Forum: Author Hangout

That was an unusual complaint. I admit, adventuring is not always fun. Now the Crew is discovering that their world is not all skittles and sunshine with flying unicorns shitting rainbows.
Gardallen has many dark and deadly secrets in its past. It is already known that the world was created, not a natural planet.

Ledger is having a hard time dealing with the amount of death and damage he caused. He brought the power back, but now has to face it, he cost untold thousands of lives with the flooding.

Andrew and the rst have their own problems to deal with. With Weena in a lost state, Aston is not himself. The secrets coming out about the world will only make things worse for all the people of the world.

So yes, it is darker than before. Brena will have it really rough as her hidden talent manifest. No spoilers on this one.

I have Part one partially redone now, but it takes all day to work one chapter. The cleanup is massive. I am a horrible writer. A good story teller, but the writing sucks.

Dark stories is always a tricky slope. You need conflict in any story, and a little trauma helps keep things real and emotional, but you need an overall positive connotation to keep it light. I set about to write a story where EVERYONE dies, but I worked to keep the overall story light. The apocalyptic story was designed to show how people cope when everyone you know is dying, and how they respond.

Despite the continuous deaths in the story (roughly 30% loved, 30% couldn't finish it, and 30% hated it), but given the playful banter of the teenagers listening in on their parents, they all flocked to the sequel (even those unable to finish the original book). So it's all in how carefully you craft the story.

However, I've read many successful dead tree sagas that, once completed, I could never bring myself to reread, nor EVER read another book by the author, not wanting to return to such a dark world as that. So tread carefully, lest you produce a strong story and lose most of your regular readers.

It's not a simple do-thing and don't-do-that sort of equation, it's a matter of trusting your gut and going into it with our eyes open to just how troublesome it can be. That said, midway into the story it's difficult changing the established tenor, but ... the key is to keep the characters around the protagonist positive, with the protagonist helping to prop everyone else us, serving as the stories moral center. Again, humor helps to defuse situations, offsetting the overall dark tone, but that's a VERY hard skill to teach (as few of my later stories contain much humor, much to my chagrin).

In the end, this is NOT something to dive into without careful consideration of the consequences. I've pulled it off a time or two, and fallen flat on my face other times, so don't ever expect to escape scot free, which is why so few authors take this approach, as it's very difficult to pull off.