Hello. Questions and answers. Thoughts on the story. (Patreon)

Hello, everyone! I missed posting for you this week. I am mostly better. Still frustratingly foggy brained and phlegmy, but definitely better.

FYI for anyone wondering about Patreon’s latest quirks, they do now let people join during a billing pause, so we might see some new faces who came for the extra chapters. Hi, new faces! But judging from my messages, it’s not working across the board, and some people who want to join are still locked out. 

I thought I’d tell you what I’ve been up to this week and answer some questions from the Q&A. I’ve grabbed a mixed bag here, going for variety and things that I thought would be both easy for me to answer and interesting for people to read about. If I skipped over your question, it’s definitely not personal, and I’ll try to get it later. There are a lot of questions there, and some I just don’t have very satisfying or thoughtful answers for yet.

What has Sleyca been doing on Super Supportive this week? 

Reading mostly. I had planned to start back at the very beginning, but I reconsidered. Since my main goal is to get some backlog this month, reading closer to where we are seemed like better prep work for it. I started at Chapter 163, “The Primary’s Youngest Child,” because it’s a personal favorite of mine. (And it still is after the reread!)

I will probably backtrack to at least the 120’s before the end of the month to read those, too. 

It’s been really fun. I rarely reread more than a chapter or two at a time, so experiencing a large chunk of the story straight through has been wonderful. I haven’t quite caught up to where we are currently. I will tomorrow.

So far, I’m pleased with how it all looks. If I could wave a wand and instantly change things, I would probably reposition some content. For example, I think it might have been better if I’d waited to show duels in gym until after Flashes and the mind healing. It’s only twoish chapters, so maybe I can find a way to move it seamlessly in the future. Not this month, though. 

I still absolutely love that I’ve finally gotten the chance to tell you all so much more about the art’h family and Stuart! It felt like I was sitting on his backstory for an eternity, and having Alden go back to Rapport I and learn some things has been delightful. The Elder’s Croak makes me happy. And Esh-erdi visiting the sauna was funny, and Thanksgiving was great, and Bash-nor was such a creep. 

I should probably get to questions people actually asked now. 

Will Alden be stuck with his temper sphere affixation forever? — Sloth

Yes. Those Jatontan pests better watch out.

Next, we have several questions about character writing:

Hardest characters to write — question from Samuel Allen

Favorite side character to write — from Jordan RiRi

How do you write dialogue and come up with voices for characters? One of my favorite details in the story is how alien the Artonans speak. Phrases like "it is maybe even perfection" are so interesting to me because it's normal English, but no one talks like that. Do you have any tips for developing voices? — Eddie

What do you enjoy most about writing Artonan voices? Alternately, would love to hear how you approach creating alien idioms and conveying translation nuances when you write dialogue - your choices add so much richness to the worldbuilding!  —JJ Hunter

Thank you all! 

Stuart remains one of the most difficult characters to write despite being one of my favorites. I find I have a lot to consider every time he opens his mouth. 

Jupiter’s tough to convey. I think if I had a whole chapter from her perspective she’d be easy enough, but in the bits and pieces of screentime she’s gotten, I wonder how she comes across. She’s got a Quirky Plant Girl thing going on, but I feel like Quirky Girl  characters are often adorkable, sweet, and vulnerable. Jupiter’s not. She’s frequently nice, but her niceness isn’t entirely sincere, and it’s been showing cracks since Forty Pineapples. She can be pretty blunt and brutal occasionally.

I do particularly enjoy writing some of the over the top, unusual characters. Aulia, Winston, Manon. Actually, almost any time I get to write a PoV from a character we know whose perspective we rarely see, it’s a lot of fun. I loved getting to touch on some other characters in Flashes. Marsha was supposed to have a PoV there, and it just didn’t fit. I’m looking forward to doing that one day. 

Dialogue and voices—

For coming up with different voices, I think of who the character really is and what they’re trying to sound like they are, and usually the phrasing pops out in decent shape. I’m glad you picked that specific line from Weset, Eddie, because I remember writing it.

I thought, “She’s a little kid who has had time to prep a speech to make her point. She wants to sound serious and formal.” She’s telling Alden that Punzee-thorn is the name for him, and I know she’s about to say the equivalent of, “It’s perfect,” but I don’t want her to say exactly that.

When serious Artonans are talking formally about perfection, they say, “Through our efforts, may the way be made closer to perfection,” which is an important idea in their culture.

So Weset wants to strongly tell Alden he has to change his name for the good of the siblinghold’s better ryeh-b’t, but because she’s also in trying-to-be-formal mode it would be rude to actually declare her own idea to be true perfection.  At first, I wrote, “It is maybe even close to perfection,” to call to mind the phrase we’d heard Dalat-orni use with Kibby. Then on revision I think I took out the “close to” to make Weset sound more adamant.

Alien idioms have been a joy to write. I’ve been trying harder since we got back to Rapport I to make up some new ones. We have a lot of tree and plant references, which are relatively easy to come up with. Other things have been harder to think of, but I’m always happy when I do. I really enjoyed Stu’s hand gesture recently, to represent the children’s story character known for telling lies then fleeing over the hills. I pictured him making the gesture in the scene first (ninety percent sure this was caused by me brushing up against a core memory about the hand motions that go with the Little Bunny Foo Foo song) then I had to figure out why it meant what it meant. 

…are you vegan yourself or know someone that is? What's your favorite non-meat dish? — AliYang

I’m not vegan, or even vegetarian, but probably three quarters of my meals are plant based at this point. It’s been a gradual transition over the past couple of years as family members and I have found more recipes we really love. For the past six months or so, I’ve been eating two meals a day, and the main one is almost always some version of a grain bowl with roasted veggies. Usually steel cut oats and this version of Greek briam, with extra bell peppers: https://www.mediterraneanliving.com/greek-briam-summer-vegetables-baked-in-olive-oil/

Today I didn’t have the roasted veg, so I made a smoky black bean and corn dish to go on the side of my oats. My taste buds are still dulled from being sick, so I topped it with a lot of chili crisp. 

My favorite foods change from month to month, but right now it’s probably a tofu banh mi.

I know it borders on a spoiler territory but I always wanted to know. We know from Joe and Stu himself that he has received body enhancements so here is the question. Can Alden/humans in general sense also be enhanced or is it strictly for Artonans? — Michaellogan

Anyone could have the kind of enhancement that Stu and a lot of the other knight family kiddos do, but few do even on the Triplanets. I do think this will probably come up in the story fairly soon.

How long do you see this story going and what is the possibility of another story in this world? —billy ilioupolous

How long do you envision continuing to write Super Supportive for. I know you have a story ending in mind, but have you tried to map that out at all into IRL days/years? Too much of a spoiler to say? —sunden

Hard to answer these accurately, so don’t quote me on this. I’d imagine we have at least two more IRL years, even if I decide on one of the nearer-future endings. I already know I won’t be doing the nearest possible ending because you guys are here to read, and I’m so interested in telling you what happens beyond it. I hope you’ll still be here for a long while to come, and I get to tell absolutely everything I can think of.

I don’t imagine I’ll write another story in this world after Alden’s is concluded. No promises on that either, but as a reader, I often find that returning to a world without the main character who introduced me to it makes me sad. I miss my familiar character and have trouble connecting to a new lead in an old setting. I suspect it would be the same for me as a writer. So you might get side stories like The Chainer during the writing of Super Supportive, but I don’t currently imagine myself wrapping up Alden’s story and then writing something brand new and disconnected from him set in this world. 

Plus, I’ve got other worlds in my head I’d like to take readers to in the future.

1. Will the costume Alden wore at the party at Leafsong ever make a reappearance?

2. Alden originally wanted to be a Trap Meister or an Adjuster, but what kind of tool would a Trap Meister be given by the system? — Merf

I actually had tentative plans for him to receive the costume from LeafSong and wear it on Halloween, but then I decided not to do Halloween this year since we had Boe around. Met-oosa still has it. It has not been destroyed.

Trap Meister sounded so cool to me. I’m sure I would have thought of something reasonable if we’d gone that route, but the first idea my brain presents is like a portable hole the road runner and coyote might use. 

Of the plot points that you have covered, which one are you happiest with? Which one was the closest to how you imagined it? — Brenden Nichol

This is one of those questions I think I’m going to poke around in the vicinty of instead of truly answering. I started making a list, and so much was on there. I tend to be disproportionately fond of things I’ve done recently, and I also tend to be thrilled by specific little story parts I pulled off successfully that may not seem that special to readers. 

For example, I was happy with the way I gradually increased the pressure on Alden in that section of chapters called “Family Matters.” The idea was to drive home his isolation and the fragility of his social support structure on Anesidora, the newness of his relationships in contrast to all these families around him. He seems less and less fine throughout, but he’s still holding it together pretty well.

Then Connie calls, and she’s making mac and cheese for a new family, and she’s telling him it’s okay if he takes her off his list of two people who get saved at the end of the world. 

There’s this snap in the story then. I was going for it anyway, and I think it’s there. He’s suddenly so overwhelmed and upset, and it feels like a really properly built emotional blow. (Sorry, Alden.) 

That’s when Stuart invites him over, at exactly the moment he really needs an out.

*

Lately, I’m proud of “Flashes,” because it was a back-to-the-drawing-board moment for me, and in the end it turned out so much better than it would have if I hadn’t taken the time. It was originally going to be one or two chapters, skipping most of the gym class and going right to the end. And I actually wrote about 3500 words of it that way, and I thought, “No. Stop. This is confusing in all the ways gym class is too often confusing, and it’s not doing the emotional stuff you hoped it would do. How do I do a gym class better than any of the ones I’ve done before?”

And I worked on the plan for a couple more days, and I decided that to be good, this one needed to be longer. Fight scenes needed more breathing room. Characters needed more page space. Descriptions needed to be delivered in more palatable chunks so that it wasn’t chaos on the page. And if it was going to be longer, then I realized I could make it about not just the action but also about the ensemble cast. We were due for a kind of end of term beat in the story anyway, where we checked in with the other students and saw their budding potential. I managed to get it all in there, I think. 

Søren overcoming, Winston getting roasted, Alden pausing Klein, and Kon flying the team to victory. 

I was so stressed trying to figure out the rewrite, but then a couple of chapters in I could tell it was just much more successful in terms of being followable and enjoyable. Then I thought it landed well in the final chapters. Definitely my favorite gym writing to date.

*

Ironically, one of the story moments that makes me happiest was unplanned until we were pretty close to it. I thought Alden was going to deal with Manon directly. There was a plot that never came to be, where she got all stalkery and tried to manipulate him from the shadows, and he dealt with it over the course of several chapters. But then I realized she was going to run into Hazel at Benjamin Velra’s birthday party, and I realized how she would think of Hazel. How, in her arrogance, she would see an opportunity there that did not exist.

What I love most about it is that Alden caused it all by trying to be a good person. Manon is stressed and overreaching on that particular evening because she just got back home from the Triplanets to find all her boater members in an uproar after Alden sent them the letters about what she’s doing to them (in duplicate because he’s cool like that). Hazel loses it and embarrasses herself because he tells everyone why he doesn’t want to be around her, and her overreaction is part of what makes Manon think she’s vulnerable enough to use.

He positioned them both to crash into each other without knowing it.

But at the end of the chapter, he’s in the bathtub, feeling like all his efforts to help the boater might not have made any difference…

If only you knew what we do, Alden.

I was a little sad that we never got to Jeff's stat screen while Alden advised him. And in general you've dropped basically all the RPG style elements that were present in the start of the story. 

Did you find them narratively clunky or is it more a text formatting thing? (or both?) — Daniel Franz

This was a moment where I almost put the screen in there and then I shied away from it again. The reason is mostly about the narrative value versus the cost in terms of the additional time it will take to make it correct. Creating a full status window for a member of another class, one that’s right enough to hold up to scrutiny over the life of the whole serial without me having to go back and retcon it, is an undertaking I’m wary of.

It’s not just the front end work of making sure my stats and spell ranks are accurate for Jeffy, but also the future work it creates. If I give hard numbers to a character’s stats, then I have to make sure I’m obeying the hard numbers in every scene. It starts to breed lots of research. Instead of telling story, I’m suddenly trying to do things like figure out exactly what a specific type of undersea cable weighs and precisely how many meters of it Jeffy should be able to carry. Which is cool, and I like learning random things like that, but it’s probably not the most effective use of my writing hours.

I’ll probably let more numbers, and numbers for characters other than Alden, creep in eventually, but I definitely have more respect for how hard it is to properly balance these things than I did when I first started out.

Do pineapples belong on pizza? — Shawn

Pineapples are possibly my very favorite fruit, and I think they’re only okay on pizza. Which is probably a sign that they don’t belong there, right? Pizza drags the pineapple down. Pineapple drags the pizza down. Both are great but they become less great together. Eat the pizza, then have the pineapple for dessert.

Will we get more Sophie? Weirdly a side character I really enjoyed. — MelRein H

You have excellent taste in aliens. I enjoyed Sophie so much. I keep picturing scenes involving Sophie and Kraaa giving Alden advice about each other. I can’t promise these specific scenes will ever come to pass, but it’s very likely we’ll see her again in the future. 

What are you going to do now? — asked by me for the purpose of wrapping up this post 

I must go and finish reading through “Shoes” one last time before I post it for Royal Road. 

Thank you all. :)



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