Chapter 11 Long Author's notes · 7:42pm Nov 20th, 2020
FINALLY got around to the “Iron joins up with Banter’s group” plot point. In my original draft, that was meant to happen at the end of chapter 2. It only ended up happening so late because I was reluctant on using a contrivance (since it would have been 100% a coincidence that she finds them). In hindsight, I realise using a contrivance there would have been acceptable, since it would have been pretty necessary for her to meet them. Then it got pushed back to chapter 3, as I decided to make 2 more about seeing the outside world for the first time. Then, at the end of chapter 3, it was pushed back again as I realised her meeting Candy was much more likely.
Speaking of Candy… that might make you think I threw her away for plot convenience, but that would be very incorrect. I always planned on having Candy’s death be a catalyst for Iron cutting ties with her past and stable completely. It’s just that in the original idea, Iron was going to murder Candy for <insert relevant plot or story reason>, since the two weren’t going to be that close. Now I made it much more nuanced.
Come to think of it, I’m amazed by how much the decision to flesh out Candy as a character ended up improving the story. I started off hating her because of how much of a goodie-two-shoes she was, but she really grew on me. To the point that I was seriously considering rewriting the main plot line to keep her. But that would have shifted the tone too much, and would have completely derailed the plot.
Finally, you might wonder why I did such a gigantic timeskip. It’s not because “nothing happened” during that time, but because it would have been very repetitive to read about. Bolt arrives in a place, does a thing, stuff happens, she leaves the place. Rinse and repeat. And while I believe that, individually, those events are interesting, chaining them one after the other wouldn’t have made for a great read. And this way, I can add a few mini-chapters within part 2, which is fairly plot heavy. It’s win-win.
Of course, another possibility would have been to make her travelling from town to town heavier on plot. Ultimately, the shortcoming of that idea would have been that Bolt had a long term goal in mind—”get stronger”—and would have basically ended up walking from place to place, every time looking for something different. Point is, I don’t think I could have written about her wandering around for almost two years without making it either boring and repetitive, or writing at a breakneck pace.
Also, my original plan was to not drop any explicit clues that Bolt Action might be lying in her stories—I was simply gonna have her stories be slightly inconsistent with what the audience knows of her—but then I remembered I gave Banter a good feeling for ponies, and that she would never be able to fool him. So I guess I made my fic less pretentious.
