I just finished reading the echoes series (so far) and AUGH... it's so good. I've been rotating them all in my brain for several weeks now. This is the first time I've read something with an ensemble cast this large without getting overwhelmed or forgetting who people are. Absolutely peak fiction good grief.
I also have some questions! Optional answers ofc the main point is to gush happystyle but if you want to answer them then it's peaches
1. Will YHS/Tokyo soul become more relevant in future instalments with lizzie and martyn in the ensemble cast now? It was referenced more than I thought it would be in the back half of OSH and then grian stopped being the primary POV but I was wondering!
2. What have been your favourite dynamics to write so far? I can see the absolute love for ZITS and boatem but if you had to pick up a few favourites to write who would they be?
3. How has actually plotting echoes worked? It's so sprawling and I remember reading Infected before the retooling- has it been harder to do as well now that HC has moved so far past the S8-9 between period? If not, how do you keep up interest/motivation to write something this epic in scale?
Okay thank you have a lovely timezone! Once again I absolutely loved the series and am so sat for whenever you get back to it (and in the meantime have Lots of rereading to do)
Yooo hello I am finally active enough on here to see asks when they come through! Always happy to answer questions, and the Echoes discord server OHC is always super active and you’ll get a lot of responses if you ever want to poke your head in there. But anyways questions!
1. I mentioned a lot of YHS being Schrödinger’s canon in my early author’s notes, but as the series went on that’s not exactly true anymore. E!Grian’s backstory at this point is loosely inspired by some of the concepts (he fell in with a bad crowd and got into some deep shit in high school), but the series itself is not strictly speaking canon to Echoes. Honestly it was the best way to weave in some of the more popular fandom headcanons for young Grian without being beholden to *gestures at YHS* all that.
2. Boatem and ZITS are so my jam you are very correct in that—I’ve been watching ZITS for. Oh god twelve plus years now. I waited a decade for Hermit Skizz canon and that’s not an exaggeration. Honestly I think the dynamic that snuck up on me the most in the later fics is the NHO—I never really watched too much of any of them before or during early Echoes, but obviously once Etho’s backstory got more fleshed out the other three are such a huge part of it. The interplay and dynamics between the four of them on any combination are so fascinating to me. Also absolute shoutout to Skizz and Etho who had, when I decided their Enderian backstory, pretty much only interacted through Third Life and Last Life (which were the only two series out when I started Echoes) and then *became* the sort of buddies I’d been picturing them in Echoes. Get more abnormal about each other please, for my enrichment.
3. Plotting! A whole kettle of fish by itself and hard to explain. Believe it or not I’ve had the broad strokes of the entire Watcher plotline in place since at least when I wrote Grian’s bargain in Icarus, which would have been around Feb/March of 2022 and was less than three months into writing the series. (Send help the passage of time is real and can hurt you.) They were VERY broad strokes though, and the very endgame still is. I tend to plot very loosely into future arcs and narrow down and expand on them as they get closer, so I’m usually pulling together a half-solid genuine outline out of those half-formed ideas for the next major fic in about the last half to third of the current one. Something Wicked for right now is in full chapter-by-chapter outline and has been since shortly before I finished Faultline, but Bad Luck (fic 7) is still in very loose planning stages mostly still in my head. Usually I start with a very barebones list of every plot point I have planned, then start pulling those into sensible chapters and figuring out the timing for the parallel plotlines. (SW was a pain in the ASS for this one, since we have seven POV characters which is the largest roster by far, and we have them spread out through at least 3-4 places for the entire fic.) A lot of times we end up with very silly notes to myself such as “Alchemy :)” and “Vote’em 2 electric boogaloo” and that’s also usually when I realize “oh we’re gonna need an Impulse scene here because we haven’t seen him in five chapters.” Even then that outline goes through a lot of flux as I feel out the pacing on scenes (such as this chapter has gone too long and the last planned scene for it needs to be the first of the next one) or I find timing discrepancies (such as oh this is day earlier than [character] was supposed to show up so I have to flip-flop two scenes in a chapter so they remain chronological). That’s why I usually have a tentative chapter count for myself at the start of the fic, but I don’t finalize it on ao3 until I’m within the last half a dozen chapters or so and I’m certain the scenes will shake out with the pacing I want them to. Something Wicked is currently sitting at a planned 20 but it could end up anywhere between 19-22 depending on how things go!
3.5 Motivation! Well that’s at a bit of a Spot right now, since you can see I haven’t update since Nov. That’s not Echoes’ fault either—I got absolutely taken out by the hyperfixation return of my previous massive sprawling fic series fandom, Fire Emblem, and it’s consumed me ever since. I worked on that from 2018 to the end of 2021, then got bit by Echoes the exact same way right at the start of 2022, so it’s essentially just flip-flopped again. Echoes is very much NOT abandoned and I’ll be returning to it again someday, but I’m in a different building for the moment. There’s a scene in SW that I’m INCREDIBLY excited for in chapter 9 that’s half written, and I knew when I didn’t go completely batshit writing it that I needed some breathing room from the series to not burn out and be desperately frustrated and unhappy with it (like I was with Fire Emblem for most of those four years). So while I’m out of it at the moment, I’m still writing and still going insane and I’ll be back eventually! (And in the meantime if you perhaps also enjoy medieval sword and sorcery I have another 700k for you to read, you just have to get through the rough beginning of me learning how to really write in 2018 and get through to the stuff that’ll actually feel like Doc fic again.)
Thank you for the ask!!! I hope you enjoy my rambles.
