Okayyy, so I've written about the drafting process in detail. But along the way, logistics problems tend to pop up that can't be solved in words alone.
Mostly, it has to do with knowing exactly where someone is or what someone is doing at the same time as another character I'm writing. For instance, when does Alva get back to the Base? How long is she there before Aloy shows up?
I didn't always take detailed notes on this during my first play-through. And after I abandoned my Scrivener file, (more about this here ⚙️) I decided to refine my timeline.
I already had a great foundation based on my first play-through and my New Game+ speed run. So, I started fresh, with a new game file and good old fashioned pen & paper. I'm still working through this as I write. (Just finished the Scorcher side quest!!)
*This is in a Master-size (A4) Leuchtturm notebook, in which I'm working back-to-front. I prefer purple pen and grid paper always.
Yes. I know. I am a psycho. As I mentioned in the Preamble, gaming timelines are a special interest. 💁🏼♀️ Plus, I build client-friendly Gantt charts for design projects IN MY SLEEP. So, taking my timeline from paper into Spreadsheet status felt like a v natural next step.
💡I started with a weekly at-a-glance, mostly because I needed to coordinate when various characters arrived back at Base:
Why yes, I am tracking Zo & Aloy's periods. Because there is no single, magical herb you can take to stop pregnancy. Don't get me wrong, I dig this trope! It's important to discuss family planning, and our genre is ✨fantasy✨ after all. But I can only suspend my disbelief so far, and there are other ways to get around this, which a Matriarchal society would probably be clued in on.
💡 This quickly evolved to a daily at-a-glance once Kotallo made it to the Base:
This spreadsheet helped me IMMENSELY as I was writing chapters 13, 14, 16, 17, & 19! Basically any time Aloy & Kotallo are not in the same location. Knowing what Kotallo is doing at the Base while Aloy is off mid-adventure has been super important to make sure their Focus calls work and feel natural.
Likewise, knowing exactly what day Erend returns, and how long they have before Aloy gets back all helps with continuity and flow.
Other Things I'm Tracking:
💡Datapoints. The whole point of the GAIA Gang is that they're sorting through the data Aloy collected during the events of HZD. And since that was an absolute whirlwind year for Aloy, I'm thinking her files are a fucking shit show—and almost none of the people sorting through them even know how to read. 😵
So, I started by accumulating all the files by location. I am assuming they're probably geo-tagged—if not, they're at least assembled in order of pick-up, which would mean they're ordered by Aloy's general location at time-of-discovery anyway.
*I crossed them out as I moved them to the next spreadsheet tab...
From this hot mess, I figure that Zo, in her infinite wisdom, took one look at Aloy's files and went, "Oh hell no."
💡Here's the way I imagine Zo organized her playlists, much to Varl, Erend, & Kotallo's relief (Meanwhile, Alva re-filtered everything, and discovered entirely new metadata categories, obviously):
The most important detail here was time!! Most of these are like 1 minute long... but 1 minute in the game is like, 20 minutes IRL. So you've gotta figure the GAIA Gang is back at Base binge-watching an entire docu-series, while simultaneously learning how to read (and procrastinating with hours and hours of bodycam battle footage).
No wonder they're always busy when Aloy shows up!
💡 And yes, these are all tabs on a single spreadsheet:
💡 "Population" is literally just a mess of numbers & formulas as I try to figure out how we went from ~20 E-9 Cradle inhabitants to multiple tribes in the span of ~700 years.
I mean in 3041 we're prolly sitting at like... maybe ~15k in the U.S.?
*On second thought, that Oseram number is probably higher.
Anywayyyy, as fun as a blank page is, my brain really does work best on a grid. The process is totally intuitive, and I create the necessary docs as I go, the same as I would for any client or project. Sometimes, you need to explain things in a way so everyone is on the same page, and I find spreadsheets invaluable in that regard. (Y'all should see my wedding planning spreadsheet, lol.)
This whole process has helped me to find what works for me, and writing fanfic is truly preparing me to write my own original works. What I've discovered is that spreadsheets are part of my flowstate. They bring me a deep sense of peace and they help me to stay on track and oriented while I'm in the weeds.
🖤 Really, I want to come back to something I said in my second 'Process' post: Do what feels natural. Everyone is different. If being 'organized' steals your joy, don't do it. Stay messy! Whatever! Who cares? The most important part is that you find your flowstate.
I found this old Hindu saying while I was copywriting for a Chinese Medicine client, and it really stuck with me: "There are a hundred paths up the mountain, so it doesn't matter which path you take. The only one wasting time is the one who runs around and around the mountain telling everyone else that their path is wrong."
I'm just here documenting my own path up my mountain. And part of me thinks that it's all incredibly self-indulgent and cringe, but hey—when has blogging ever not been?
If you've read this far, I'm grateful. It's all a bit shouting-into-the-void out here, especially when you're this deep into a niche that moved on a while ago. But I've always loved a slowburn. (And if you do too, you might consider reading The Marshal.)
Sooooo, I started drafting Part 2 almost immediately after Part 1 concluded—and by now I've abandoned my Scrivener file entirely and am doing everything in Google Docs. (I talk about my switch from Scrivener to Google, here. ⚙️)
This time, I didn't have all the journal entries to work from, either. I was starting entirely from a blank slate. So at first, I just let myself WRITE. All the scenes I was most excited about, in no particular order, just to squeeze all the juice out.
I did that for like a month. And then, when I had about 15-20k words of random bits and bobs, I started to put them in order, and develop a through-line. That's where the draft docs & trackers came in.
✏️ Away from Scrivener, I needed some extra organizational tools to house my more general notes, research, & scraps. So, I built this li'l cutie with easy links to all my Google draft files, and included a brief summary that helped me greatly when plotting out the next set 10 chapters for Part 2:
*The chapter titles were updated as my outline changed, but the summaries did not! The descriptor for Chapter 20 is now, like, Chapter 23.
Keeping the descriptors short really helps me stay on task. If I have so much I need to cover in a chapter that it drops my formatting to the next line, I know I probably won't be able to cover everything in ~3,000-5,000 words.
✏️ Now, that's just the first page of the "Table of Contents." As of today, it's 13 pages long, and it also houses a TON of notes and working drafts and snippets of dialogue that I am saving for future, as-yet-unspecified chapters.
It's really messy—and sometimes when I'm out & about and my service is shit, I whip open my old Notes app, just to get a thought down. Here, have a taste of what's been rattling around in my brain...
Dialogue often starts as just the dialogue. I layer in tags & descriptors later, during the editing process. Most of the conversations I've written started with me talking to myself alone in the car, in the shower, or while washing dishes. (This works for copywriting too. My best ideas almost NEVER come to me while I'm sitting-down-looking-at-a-screen. Of course.)
For instance, that same conversation made it from the Notes app into a Google Doc and has since evolved to:
A li'l somethin-somethin from the upcoming Scorcher Season's Chapter 24 🔥
✏️ Once I've got all the major plot points written, I'll go back and write the "boring" stuff in chronological order. Okay, it's not really boring. It's just the filler information that helps a reader get from point A to point B, and I edit as I go. This ends up being like half of the total word count for the full 10 Chapters.
I'm currently hitting this point in Part 3—and you can see below that just writing my favorite parts here and there gets me pretty far on its own. Over the last 3 weeks, I've nearly exhausted my imagination developing the general story arc. Next up, I'll go back and start fleshing out each chapters one by one.
Wanna know something CRAZY?? Over the last ~year, I've noticed that I tend to write nonstop during Mercury Retrogrades. Like, I don't want to do anything else. I'm learning not to schedule any major projects for these ~3 week periods, so I don't blow my deadlines on account of being too obsessed with my fanfic to bother. 😅
After my decision to expand to 4 Parts total, my original ToC Doc got a bit... top heavy. (Also, I got really tired of manually calculating all the word counts.) So, instead of continuing in Docs, I added a tab to my spreadsheet:
*Hiding my chapter summaries so as not to spoil!! 😈
As you can see, I fill in the links as I create the draft docs... and I've already had to split a chapter in half due to scale, so the untitled <Scorcher 7> dropped to Part 4. I'm hopeful I won't have to split any more, so I can end strong on 'Ten Days.'
I don't usually start the finale until the very end, because I've learned that the wonderful comments I receive will sometimes give me extra ideas that I want to ensure make it into the fic!
✏️ Around the time I've fully completed the first 5 chapters, I'll give myself the green light to start posting. That leaves me just enough runway to finish out the rest of the season, and posting on a timeline helps keeps me motivated & accountable!
This is getting kinda long, so I'll write about Trackers & Timelines I've developed along the way in another post.
When I began writing, I already had plenty of material to work from! For more details on this, read the Preamble. 💋
⚙️ When I began work on the fic, I was working in Scrivener, adapting first-person journal entries I'd drafted in my phone's Notes app. I wanted the full fic to be third-person in order to develop the background motivations for multiple characters. Scrivener gave me plenty of space to hold all the journal entries, timeline notes, and dialogue scraps I didn't know what to do with yet.
I originally planned for 10 Chapters, at ~10k words each. My initial outline looked like this:
I The Bulwark
II The Kulrut
III Returning
IV Rest
V What Was Lost
VI Waiting
VII The Scorcher (👈🏻 After 26 chapters and 90k words, we are currently here.)
VIII Rebellion
IX Endgame
X Finale, or Returning, Reprise
However, I was quickly burning out due to the length of each chapter, and after asking around in Discord, I had a sinking feeling readers would be overwhelmed.
What I Did Instead:
At a certain point in April, after about ~6 months of on-again off-again drafting, I got fed up, a little drunk, and chopped up my enormous existing chapters into smaller chapters: five, to be exact. That night I posted the first one, ironically called 'The Last One.'
While I have been very selective about chapter titles, at the time, I didn't have a title for the whole shebang. But I was wine-drunk and flippant, and said "Oh just fuggin pick something u bish." So I called it 'The Marshal,' because it was just vague enough, y'know?
(I absolutely would have called it 'What I Choose,' if it didn't already exist.)
I told myself I'd post weekly. Just the first 10, ending in that bittersweet conversation Aloy has with Varl about Rost. It gave me 5 weeks to figure out how to write 5 more chapters. And I was off to a great start with 6 & 7 drafted in advance.
But then I got this comment on Chapter 6: "Looking forward to the Kulrut Hopefully we get some more of our power duo fighting together 😁"
I was... absolutely planning on skipping directly to the dialogue scene after the battle. And based on what I'd already plotted, I would need to squeeze in an extra chapter to get'er done, pushing out my 10 chapter outline. But I REALLY didn't want to disappoint anyone, especially if they were LOOKING FORWARD TO IT?!? 🥹
I was also traveling at this time, away from my computer and my stupid, bulky Scrivener file. So I whipped open a Google Doc and started firing on all cylinders to write a new Chapter 8 complete with Kulrut battle scene. And lo, I discovered:
⚙️ Writing in Google Docs gave me SO MUCH MORE FREEDOM. I could access my drafts from my desktop, my tablet, and my phone. These days, I write mostly in bed on my tablet, which is a FAR cry from the early days staying up till 2am at my desk.
It was extra comfy, because Google Docs is where I do all my client work. As I've mentioned: IRL, I'm a copywriter/project manager for print & digital design work. Mostly, I build websites, but as a freelancer, I work on a wide range of projects and the tools I use need to be flexible & accessible to a wide range of audiences.
The Google Suite is perfect for that, and I have a simple filing system for all my projects to keep things nice and neat. My writing work fit perfectly into that system, and the same flexibility & accessibility really supported my writing process.
Here's what my file folder looks like these days:
Which frankly, is a lot easier to navigate than this dumb Scrivener sidebar:
I finished chapters 8, 9, & 10 in Google Docs. I'm still really proud of myself for taking the leap and posting. Sharing your work is scary! Or at least, it was for me.
I'd never written ANYTHING on this scale before, and it felt like a huge accomplishment. I'll be honest, impulsively posting that first chapter with a short runway and a clear end-goal made it a LOT easier to be accountable. I would recommend this strategy to ANYONE!
Tips & Takeaways:
🖤 Consistency is key, but I've found it comes at a price. Trying to post once a week in perpetuity will slowly bleed you out. Wait to post until you have at least half your content under your belt, and set a clear end date—if only for your own sanity.
🖤 Be flexible in your outline!! In both Part 1 and Part 2 I ended up with an extra chapter that pushed my intended finale into the next season. I'm still glad I had an outline, but I'm grateful I left room for it to change. (This is something I would have had a LOT of trouble with 5 years ago! Personal growth FTW!)
🖤 When you start to feel like writing is just biting concrete, find the most fun way out. Is it writing the most exciting scene you can think of? Or is it looking at what you already have and finding a new way forward within your existing structure?
🖤 You're gonna be stuck with your title for the long haul, so make sure you like it. Or at least that it's something you can tolerate.
🖤 Do what feels natural. Everyone is different. If you're like 'okay yeah, but I really like writing by hand and then editing as I transcribe it' do that. Go bananas. Have a ball! Find your own way up the mountain. These tools may work for you, or they may send you into the pit of despair. And you should always avoid the pit of despair.
*Ahem* SO! I was recently honored with a question about my organization process for writing. And, boy howdy, am I just tickled pink to tell you! I've never felt so seen!! Let's do this thing.
Let me start by sharing that IRL, I'm a copywriter/project manager for print & digital design work. So when I started writing my first-ever fic, I organized it much in the same way I would a website build.
But tbh, when I started The Marshal, I didn't really know I was writing a fic. In fact, I was only working through my typical video game process. In that I'm extremely anal note-taker, and it's just the way I live my regular-degular life. All my books are annotated to the Nth, I’ve been keeping a (rather inconsistent) diary since I was 17, and I’m a religious bullet journal-er with very specific journal preferences (grid paper, always).
My practice of video game note-taking goes all the way back to drawing maps of Luigi's Mansion as a kid to try and optimize my speed runs, and progresses into tracking daily decisions for BG3. I’ve also got entire pages in my bullet journal dedicated to developing backstories for all my Cult of the Lamb cult members, and my Notes app has several installments of history & lore from various Civ V games. It’s simply how I prefer to play.
(Side note: No, I am not technically diagnosed with anything. Yes, I have found myself in repetitive, furious spirals, tearing out pages of my notebook over-and-over when the map I HAD to draw in pen was not 'perfect.' 💁🏻Is this OCD?🦋 Who knows. Who cares.)
Game Timelines have always fascinated me, pretty much since Ocarina of Time. I want to know how exactly long something took, what order it happened in, and whether it's technically 'feasible' within the parameters of the game. Peep my post about 'realistic' gameplay for more deets.
Mostly, I was trying to track where I 'camped' each night, because it was SUPER IMPORTANT that the events of the game took place within the ~3 month timeline GAIA sets before the environment collapses (super casual). So, the notes from my first play-through looked like this.
And then I met Kotallo.
And I started drafting journal entries from Aloy's POV to explore the internal monologue behind all those ✨faces✨ she was making.
(These ones. Infinite credit to @Diviner-Alva for doing the LORDT'S WORK.)
They looked like this:
If you've read 'The Marshal,' you'll notice some similarities.
After a few weeks of gameplay, I was pushing 20k words in 'journal entries,' and it just... wasn't cutting it. That was around the time I knew I had an bona fide obsession on my hands.
Writing exclusively in Aloy's POV left out SO MUCH OF THE STORY that was developing in my li'l head alongside my gameplay. I was imagining a whole burgeoning, slowburn romance as I picked my way across the Forbidden West. It mirrored the side quests (That Talanah convo??) and overall themes of HFW perfectly. (Also, um, the consistent controller rumble during the Scorcher cut scene?? Like, WTF? You're telling me Geurrilla didn't know EXACTLY what they were doing? Pfft.)
I can't tell you when exactly I finally took to the internet to feed my hyperfixation, but let me tell you that it was my first time discovering Ao3, and I spent the summer of 2022 devouring every fic in the Aloy/Kotallo tag. I felt like I had finally found my people. It even worked for a while! But the story playing in my head didn't exactly match any of the stories 1:1, and I realized after a while that no one else could write MY headcanon.
Still, there's a TON of overlap in a few of them: Medicine by HIMLuv is by far the closest, and my personal fave. I love basically everything Garbage_Dono has written. Obviously, I've developed a massive crush on Pikapeppa. (How does she do it so FAST? *awe, amazement, un poco envy*) There are some truly incredible writers out there, and I'm genuinely grateful to every one of them for creating a foundation that gave me the permission I needed to finally fucking WRITE. I denied myself fanfic for probably 20 years, imagining all the ways I would be ruthlessly mocked if anyone ever found out. I've had a-lot-a-lot of shame blocks to work through as I've been writing over the past year, and this story about opening up and trusting others feels deeply personal in a way I can't quite put into words.
That's how I made the decision to begin adapting the journal entries into a more organized fic. So, I started my second play-though and created this account around that time. It would be probably be another ~6 months before I got drunk enough to just press 'publish' on the first chapter in April of this year, over a year after the game came out.
Every other reference tool I've made, I created along the way. I intended to post more of them here on tumblr, but hey. Life Happens.™ And even tho it feels like the fandom had moved on post-DLC, there's still pleeeeenty of time. 😘
Anyway, I'm gonna clip this here, and get more into the weeds on organizational tools in another post. But it felt like I needed to talk about this first, because when I started really writing in the Fall of 2022, I already had a lotta documents under my belt that I needed to wrangle.
If you got to this point, thanks for reading this entirely self-indulgent post.
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