, it would probably be an easier task to transition into self-publishing if you could convince your readership to go with you.
But I also agree that there's something nice about knowing your audience is out there in a medium your comfortable with them interacting with you. 
I've never minded discussing my writing with other people, I'm just abysmal at the elevator pitch. For anything; there's this leadership styles compass thing, and I'm firmly in the "feelings/details" camp of it -- "big picture" is okay, "just do it" is not. So I definitely get bogged down in the details of things.
Yeah, Secrets of the Heart is the AU one I'm talking about. All five guys are in it, but they don't all know each other. It's mainly about Brian and AJ, who don't know each other at the beginning but meet over the course of the story. Kevin is still Brian's cousin, Howie is AJ's friend, and Nick is a substitute teacher who takes over for Brian when he's on leave. So they don't have the same kind of brotherly/boyband relationship they do in real life where nicknames would get thrown around a lot. I do think "D" is in there, so I would probably do the same thing Mare did and just give Howie a D name, but I'd have to look and see if there are any others.
I think it's fine to keep Nick's name the same. Of all of them, that would be the one to keep (in a Nick-centered story, anyway). When I started OF novelizing Broken, I also kept Nick's name and changed the other four.
Regarding publishing, those are all great points. It's been years since I even half-seriously looked into it, but the more I read about the whole process, the less interested I am in pursuing it. It does seem like it takes a lot of effort and/or money, depending on how you go about it, for little chance of success if you're going the traditional route. Even if I succeeded, I don't know that the reward is worth the work and the risk in my case because, like I said, what would I even do with a published book? I wouldn't want to promote it outside of the internet, and I probably wouldn't make much, if any, money from it, so what's the point? I already have an internet presence and am fine with writing for free under a pen name, so the only point would be to prove that I'm good enough to published (which, in reality, I'm probably not LOL) and bask in the glow of seeing my book in print.
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Topic: Writing & Thread (aka The Writing Thread 4) (Read 352500 times)