“”Don’t fuck the dogs” -Bitch” -Krixwell
Hehe. 🙂
Generally good advice to take to heart.
half-man-half-lime:
Krixwell: *Makes a Steven’s Knife joke about Taylor, because how ridiculous would it be if this nice, innocent girl went around stabbing people?*
Taylor: *Cuts out some dude’s eyes like it isn’t even a big deal*
The coddamn irony, I love it.
stranger–12:
This chapter is where I went from liking work to loving it. The solution, quote, aftermath were brilliant. What about you?
Yeah, this chapter was overall fantastic. It’s not the very best the serial has shown me – I think that honor might go to Shell 4.8, maybe – but it’s damn close.
The chapters explode in length post this point. I won’t be surprised if many of them are multi-day things.
Ahh, interesting. I was actually thinking to myself about length after wrapping up 5.9, because while people have told me before that the chapters get longer, this is the first I’ve actually seen of a noticeably longer chapter (though the arcs have gotten about twice as long since Gestation).
If this is a thing that starts happening consistently, then I suppose Wildbow decided to change how he went about dividing the chapters. The entire fight against Lung took place in one chapter this time, whereas the Lung fight was spread out over about three in Gestation, and other major encounters (such as Bakuda in Shell) have since been split up over several chapters.
Hm… Remember how I said Sundancer’s power would be climactic? It looked like it was, until Lung stood back up from his floosh woond and fought for another sizable chunk of text. I think Lung getting back up might’ve been a good spot for a chapter break. It’s very possible that Wildbow decided to merge several chapters after he wrote in the chapter breaks into the plot structure.
Also, sidenote: If multi-day chapters become a regular thing, I’ll probably start spacing out the sessions like I do with chapter breaks nowadays, instead of always aiming to finish the chapter the next day.
Hi, I’m really loving your live blog. I only finished worm recently but it’s so nice to see, have fun and enjoy 🙂
I’m glad you’re enjoying it! 😀
Also, here’s some interesting comments from wildbow himself on the subject of chapter lengths, taken from a blog post he wrote near the end of worm: “When I started, I was looking at the other web serials out there, I checked the average site count and then tried to fit myself to it. I was probably doing myself more harm than good. To fit those wordcounts, I had to force the cliffhangers, I had to twist my own arm to make the chapter end at the ‘appropriate’ times.”
“Having longer chapters takes time but it also gives me elbow room for plot twists, characterization, themes and atmosphere. It’s less confining. Some of that stuff comes much more naturally to me now than it did. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easier to get chapters done now, but I’m a hell of a lot happier with what I’m producing, and a hell of a lot happier with where I’m at as a whole.”
Incidentally, that whole blog post is rather interesting and fairly non-spoilery. It’s basically wildbow’s thoughts on the experience of writing Worm. If you’d like to read it, it probably wouldn’t be that hard to censor out any minor spoilers.
Interesting! So Wildbow is naturally inclined to write long chapters, but limited himself to fit in more at first.
I think that might actually help the serial in a way. If he had started with long chapters, getting into the story would seem even more daunting than it already is if you know the total length, whereas by this point, he’ll have hooked people so even if they’re not fans of long chapters, they’ll probably continue reading.
Either way, I’m glad he found an approach that worked better for him.
Here’s some actual numbers for the ‘chapters getting longer’ thing: Chapter 5.9 was 4639 words (assuming I didn’t mess up cutting and pasting it just now), which surprisingly isn’t the longest chapter you’ve seen so far. As far as I can tell, that was Interlude 3, at 4763. There have also been a handful of other 4000+ word chapters: Purity’s interlude was 4054, 4.11 was 4282 and 5.4 was 4166 (it’s possible I missed some).
It’s definitely one of the longer chapters though: the previous 3 were 2386, 2236, and 2613, which is more typical of the chapters you’ve seen so far. So it is possible for you to do chapters like 5.9 in a single day, but that’s probably something of an upper limit, and depends a lot on when you get started. It’s also certainly true that they’re about to get a lot longer. The *average* chapter length of worm is about 5500 words, so everything you’ve seen so far would be considered “short”.
You’re pretty close to hitting the part of the story where wildbow decided to start focusing on writing full time, instead of just doing this in his free time. A couple arcs from now he set himself an unofficial 4000 word *minimum* chapter length (although iirc, there are still a few chapters below that), which he of course regularly exceeded. 8k+ word chapters are reasonably common, and by the end of worm most chapters were 6k-10k, with a few over 10k (I think the longest is 11,192).
So yeah, expect a lot of 2 day chapters in your near future, with some 3 (or 4?) ones thrown in. Hope you enjoy long chapters!
Huh, wow.
I guess I didn’t really realize how long some of those other chapters were. And I certainly didn’t realize how short everything was.
I’m normally crap at interpreting word count, by the way, so this comparison really helps put things into perspective for me. Thank you!
thats-rough-buddy:
The Arcs go back down in number of chapters, yes, but there are at least a couple that reach the five digit word count mark
Before I read that last series of asks, I had no idea what this really meant, but now… wow.
But yeah, I figured that would happen – longer chapters doesn’t necessarily mean more story in an arc, just a different way of breaking it up.
While we’re on the topic of how long it takes me to do chapters, I should probably mention that I begin web-based history studies a week from now. I don’t know yet how this will affect my liveblogging schedule, but it likely will.
Taylor’s second takedown of Lung is one of my favorite scenes in the story. As I see it, Taylor has been badass from the very beginning, but her first *self-consciously* badass moment is saying “Don’t fucking underestimate me”.
Yeah, that was awesome. I didn’t really appreciate it enough on the first reading because I was busy contemplating what it was she was actually doing, but in retrospect it was very cool.
If you’re going to have to split the chapters into multiple sessions, it’ll probably be easiest for readers if you have a ‘part one’ and ‘part 2’ tag and so on, so we can just find and read the most recent post, rather than having to select the chapter tag or the chapter on the table of contents, and then scroll past all of the previous liveblogging that we’ve already read already to get to the new stuff.
Ooh, yeah, that’s a good idea.
Purity’s Interlude says she was married to Max for 11 months. If he’s had other short-term marriages (we know Theo isn’t Kayden’s kid, but we know nothing about Theo’s mother), that would clearly fit the category. Also, given how Kaiser walked into Somer’s Rock with the giantesses on his arms, he’s either banging them or making it look like he is.
Hm, yeah, good points.
When it comes to Fenja and Menja, I’ve been leaning towards the latter. Women on his arms just for show seems very Kaiser. Though that wouldn’t actually rule out that he could also genuinely have that kind of relationship with them.
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