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mlundertow · 2 years ago

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Pulling a Haruka

tl;dr: Muv-Luv Undertow hasn’t been abandoned. I just have a lot going on right now.

So… long time, no write, right?

Yeah, it's probably been, what, a year and a half since I posted a chapter to Muv-Luv Undertow? You’d be fully justified in thinking it’s an abandoned fic.

Thing is, it’s not abandoned. It’s not dead.

It’s just… resting…

So… this is going to take some explaining. Content warning for severe medical conditions.

So, maybe the first thing to know about the author of Muv-Luv Undertow — that'd be me — is that I'm old, at least relative to most anime fans. Really frickin’ old. Long past the point where individual birthdays are interesting and you have to do math in your head to remember your exact age because it kind of doesn't matter anymore.

Like, seriously, the first election I could vote in was Reagan vs. Mondale, and I voted for whoever the Libertarian was, because I was still in the thrall of both-sides-are-bad poseur contrarian bullshit that took me far to long to outgrow. (That college friend that Noah mentions during the trial in book 3, the one with weirdo political opinions? That’s me trashing my younger self.)

Anyways, when you burn through your 30s, 40s, and 50s, one popular thing to do is to have kids. Both our societal traditions and contemporary media tell us this is an important, heartwarming, and even fun thing to do.

And sometimes it is!

But also, sometimes your kid is born with a congenital heart defect.

And sometimes that acts up with severe side-effects when they grow up.

And sometimes when they're in the hospital for that, a scan discovers cancer.

And sometimes when they're undergoing chemotherapy, they have a stroke.

And sometimes all of these things happen at once.

So… yeah. That's a big part of where I've been (there's more, which accounts for 2022 and why we had to move out of our house, but this is the current problem). I actually had to take four months off work — I'm lucky I work at a company where I even can do that — and I'm still not back to work full time. The kid requires a lot of care, and it has drained all my free time, between caring for him, doing my job, and giving my wife a break.

And free time is the one thing I need to work on this fanfic.

I do think I'm eventually going to get back to it, as the kid improves and life here stabilizes, but I can't put a date on that. I’d hate to set expectations and let readers down even more than I already have.

But it pains my heart to want to finish this story and not be able to. I think about it almost every day.

Still, it’s worth assessing where Undertow is, and what it’ll take to finish it once I can.

Muv-Luv Undertow was always planned as a series of five books. I wrote in that format because I wanted to mimic the light novel format that Schwarzesmarken and Total Eclipse used. I also thought it would be good discipline to have to pay off novel-length plots while spinning the tale of the larger series. I think it's intimidating to see some fic on AO3 that’s like 500,000 words or more. Even though Undertow will probably end up close to that (it’s already at 300K words), being able to see it broken up by book may be more appealing than diving into some big, potentially-unstructured sprawl.

Three books are completely done, at least as first drafts:

Broken Ship — AO3, epub

Jour de Gloire — AO3, epub

If You Tolerate This — AO3, epub

Then we have the in-progress book four:

Join the Parade — A03, epub

And speaking of “progress”, how is this actually going? Well, book four is at 72,964 words across twelve numbered chapters (not counting the front matter that AO3 counts as separate chapters, like the cover image or the epigraph). As I thought I was getting the book rolling again last December, I finally outlined the end of Act II and all of Act III, filling in a lot of gaps I had been putting off making decisions on. Book four has been the least plotted-in-advance story in the series, and that made it harder to write even back when things were moving along. It’s pretty clear that I'm a plotter, not a pantser.

One thing I did in outlining these chapters was to do virtual index cards for key beats — the things that have to happen and the things I want to happen (ideally, the Venn diagram of these should be a circle) — so I could move them around the last few chapters to see how different arrangements worked out, in terms of plot, theme, and feel.

In fact, here’s a PNG of how I ended up breaking Act III… with spoiler protection provided by the Gaussian blur filter in Acorn 7. I let a few cards go through unblurred so you can speculate about what's happening between here and there. It might read a little dull in this format, but I promise you that several things explode before we're done.

So, seven more chapters and a one-scene epilogue get us done with book four.

After that, the story ends in book five. Payoffs for stuff I've been building since the first book, some twists that you won't see coming (oh, but they're coming), and connections back into the main Muv-Luv timeline that’ll show why this story was worth telling in the first place. One thing that’ll help book five is that since so much of it is natural consequences of what’s come before, the plotting should go faster, because everything that happens is now inevitable.

You know, like when you hit Act V in any good tragedy.

One of the themes of book four has been about our protagonist Noah being pulled back to his normal life. Whatever route he chooses, the end of the current book will bring him to the point of no return, and then beyond.

Book five is titled Autumn Closin’ In. I'll save you the trouble of looking up the epigraph; it’s from the song “Night Moves”, because you can’t set a story in the woods of northern Michigan without eventually dropping in a Bob Seger song. Literally. I think Gov. Whitmer signed that into law a few years back.

Ain’t it funny how the night moves, when you just don’t seem to have as much to lose? Strange how the night moves… with autumn closin’ in.

I’ll post here in this Tumblr as things come back together. I also plan to start a Mastodon account (possibly on the anime-themed urusai.social instance, if they’ll have me) to replace the @ml_undertow Twitter account, because Elon has ruined Twitter, and everyone should be migrating off it by now, if you haven’t done so already. As things get closer to starting book five, I’ll also need to commission Hirei to do one more character design and a matching book cover. (Now that we’ve done Noah, Adrienne, Kimmy, and Don, who do you suppose will be on the final cover, and why?)

I don’t know when, but we’ll get there. And it’ll all have been worth it.

Even if it does mean suffering through a three-year Haruka-like coma.

#fanfic #ao3 author #muv-luv

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