After a long marathon writing session this week I finally managed to polish off Twin Stars Book One. What was originally intended to be a single Episode 8 finale ballooned into a movie-length epic that I will release as episodes 8 and 9. Even then, 9 will be double the length of a normal episode and I had considered making it 9&10 but at the moment I think it will be better to make it just one giant episode.
When I first started Twin Stars B1 I had a rough outline in my head of how it would go, and in fact I have generally followed that outline right from the start- working towards the ending(s) I saw in my head. But when it actually came down to the real finales, they ended up being different than I planned- my old endings had up and evolved on me while I wrote. Characters changed, characters got added that I didn’t plan for, and some twists evolved that I didn’t see coming. (Which I suppose is good, since that means the audience might not see them coming either!) It was very much an organic process.
I think the story turned out pretty well overall, and everything is still in the places I planned for it to be when Book Two starts later next year. Book Two will jump ahead in time (the reasons for this will be obvious when you hear how Book One ends) and things will be a bit different than they are in Book One. There will definitely be a lot of things I will have to jump over as this story progresses simply because I don’t have the time to fill in all the details. I guess I’ll have to leave it to the imaginations of my listeners to cover some of the missing ground.
One thing about the finale that will be interesting is to see if it works in terms of the listeners being able to follow it well. There are upwards of 17 major characters running around doing things in the finale and I worry it might get a little confusing at times. It should be fine as long as the listener has heard all the episodes that come before it, but it really will be an experiment in characterization. One of the things I wanted to do with Twin Stars was prove you could do an epic SF Space Opera saga in audio drama format, and if everything goes according to plan I will have done so by the time Book One ends.
Rob
