Posted here so as not to clutter up the topic. Author's notes after the jump.

Final Author’s Notes

You really don’t have to read this. This is just my rambling and random facts about the writing of this story.

To start off: I don’t believe I finished that.

This is not like finishing a short story or a drawing or something, this was huge. How huge? In case anyone wants some statistics, as of this writing (I might do a couple more revisions) the story proper, minus my notes, stands at 176 pages in Microsoft Word (all default formatting) and 55,052 words. Around chapter 18, Word told me my document was too big to keep marking spelling and grammar errors.

The thing is, I never finish anything this big. Ever. Which is why I was stunned when I typed out the last sentence of chapter 20 and realized, “Wait, this is it.”

I guess it’s mostly because of a couple things I did right. For one thing, I wrote I think the first five chapters before even posting chapter 1, and always rigorously stayed one chapter ahead of what I’d posted. For another thing, I stuck to my schedule the entire way through (something else that never happens); even the week BZP’s server was down, I stayed up late on Saturday writing. One more thing, when I got to chapter 9 I actually wrote a plan for the rest of the story (this is the largest chunk of my notes) and was able to refer to it when I wasn’t sure where to go next.

A sort of entertaining little side note: I most frequently got stuck on writing when I had to make up another name for a comic book series or superhero. It really wasn’t long before I’d exhausted most of the easy/obvious puns and portmanteaus…

Speaking of names, most of the main characters have meaningful names. This fact is actually more of a sign of one of my weaknesses: I simply can’t just string together random syllables to make a fictional name that sounds nice. I suck at it. However, if I’ve got a bunch of preexisting syllables to work with, I’m perfectly able to mutate it a bit and come up with something halfway decent.

I think Akiro and Mahka came from random names I stumbled across while flipping through the Aeneid. Of course I played around with the names a lot, but they don’t really have any meaning. I just needed something to start with.

“Instar” means “image” in Latin. My Latin teacher always commented that it was such a cool sounding word, so it kind of popped into my head when I was coming up with names and I thought, “Yeah, I’ll go with that.” Believe it or not actually, the name spawned the character; when I got to chapter 3 I had a vague idea that I was going to augment my cast with a bunch of new quirky personalities, but if I hadn’t thought of that name, Instar wouldn’t have been one of them. Despite how major a character he became later on, Instar's part of the story wasn’t one of the things I’d determined before chapter 1.

“Janai” is an informal way of saying “is not” in Japanese (i.e. “desu” in the negative form, contracted). This one I came up with in the correct order: I thought up the personality before picking a fitting name.

“Dekimu” is a reference no one here will get because it’s a reference to a friend of mine, on whom the character of Dekimu is based. I basically lopped off the “s” on “Decimus” and changed the “c” to a “k.” The friend on whom Dekimu is based was in my middle school Latin class, and our teacher assigned him the Latin name of “Decimus.” No, my friend didn’t get crushed by a giant rock.

“Kirga” is a severe contraction and mutation of the name of a philosopher, except I forget which philosopher it was and what he believed in. So it goes.

“Lahkan” comes from Laocoön, the priest in the Aeneid who warned the Trojans of their impending doom, but whom nobody believed.

“Sakrah” comes from Socrates, although I don’t remember why. Because they’re both smart, I think was my reasoning…? You could also interpret her name as being a contraction of “sakura,” cherry blossoms, which did partially inspire the epilogue scene.

“Sebrahk” comes from… I don’t remember. I remember I had a lot of trouble with that one actually, trying to come up with a suitable name. If pressed for an answer, I’d say I probably got it from “Sebastian,” which, as everyone knows, is the quintessential butler name.

Are those all my named original characters? I think so… hmm, what else?

I don’t like deleting things, and there were very few scenes I completely rewrote. Mostly when I revised, I was adding things or altering wording. The instances that I did end up making paragraph-size or more deletions, I actually cut the original passages into my notes section. They’re still there. One was a description of the Rahkshi bringing down the Axalara in chapter 3, which I changed to be much more concise, direct, and morbid in the final version. One described Kirga falling off the roof in chapter 8, but I couldn’t work with it so I scrapped it. The last one was an alternate way of starting the bar scene in chapter 14, which wouldn’t have flowed with what I had planned for the rest of the scene.

I was gonna write a quick interlude to post over winter break, basically “The Adventures of Nui-Toran Issue #01,” but I’m not that good at direct parody and it never went anywhere (there’s still a page of it in my notes). I even came up with a name for Nui-Toran’s secret identity: Mendax (“counterfeit” in Latin).

Uh, I think I ought to address something I’ve been asked more than once about this story: why it’s in the comedies forum instead of epics. Well, the reason I posted it there, aside from the obvious fact that there were many jokes throughout the narrative, is the purpose of those jokes and many of the plot events. For one thing, if you noticed, I wasn’t really ever writing about Matoran. I was always writing about humans. Matoran were just the vehicle.

This story is in the comedies forum because the entire narrative is satirical in nature: a commentary on the ridiculousness of human beings. And I tried to incorporate that into scenes throughout the story, into the characters’ personalities, and ultimately into their respective demises. Which, while depressing as some have commented, were still meant to be drily humorous in their nature.

Which brings me to something else that’s been asked a couple times: did everything serve a purpose? In short, yes, but maybe not the way you might think. Certainly not everything played a part in the grand overall plot or revealed some important mystery. But everything I decided to write in that wasn’t for plot purposes, was there because it developed the characters, developed the universe, or developed the themes. It’s really because I just can’t write filler. If there’s no purpose to what I’m writing, I end up rather at a loss for what to write.

But yes, there were scenes that were just setting the stage, establishing an atmosphere, hinting at the larger world outside the direct story, or in a couple cases, “There’s going to be a really serious scene next. I ought to put in some comic relief.”

Well, I gotta say I enjoyed writing this story immensely. I love stories, and while I’m usually reading them, it was so much fun to tell one. I still can’t get over how I actually managed to complete so large a project. And I hope everyone enjoyed reading!