Tumblr Dedicated To The Ao3 Star Stable Online Fanfiction "A Quintessential Jorvegian Summer Vacation". Primarily announcing chapter updates. pfp by @thereisabearonmyceiling. Find me at @shiroselia for yapping and other such fun things.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
I've finished the first draft of QuintSum. So, what now?
Well, the short answer is that I'm going to release it all on Ao3, but there's a few things to discuss related to that process, because that won't be done in a day either.
Beautiful drawings of the main cast done by @thereisabearonmyceiling and @dorianwolfforest respectively!
How will you release the fic?
The long and short of it all is that I release one chapter at a time in chronological order. I divide them into batches/groups to make my life easier planning for them, but this doesn't really change anything in practice. For a better view on where I currently am, have a look at the Ao3 summary.
How long is this fic?
Short version: Long. Really fucking long.
Long version: 138 chapters, as far as I have planned. Originally, it was 135, then I underestimated how long chapter 57 would get, and had to split it in two. Then, as I was reworking the final arc, I added two whole new chapters to it that weren't even in the first draft. So, now I can't say. But that should be it, assuming I don't have to split anymore chapters for length reasons. I shouldn't have to, but, you know, clearly I cannot be trusted with anything when it comes to word counts and chapter lengths.
As for the word count? My personal prediction is around 850-950k. Every, and I do mean every, single one of my friends thinks I'm gonna hit 1 million with ease. So, place your own bets I guess? And then we'll see?
Why do you talk as if you've already finished the fic?
Because I have. The fic you're all reading and I'm currently uploading is the second draft that I started working on in August 2024. The first/original draft was started in September of 2023, and finished in July of 2024. The original draft ended up at 280k words, at 135 chapters. I'm sure you can figure out the rest.
When would be a good time to start the fic?
Literally right now/whenever you feel like it. The fic is not getting shorter, so if you wanna read it, might as well do it now.
When does the next chapter come out?
When it's done. (Read: I don't know. I don't have an upload schedule, and I'm not planning on getting one either. Because I don't want one, and also I'm too busy for one. So, whenever it's finished.)
What is important to keep in mind about the fic?
Two major things: I have consistently talked on my main about how the biggest goal of QuintSum has been to "make Elizabeth's death worth it"; and third-party sources, of the my friends kind, would all agree that I have written a by the books tragedy, catharsis and all.
Do with that what you will. But, honestly, just read the tags, read the fic, and go from there. I don't go as mature as some other rewrite fics do (not a dunk, people can do whatever they want, I think every rewrite fic ever is very cool, and that includes the people who write them), but I definitely discuss and portray a lot more mature topics than the game does (including portraying in-game events in a much more in-depth/mature way).
(My personal choice for 'load-bearing tags' would be: Tragedy, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Grief/Mourning, Eventual Happy Ending, and Tonal Whiplash.)
(At the time of writing, until the fic is finished, all of the tags may not apply to the chapters currently released.) <- also the explanation for why there is two archive warnings, one of which is "does not apply", it's because major character death is a Very late-game tag and we simply won't get there in a while (once we do reach that part I'm considering just removing the "does not apply" one)
Anything else?
Tell @tobnuuy that you love him because he's the entire reason that I started, nevertheless finished this fuckass fic of mine. Stay tuned for the release, boys, we fucking made it.
(If you want some sporadic updates because I can't shut up, I'm always yappin over at @shiroselia and otherwise you can find me at Ao3 as per usual)
And also happy "I hit 500k words a chapter ago", but I just realised I could do it Now, so I'm doing it now! Huzzah! (I finished the first draft on the 17th of July 2024, hence I realised I had a fantastic opportunity of timing.)
Explanations for everything under the cut. Yes. Everything. (Contains minor mentions of unfiltered spoilers for part 1 and Particularly part 2)
More than one draft: There's two (technically, if we ignore all the editing the pre-50s chapters have gotten) drafts of the story. The one I wrote 2023-2024, and the one I'm still working on to this day. You're seeing the 2nd draft. If I hit 1 mil (which I will lbfr here), I'm gonna release the first draft in its own ao3 fic The Way of Kings Prime Style.
The 10k Curse: I keep accidentally writing chapters at 10k words or more, all the time, somehow. Even if, or especially if, there's no real reason for that chapter to be that long.
19k Chapter Split: What is now chapter 57 and 58 were originally supposed to be one chapter, but chapter 57 got so long when I wrote it that I decided to just cut my losses and split them in half. Which is a good thing, because if I hadn't, ch 57 would've been 19k words long.
The Fucking Google Docs Character Limit: Did YOU know that google documents has a limit for how many characters can coexist in a singular document? Well, if you didn't, know you do! Because I didn't, and neither did any of my friends, until that fateful day on the 16th of July 2024 (the same day I'm writing this, coincidentally, I didn't know that!), when we discovered that the limit is 1.02 million characters, because I hit it.
Horsefic: Horsefic is the nickname the fic has among my friends because they don't play SSO, which I refer to as "the horsegame" to them, and so, quint became horsefic
English Major: For those who don't know, I major in english literature. When I started the fic back in 2023, I was one year into a bachelors degree, and as of writing this I am one year into a masters degree, also in english literature (and if anyone is curious my minor is social studies). Yes, this has been the source of Many a joke.
280k: The original/first draft ended at 280 000 words. Hence why I always refer back to the fabled 280k whenever I manage to do something silly with the wordcount again.
Brando Sando Comparison: Brandon Sanderson is my favourite author, but even before I started reading The Stormlight Archives, me and my friends liked to joke about how I was basically Sanderson because he is also of the insanely long stories school of thought (fun fact: I just finished Edgedancer the other day and his author's note mentions how he planned for it to be 14k words but accidentally made it like 80k, which "happens a lot, especially when you're me", and I have never felt so seen in my LIFE.)
Thought She'd Be Done By NY 2025: When I started the 2nd draft in August 2024, I thought I'd be done with the second draft/the editing somewhere around the new year. Well, considering I have 63 chapters left and it's not almost 2 years since that, you can probably guess how that went.
Stream of Consciousness: The first draft is written using a somewhat reworked/Manda-ified version of stream of consciousness, which is a modernist style of writing that every sane person hates! I like it though, I think it's cool. (If you know about James Joyce's Ulysses, that's written in stream of consciousness. I'm not reading that though I don't hate myself THAT much.) <- inside joke between me and my ma coursemates
Jorvikpov Beta Reader Incident: On the 13th of September, @tobnuuy approached me and asked me if I could become his beta reader for his then ongoing rewrite fic jorvikpov, three days later, on the 16th of September, I DM'd him to ask if he wanted to read a little something I had done. That something was the first version of the first chapter of what would Very Quickly become Quint.
2011 Player: I've played SSO since December 3rd 2011, or since I was 8 years old. Which is funny for a lot of reasons, mostly because I not a very stereotypical "old" SSO players (mostly by virtue of preferring how it is in the present), and also because the story that would eventually become QuintSum started with me making up silly headcanons for my player character. Fun fact: in the first iteration of the story, Aideen was the main villain and abusive to Moonlight because 8 year old me thought she did something by turning the main god secretly evil.
We Broke The Google Docs Collaborative Sharing In Like a Week Lol: Early on, Toby liked to hang out in my document as I was writing the new chapters, except, at a certain point, we realised that things I wrote didn't translate over to his version of the document. Which is to say that we had to figure out what was wrong, and it turned out that (probably due to the document's size and the sharing feature/google docs at large being Asscheeks) he wasn't receiving my updates, and from then on, we realised that Maybe we should just have him read stuff on ao3 instead. Or at least, after the chapter is finished.
Qunt: A combination of the Quint from A Quintessential Jorvegian Summer Vacation/Part 1 and the Punt from How To Adequately Punt a Squirrel/Part 2, almost exclusively used, and coined by @tobnuuy
The Ao3 Wall of Chapter Buttons: I'll let the image speak for itself.
"A Quintessential Jorvegian Bonus Chapter Collection": Back in 2023, when I started the fic (and was doing that excellent tried and true method of finishing your work and making it good called "writing as I go along") I made a little thing where I wrote short stories that weren't canon where Deia and Moonlight fucked around and did stupid shit, reminiscent of what is Technically the original draft of quint, i.e a bunch of short stories I wrote when I was like 10 where Deia and Moonlight harassed Jorvik's citizens 2014 ship-obsessed tumblrina style. Suffice it to say it did not last long, because I had a plot to figure out, and the project very quickly got out of my hands. I do still have the storis in my google docs, though. (You'll have to send me actual money to get those published again though slash silly.)
"Deia and Moonlight's Various Horsegame Misadventures": The original title I gave to the story before I had an actual proper one. i.e the predecessor to Unto Daylight, and also why I write my tags like Deilight (other than it being a LOT better for tagging/searching than if I had just written Daylight the word in all my liveblog spam posts.)
Anonymous For Like 3 Months Lmao/The MayAlex Journal Incident: For those of you, which I assume is most of you, who weren't around back in 2023, the entire reason why the @equestrianequivalent tumblr blog exists, is because I was originally planning on posting quint anonymously. The entire reason for this is because @tobnuuy was originally anonymous while posting @jorvikpov, except he actually knows how to stfu and not talk about everything he does, so even before I actually revealed myself, it was obvious that it was me to everyone. As for when I ACTUALLY said hey this is my fic, a little Thing happened during the winter of that year (like November or December), where SSE accidentally(???) removed Alex and Maya being listed as each other's girlfriends in the in-game journal, which lead to all of us faggots here on tumblr getting pissed, and how I chose to be mad about it, Other than writing a long post about how it's cringe and stupid (because we assumed it was intentional, and tbfh we still have no proof that it wasn't) <- I think we all concluded they made it quest-dependant information but like. girl come tf on here. I also decided to make a joke about how. something something better than sse something something, and then I told people to read my fic and obvs linking to the eqeq blog. It wasn't a very big deal, I'm p sure nobody read the fic at that point. It was REALLY funny to me and Toby though.
Moonlight Gijinka/Children: Moonlight is my oldest OC. I used to be an SSO roleplayer of the "we roleplay as our horses" kind. Even after I stopped roleplaying, I took Moonlight and the other horses, and turned them into humans and used them as characters in my other original stories at the time (we're talking age 10-12 somewhere there). In one of them, Moonlight has two children named Grimmé and Nagya (named after Grima and Naga from Fire Emblem Awakening). That's it, that's the lore. She's an actual OC of mine outside of quint, too. In fact, chronologically, quint is like her third story of mine she features in. (Yes she has her scars in her human form, too, that lore is, like most things about Moonlight still present in her character, OLD.)
Pandora: Deia's dad that stepped up. (So remember how I said that there's actually Three completely original characters in the fic? Yeah, so about that-) <- learn more about this if I ever write that 2nd part (Based on the name, yes, it's actually what you think it is)
"It's not a tragedy, it's just sad": Actual thing I used to say about Unto Daylight as a whole. I love(d) to insist that the story isn't actually that sad even though (spoilers for part 2) Moonlight "dies" in the last chapter of part 2 and Elizabeth's death is the #1 most important thing that happens in the first part/overall. Not to mention the EVERYTHING ELSE going on. But the reason why I say that is because I'm an autistic literature critic and exclusively judge stories critically/with my english major lense (because I can't do it any other way) which means that when I look at stories I judge them based on their internal logic and the strength of their narrative. i.e the reason I say it's not a tragedy is because (particularly in reference to part 2) "Moonlight has to die, otherwise I'm a copout", and (in reference to part 1) "I have to actually sell Elizabeth's death as meaning something, otherwise I'm a copout". But, as all of my friends have said in response to That neurotypical ass statement: "Manda, that doesn't mean that it isn't sad."
The Origin of Equestrian Equivalent: It's the name of one of my original stories/OC groups. That's it. It's not more exciting than that. I name all my stories (or at least used to because nowadays quint is 99% of my brain power) and the name I picked for my original group of bri'ish equestrians was Equestrian Equivalent, which slaps, and should not be contained to only my head. And also I had an old ao3 that used my main username at the time so I made a new one for my horseficcing endeavours.
Garnok/Aideen: Famously based her entire original lore fanfic backstory on one (1) really shitty break-up. <- learn more about this in that hypothetical part 2 (also known as: if SSE won't explain why Garnok and Aideen are beefing, then they can't stop me, either!)
Hilarious time for me to post a chapter, because yesterday was my 23rd birthday, and tomorrow is the 2 year anniversary of when I completed the first draft.
So, realistically, posting it now is lowkey perfect!
Somehow this turned out a Bit longer than I thought (almost 6k), but I guess that's on par for the course with me by now. God, we're so close to 500k... (Still not sure whether it'll be 74 or 75, but we'll see that soon enough, I'm sure.)
This chapter has been called many things. @horseslur has dubbed it, among others, "the most boring 69 ever", and I personally have referred to it as "the most doomer chapter yet."
Either way, we're now closer to half a million words than four hundred thousand.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
QuintSum Ch 67! Featuring such fun facts like "I spent genuine minutes on the wikipedia page for 'ice' while writing this chapter"! And of course that even if SSE releases new and fresh good horse game yuri, it won't stop me from Da Grind
Oh right and we're one (1) more chapter away from the literal half-way point, isn't that sick?
Don't look at the word count, don't ask me how long this chapter got, don't ask me how a chapter with basically no substantial plot what so ever was THIS close to being split.
