#llau

So, for most of my longfics I have what I call a "working outline." Generally, in that document, I have all of my worldbuilding info, a general outline of the major plot beats I want to hit, and then a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of events. The reason why this is a working outline is that I very rarely sit down and write out what happens in each chapter before I begin writing; I usually write out the first 1-5 chapters, and then after I've written a few of them I will come back, revisit what I wrote, change things around, and plot out the next few chapters. I find that this works really well for me as it allows me to structure my thoughts and problem-solve, but doesn't require me to have the entire thing figured out from the get-go, because I really do benefit from the creative process and generate some of my best ideas on the fly. (Fun fact, this is known in writing communities as being a "plantser", someone who likes to plan but also likes to write by the seat of their pants.)

As an example, here's the beginning of my outline for my fic A Call to the Void:

We have the chapter titles, the POV characters, and then very brief bullet-point summaries of beats I want to hit in each chapter. Nice, simple, easy to work from, easy to throw together.

And now, a confession to make: I did not do this for LLAU at all.

I came up with the concept for LLAU whilst making jokes with my friends in a discord server, rushed to the writing channel to throw around ideas (mostly along the lines of 'which Hermit should replace which Lifeline character?'), and then redownloaded the game and wrote along as I played it. The first two fics in LLAU (Empty Oceans and My Blood) are pretty much beat-for-beat the same as the first three Lifeline games (Lifeline, Bloodline, and Silent Night), with a lot of the dialogue in EO being directly from the game. (Sometimes people compliment me on Tango's characterisation in that fic and it makes me laugh because wow I can't believe my assessment that "Tango Tek and Cadet Taylor are the exact same person somehow" was that accurate.) Tangent aside, I didn't have much of an outline for the first two fics for that reason, because the games themselves acted as an outline in their own right. Most of the choices I had to make here were about pacing and chapter breaks, which is something I really enjoy and find relatively intuitive, so I didn't need an outline for those things necessarily.

However, the fact that I didn't outline these fics does not mean that I wasn't planning anything. Between writing ch1 and ch2 of Empty Oceans, I went and had a brainstorming session with Luna @/lunarblazes, who I'd worked with on my previous longfic, The Fair and the Brave and the Good. This was when I hashed out a lot of the big picture stuff, including the Impulse twist in Lost Boys (I've posted screenshots of this conversation previously!). However, I never had anything like a place where I sat down and hashed out my worldbuilding--it just kind of came to me over the months that I was writing and daydreaming and brainstorming this story.

Then we come to Asking for a Miracle, the first fic in the series where I didn't have a game to follow! Everything from AfaM onwards is fully original content, though I do take inspiration from other aspects of the Lifeline games (Impulse's arc is inspired by Wynn's in Flatline, and the clone stuff is inspired by Whiteout). I actually did have a working outline for AfaM:

As you can see, it's not super detailed, it doesn't fully have the details worked out, and it's missing chapter 6, but I don't think there are any major differences between this and the fic in its final form.

The same cannot be said for Lost Boys, which I started an outline for and then promptly abandoned in favour of just winging it.

As you can see here, a lot of the bare bones of LB are there! But some pieces are slightly different, whether in where they take place in the story, or the characters involved, or how they happen. I hadn't even decided whether Joe or Ren was going to be the clockwork armageddon when I wrote this--I don't think anyone reading even knew that I'd ever been considering Ren as an option!

Not having an outline doesn't mean that I didn't think a lot about the structure of the story I was telling and the threads I was weaving together--I did a lot of that on my bus ride to work, and I would brainstorm some things in discord servers (pacing and pov were things that I would mull over a lot!) or in my friend Doc's DMs (for cool spoiler-y plot things I was thinking of. Doc is a fantastic writer and a very close friend of mine and we plot out a lot of our stories together. Highly recommend getting yourself a Doc, having another writer who Gets It and can help you when you're struggling is so invaluable).

Writing LLAU was actually a really interesting process because like I said, the first two fics in the series were almost already written for me, I just had to take the games, replace the characters, and add in prose to support the dialogue. (There are, of course, parts of those two fics that are wholly original--anything to do with Impulse, for example. I wanted him to be more than a player character stand-in, I wanted him to have his own arc and life and feel real and believable as a character, which is where I started pulling in stuff from Flatline and building his arc. And Bdubs was a massive part of the LLAU puzzle, because I had decided that he had to be the Varia's Captain, but he also had to be the Architect of Time, and pulling together those two disparate characters together informed his entire arc and a lot of the series' deep lore. I also added in the time travel scene at the end of EO, and changed up parts of MB to better fit the flow/characters.) Then everything from that point on was me taking what was already built in the games that I'd adapted, and taking the extra things I'd thrown in, and pulling it all together into a coherent world and story. Honestly, it was a super fun problem-solving exercise, I'd highly recommend trying to mash together two very different pieces of media in this way and seeing what comes out the other side. LLAU would not be what it is if it were not both a fic of Lifeline and Hermitcraft.

I think that's pretty much most of the things I can say about this off the top of my head, but if you want to ask any follow-up questions, please go ahead, I love this silly little AU and I love writing fanfiction and I could talk about them for hours. I've been typing this up for like 40 minutes.

And please do tag me in fanart!! I don't follow any tags, so I won't see it unless you tag me or if one of my friends see it and sends it my way.

I have in fact listened to this album! ...Actually, I think I first listened to it like a decade ago, which is making me feel way too old. Anyway, I think Fire in the Sky/Where Are All the Scientists Now/A Matter of Time would make a banger HC8/Moon's Big animatic. Someone with more artistic skills and free time than I should really get on that (/lh).