I've been re-reading Opening Dialogue from the beginning because I stopped reading for a while and forgot some stuff, but I kinda noticed that in the first chapters, it seems like the Tribunal is treated as much more common knowledge than in later chapters. Was this a change you decided on as you started developing the worldbuilding, or did you change your plans for the Tribunal as you played SWTOR and decided on where this story falls on the canon timeline? I'm just curious.
Hi there! Short answer: Yeah, pretty much, haha.
Long answer: There was a LOT about the story that morphed as I started to tell it - Dom, Astele, and Erion weren’t supposed to survive their encounter with Hssiss, Sivin wasn’t supposed to return to the Jedi, and the whole story was supposed to be wrapped up in four or five chapters.
But then I started incorporating more and more of my already-standing (and almost entirely unposted) lore and worldbuilding into Opening Dialogue, and it just got away from me. Initially I wasn’t really intending on delving as deeply into politics and governmental shenanigans since, you know, four-ish planned chapters wouldn’t have been enough. I thought at first I’d just name-drop a few of my other characters, casually mention things like the Tribunal, and just leave it as an open question what any of it meant. Just to enrich the story a little. I didn’t actually think I’d let much of this extra lore see the light of day, to be honest.
When I first started writing Opening Dialogue, it was actually my first foray back into the realm of publicly posting about OCs in... around ten years, I think? And while I’ve been a huge Star Wars fan since... well, pretty much almost since the original trilogy came out on VHS, haha, I didn’t really interact with the online SW community at all once the internet became a thing. I’m not sure why, but my fandom experiences online tended towards other fandoms. I was badly burned by one of those different fandoms many, many years ago when it came to posting stories about OCs in a canon universe, and as a result I’ve shied away from it for a very long time.
But I’ve never stopped creating. I just haven’t shared much of any of it before. So I have this massive compilation of lore and planets and species and characters and side stories and worldbuilding just... sitting on my computer and in notebooks, and once I started incorporating little bits and pieces just to give a story more flesh, it... seriously got away from me, and I pretty much had to take it seriously and delve into it all-or-nothing, or just end up gutting the whole story.
So here we are. I really would love to go back into older chapters and refine them more, fix some of the old plot holes and make some of the references more streamlined. But I think I’ll save that for when the whole thing is actually done. Or at least... this major arc. I plan to keep writing a lot of side stories involving characters that have played smaller roles, and things of similar nature.
And as the story progresses even further (I have a time skip planned, oh no), I’m going to have a real hard time incorporating actual SWTOR events, because there’s just SO MUCH going on and I really REALLY would love to introduce Adrestin and Sivin and company to the characters I’ve made in-game. ......Not to mention I’ll finally be able to name-drop some of my favourites of other people’s OCs. >.>;;
