Trial of Isolation: A retrospective

Let's look back at Isolation and talk a little about it. There will be mild spoilers, so turn back now if you haven't finished parts 1-4 of Isolation.

Hi friends, I wanted to take this week to discuss and break down my little mini serial that went out over the past 4 weeks or so. I want to talk about some of the history behind it, some of the pitfalls I had in the process of writing it, and things I just generally want to address. This will be fairly informal and laid back compared to my usual post, so let’s go ahead and jump into it.

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History

Real world history…

So, the Trial of Isolation (originally just called Veyeni) was originally written in January of 2020, so nearly 4 years ago now! I honestly don’t remember writing it exceptionally well, but I remember doing my first round of edits while sitting at my friend’s birthday party (aren’t I a fun party guest?). Anyways, in my stories that take place leading up to The End, Lady Vey is a very important character. I can’t remember what drove me, but I remember thinking that she comes off as a very young woman and is even described as such. So what happened to this ancient woman who is depicted so young? Did she die young? Or did she just want to be remembered and seen as young? That’s where the story started. From there I somehow cranked out 34 pages on a google doc surprisingly fast and then slowly started editing it down. It was one of those stories that just kept poking at me, so I kept going until it left me alone. I’d write at all kinds of odd times, and edit in odd locations. It just felt like a story that needed to get out of my head and onto paper.

The lore…

 Originally this story took place an undisclosed number of thousands of years before the apocalypse, but I have more recently changed my mind and made it about 700 years. The amount of hundreds or thousands of years really won’t make a difference in the long run, because I don’t really have any intention or plan to flesh out more time beyond a couple decades prior to The End. The important part of the story was not only to establish who Lady Vey was, but also establish the culture of the Valley and what made them into what they later become in the future. The point was to show this fascinating culture at the height of their power and prowess, and then watch as the gods dismantle them for reasons outside of their own control. That way when we visit the years leading up to The End it makes sense why The Valley is the way it is (which I cannot wait to get into in future stories).

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Pitfalls

Outdated writing

I mentioned this in a notes discussion with someone (I can’t remember who), but revisiting this was an absolute beast of an experience. As I said, this is a nearly 4 year old story and wow what a difference 4 years makes. I can let poor grammar slide - I’m sure that’s clear about me by now - but cliche writing? Long drawn out explanations that don’t make any sense? Repetitive words (I still have this problem actually)? It was daunting when reading it to know exactly how to approach changing the story. At one point I considered rewriting the entire thing. But it was 32 pages. That definitely wouldn’t have been worth it. In the end, I reread and edited the story probably about 5 times, making changes throughout to modernize my own work to fit my current style and get rid of things that I thought were downright silly. I’m no stranger to this as many of the stories I’ve shared so far are a year or two old, but something about this one felt especially outdated. I’m sure it won’t be the first or last time this happened. There’s a 42 page document in my drive called Backdrop that is really just a collection of short stories that all take place at the same time and was written before Isolation and… well, I already know it’s going to be a rough one. But they are still stories worth updating and telling!

The Ending

Upon rereading the story, I absolutely hated the end. The original ending basically boiled down to Lady Vey making peace between the Bownsend and Shill, but the arms dealer that supplied weapons to both factions steps in and refuses to accept the treaty and instead attacking the stadium during peace talks. Now, I could’ve made this ending work. In fact, I considered making the arms dealer a sort of demonic fiend that wanted the Tome of Oran-Koh to create an empire of fiends that ruled across the universe, but that felt disconnected from the story. I also considered the dealer being a servant to the lord of the fiends just trying to sew discourse in the world… but again, extremely disconnected from the story I wanted to tell. Of the original 32 pages, I completely rewrote the last 9 pages of the story and heavily edited the other 23 pages to match the new ending I had fallen on. I think I did pretty well given how I changed it, but I can’t say I’m fully happy with how it turned out. I suppose you can’t ever be fully happy with a story, but this one definitely took a bit of work on my part.

Bury Your Gays

Okay, so when I originally wrote this story, I was not aware of this trope at all. For those who are unfamiliar, the trope basically boils down to killing off a gay character (or a heavily queer coded character) just as they come to grips with their identity. It also typically involves their partner dying as well OR discovering through the loss of their loved one that they weren’t gay after all and ending up with someone more socially acceptable to the society they’re in. I won’t say I fully fell into this trope, but when I realized a gay character was dying in this story, I did not want it to come off as a trope that maintains a harmful narrative. With that in mind, I want to note that while I don’t tackle issues associated with LGBTQ+ identities, I strive for normalization of marginalized groups in the world of Astra. I don’t think I could do justice to discussing them properly, but I want it to feel normal and accepted. I hope that’s clear given how I write characters so far, but I didn’t want the death of this character to make it seem otherwise. That being said, I felt it was still important for this character to die and I made sure to subvert the trope at every possible turn to make it feel like a death that made sense and not one that happened because of sexual orientation. I’ll admit, I was extremely nervous about doing it properly and with justice. I think the ending actually worked out pretty well, and for those of you who are fans of her, don’t worry, she’ll be back in later stories.

Length

I’m not saying the story was too long BUT what I will say is that I should’ve broken the parts down into smaller chunks. Substack said that each story was between 20 and 28 minutes to read. I personally don’t think that’s a terrible chunk to read, but it seems like the norm on Substack is to keep posts beneath 4,000 words or less. I’m not sure what the actual expectation is, but I just worry that for being a multipart story, I may have turned some people off from reading with how long they were. Maybe if I brought the length down to 10-15 minutes per read, that would’ve been better for people? I didn’t get any feedback on this specific thing, but it was something I thought about often during the process. I’m not sure why, but I was really dead set on it being 4 parts. If I could do it all again, maybe I’d do 6 parts.

My own expectations

So, here’s a weird one: I was so nervous to post this story specifically. See, many of the Trials of Astra stories so far are on the periphery of my favorite stories to tell in the world, so I don’t feel an emotional attachment to them that I otherwise would. On the other hand, Isolation is the tip of the iceberg for the stories that are really important and meaningful to me, so I was worried about people not liking it or being disappointed, or just downright hating it. I’ll admit, I was really really nervous, and when the view counts came in low for the first 3 episodes, my nerves just got even worse. Those questions of doubt and uncertainty started floating in and I just wasn’t sure what to think or do. But then the strangest thing happened: When I released part 4, all the other parts rose up to within the typical margin of reads my stories usually get within a week or two. I’m really not sure why that is. Maybe there were some people waiting for the full release, maybe that post I made on notes actually had an impact, or maybe it was some weird coincidence… whatever happened, it doesn’t matter. The main point though is that we’re starting to get into stories in Astra that I have more of a connection to. For one reason or another, they mean a lot to me and that can feel extremely vulnerable. It’s easy to share stories when I can detach from them. It’s much harder when they mean a lot and if someone criticizes them, it feels like a part of my identity is wrapped up in there.

(Disclaimer: This doesn’t mean I don’t want criticism, please do criticize me!)

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General thoughts

Was it a success?

Well, mostly yes! I certainly didn’t lose any subscribers, and the feedback was overall positive. I actually think it went better than I expected. I had my concerns and apprehensions, but it was never something that held me back from posting it, so it must’ve gone well overall I’d say.

Novel material?

This is something I found myself thinking about after I finished the final part: Could Isolation be its own novel? Well, maybe not a novel, but maybe a novella. The story was rushed at some parts and could’ve been slowed and expanded upon. I was worried about falling outside of the 4 parts I had given myself to work with so I intentionally did this at points, but when I think about all the things I could expand and discuss, I think we could have a much longer story on our hands if I ever wanted to revisit this again and really flesh it out. Am I ever going to do that? Well… probably not. Not unless The Trials of Astra as a series became a lot more popular, but I don’t think it’ll ever reach heights that would justify doing that. This is just a hobby after all.

What’s next?

Well, next up on the docket I have three things I’m looking ahead to. I want to take part in a collaboration or two taking place across Substack for starters. After that, I have my surrealist horror On Your Shoulder that I am currently fighting through finalizing as it turns out making a scary story that subverts even my own expectations and ideas is really hard. Then after that I hope to return to Astra with We Weren’t Meant for the Stars, which is a story that’s been knocking around in my head for a couple months but hasn’t been written yet. It’ll probably drop in the new year!. After that, I’ll start my next serial where we will delve into one of the first characters I ever made for Astra. There were three characters I originally made (one of them being Lady Vey) where I considered them explorers in a sandbox that I made for them to react to and live in, and from there the lore branched out. I’m really excited but also nervous to be revisiting these old stories and parsing in new ones along the way! Like I said, you’ll see more of Lady Vey soon, but first we need to meet some other important characters. Of course, this is all subject to change, but that’s the plan as it stands right now.

One last thing…

Hey, oh my goodness, thank you! Even if this is the first thing of mine you’ve ever read, thanks so much for taking the time. Thanks for giving it a chance. I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, and I’ve always loved it so much and I’ve always wanted to share it. Sharing it scares me, it's difficult, it's emotionally taxing, but the desire still stands. Why is that? I don’t know. What draws me to share when I know it's just as well sitting in my desk somewhere? I may never know what the desire is, but I’m happy to have a space to feed it. So, thank you for reading. Thank you for giving this silly writer’s silly stories a chance.