So Wing, where is NLA? [It's not done yet.] · 8:45am May 26th, 2020

Hey there, Fimfic crowd! It’s been a hot minute, but I’ve snuck on to answer a question that I’ve been asked frequently in the last couple weeks.

This is Wing, by the way. I realize that wouldn’t be obvious in text, but here is the declaration/disclaimer. In case you’re still confused, I’m the one who co-wrote No Longer Displaced with Sober. I’m also the entity responsible for Tail.

Anyhoo, the question that’s popped up in these times of quarantine is some variation of: “Where the hell is NLA?” It’s been almost three years since Sober and I wrapped up the NLD publication run and dropped that cliffhanger with the promise of a sequel to come. It’s fair that people would ask.

So, the first bit of news is that, no, this is not a release announcement. NLA is just not ready yet. This blog post has two purposes. The main purpose is to state that the sequel is actively being written. In fact, I just finished Chapter 20 about three hours ago, and the manuscript is sitting at a respectable 54,000+ words.

The second purpose of the blog is to give some insight into exactly why things have taken this long, and why we haven’t released any of the chapters thus far to give the readers something to look at. To start this tale, we have to go all the way back to mid-2017. For those of you out there that don’t know, I am a particle physicist who has spent much of his last decade tucked away in a lab working for various universities. In the middle of the NLD releases, I learned that my university (at the time) had been stripped of all its funding by the Department of Energy, and that I was effectively fired. Of course, this had the profound effect of immediately halting my ability to write.

I scrambled for a job, and I was fortunate to have someone offer me a year-long position to get my affairs in order and push for a more stable position. Unfortunately, that year turned out to be a bust in the job market. Universities were looking at a different field, and I was left in the dust again without funding. Acquiring jobs in physics is pretty grueling. We’re often tied to that academic calendar, so while that year-long contract might seem like a lot of time, it actually equates to one more shot. Applications also involve a ton of catered writing, which is exhausting. I had to scramble again, and from that scrambling I got another year-long contract. Unfortunately, I will have to face this menace again in a few months since COVID-19 has wrecked pretty much everything. Silver lining, however, it’s given me time to write for the first time in a long time, so I’m doing the best I can.

Okay, Wing, that’s nice, but if you have over 50000 words, and it’s been 3 f’n years, why don’t you just start posting chapters so we have something to read during this hellish lockdown? This is a valid follow-up, and the answer is pretty simple. I’m being selfish. The run for NLD was the first time that I finished a story in full and then started a regular release schedule. With every other story, I’d publish as I went, and what I discovered about myself was problematic. While I wish I could say I was immune to the responses of others, the fact of the matter is that I am very susceptible to the various forms of feedback and commentary that a story can receive. Positive feedback could damn well make me manic with joy – to the point that I would flail to produce things that in the end just weren’t that good. Negative feedback would repeatedly make me delay a story or question the things that I wanted to do. This isn’t to say that constructive criticism is unwelcomed. It certainly is, and I’ll cite ambion’s review of NLD as a great example of commentary that has directly impacted how I write NLA in a positive way. By finishing the work first, I’m free from that burden though. Even with NLD, I have a great example of something that likely would have screwed me over in a write-as-you-release situation. One of the first comments NLD received was from a reader who wished that the story had been the sequel to Another Path instead. I can’t completely predict what my response would have been if I happened to still be writing at the time, but I imagine it would have been pretty bad. A stoppage of a month, maybe two, really isn’t out of the question for me when I get hit with something like that. Instead, since the story was already finished, my response became a shrug and a statement of, “Well, see ya next week.”

The other reason is that, while we have a lot of awesome editors around here, I really pull a lot of the weight on the editing side of things for the NL stories. Generally, I’d make an initial edit read of the entire story, go back and make tweaks, and then we’d get a handful of folks to go through and weed out typos and dumb shit that I missed along the way. After this, all the chapters would be punted to fimfic, and on the night before a chapter release, I would make what I call the remaster edit pass to get things in “true” publication order. The issue here is that editing requires a different mindset for me, and I tend to need to separate editing from creating to move efficiently. If we decided to start releasing chapters now, I’d have to dedicate a crapton of brain space to refining the writing. I’m just not ready to do that, and Sober essentially agrees that we shouldn’t wreck my mojo.

That being said, we do have a pretty chill Discord server. The link is tucked away in NLD Ch29. In said Discord server, there may or may not be a preview to snippets of NLA (where the answers are “may”, and “snippets” = “the entire story thus far”). Of course, the stipulations for viewing said material include an understanding that a) it’s not finished / edited yet, and b) editing is forbidden for the reasons above. Like seriously, do not start sending me typo findings.

Anyhoo, it’s crazy late. This blog is probably very poorly worded. I shouldn’t write anything after 1 AM, but… I felt that with all the questions, I should at least give a thorough answer.

TLDR – We’re working on it, Fam! #SCS Peace!