Good morning, good evening, and/or good afternoon to you fair reader. I NPCBurner, Lord of Raccoons, have returned with my second journal. This journal, in an attempt to get me back into the swing of working(because my day job had been killing me), will have the topic of my current WIP and to-do list.
But before that, I must give thanks. Thanks to all you Dense fans, to Xierra, Draven, and Rorian for helping me, and specified thanks to Sappy(InkBunny) Seventy(find him everywhere except Deviantart), and KhaySem4012(Pixiv) who commented on my last journal.
Those acknowledgments out of the way it’s time to dive into a steaming pile of Dense!
Let’s see, according to Bean(official secretary and helper coon) I have. . . 11 stories in the works. For the record when I say stories, I mean things that require me writing a script, not just things that will be posted as a story, it also includes comics and bonuses. Among them, only one is 100% complete(for the record I speaking on the writing end, not the full production), and only five even have titles. The titled stories being “Home Sweet Oum”(a George story), “Jungle De Ikou”(A random gift story I started out of the blue for a friend staring Joseph and some of his characters), “Revolutionary Girls”(a Cat and Brittany story), “Darkest Dungeon”(a Deiro story), “Book Hunt Part 2”(Yes, Book Hunt is continuing), and “Art of War” (a Zoe short).
I know some are you are amazed by that stated list, but let me remind you that all of that isn’t even half of my full list. Thankfully I can say that at least 7 out of 11(Heh) are at least started, most of which are just waiting for their second drafting, granted that’s because most of those were written back in 2018 before the depression hit me. This is kind of a sad occurrence that happens to many. Creators working so hard to set things up, only depression to trap us in a hellish unproductive miserable limbo. Can’t say I’ve met many artists to choose to just stop working on something they starred, but I have met many stricken by the sickness of depression, but that’s not a topic for this journal.
Now then, with the list out of the way, I bet some of you are curious as to the contents of these 11 stories. Well sadly I can’t reveal any of their contents, giving away details kind of ruins them(actually giving any sort of knowledge about them ruins them due to your brains crafting expectations based around your desires with the given knowledge, but oh well), but I will instead give a bit of insight as to my part of the process of making Dense. . . you know actually making Dense. Xierra does deserve a crap ton of credit, but from her perspective, without me, there is no Dense.
So, where to start? How about inspiration? Well can’t do that since my brain comes up with ideas 100% at random. I will be doing literally anything and suddenly an idea will pop into my head, which sucks because I can’t always start on them which puts them at risk of falling to the wayside. Though once that initial idea step is over, comes the actual writing. I will say this now, I am a very inefficient writer. When I write I basically plop myself down at a computer and write getting the whole idea out in a nice hot mess. Those are the first drafts the clutter my computer. After the first draft is completed I review it and have others review it to see how the concept and idea hold up outside of my head, and then comes the absolutely worst thing any creator can do. Once the review of the first draft is done, I open a blank doc and rewrite the whole thing from the ground up.
“Why is this method so bad?”, some of you may ask. Well, it’s very time consuming and inefficient. I basically writing one story twice. “If it’s so bad, then why do you do it?”, you may ask next. Well, that’s because long ago I discovered a big flaw in the traditional editing process. In traditional editing(the way most commonly taught in schools) the writer just goes through and changes the problem areas, which if not done carefully can actually cause more problems if it’s not carefully written to fit the surrounding context. For small things like a word or sentence you can pretty easily replace them with low risk of it affecting the story, but multiple sentences or even a paragraph that could stick out drastically in a story in a story if it’s not carefully crafted to fit the spot. I learned this by doing said process. I made a change, reread, then saw how it stuck out. After that, I had to make more changes and repeat. So eventually I just decided it was far easier just to rewrite from teh ground up using the base draft as a guideline to make sure I’m sticking to the story while making all of the appropriate changes.
And after that step, it gets a second review and after approval gets put in the queue and waits for its turn to be made into the Dense you all know by Xierra.
And there you have a nice peek into the process of making Dense and what I’m up to behind the scenes. I get random ideas, create an initial draft, do a rewrite, then send it off to be made.
And with that said, that’s what I’m going to do because 11 stories is a alot and my brain doesn’t stop putting out ideas.
That you again dear reader for stopping by, and I’ll see you in the next Journal and or post.
