Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Announcement

So obviously it’s been a while.
 
Andrew here, author of Wandering from Death and Facing my Fears. It’s with a heavy heart and a fair amount of shame and embarrassment that I’m announcing that the story is being axed.
 
I really didn’t want to let this just drop. Honestly, I didn’t. But life got in the way, time stretched on, and I just kind of lost interest. That’s always a risk with a project like this. Unlike my previous stories in the Slenderverse, my direction with this story got a bit muddled. Now I Shall Know You Again was basically my take on the “how to survive” character, with a “not even a clever person will survive forever” ending. Don’tShoot The Messenger was my take on proxies and how farcical the idea of a bureaucracy for them and had a plot direction fairly early into the run. Wandering from Death, on the other hand, shifted focus. It also grew less focused as I went along and it just made it hard to stay enthusiastic about.
 
The beginning of Wandering from Death was an attempt to troll the Slenderverse. More specifically, the main crowd of writers at the time, who I honestly wasn’t too fond of. But most of those writers stopped writing and a lot of the community started moving to the Fear Mythos. On top of that, my initial plan (start an out-of-game blog and interact with the community that way, do crossovers with everyone, then pull the plug on this blog because things were getting “too real” and shifting to the main blog) ended up falling through for various reasons. Then I decided to just do crossovers well and attempted to plan crossovers with everyone I could. Then I set up an epic story to kill off all the Fears and tried setting my protagonist as a hero figure for a community that I didn’t have the time to stay involved in and the whole thing just…kind of became a huge mess.
 
So instead of actually finishing the story (which would take quite a bit of time and effort), I’ll try to do the next best thing: walk you through my plans for the rest of the Wanderer Trilogy. Yes, this was slated to be a trilogy that continued on a blog called “Facing Death.” But anyway. On to the story.
 
The original plan with the crossover with Raggedy was to kill off the Black Dog. Canis probably would have gotten involved somehow, since that was his main Fear. As things dragged on, this was expanded to include the plan I ultimately had for the Empty City, so that I could use the City’s distortion of time and space to explain the absence. Oops.
 
I have no clue how we would have taken down the Black Dog without repeating what I did with the Rake. But the Empty City I had a plan for. The Empty City was to be the tomb for a lot of Fears.
 
I didn’t know how to kill all the “hivemind” Fears without concentrating them all in one place, since they could, in theory, just keep perpetuating. The way I was setting things up, they were all in one of two alliances: with the Choir and Red Cap or with the Intrusion and the rest of the Four Horsemen. And through EAT manipulating the followers, those factions were are war with each other. In theory, they would have met in the Empty City where they would be required to have the core of their hivemind due to how Domains worked. At that point, the Masks (probably with the aid of the Manufactured Newborn) would have blown the City up and narrowly escaped. Phones probably would have died in the process. I wanted for the Choir to consume him eventually. That way, the City would be destroyed and even if the other Fears weren’t dead, they’d be trapped inside with no escape. All the Horsemen apart from the Intrusion would escape, of course. They’re endgame players.
 
At about this time, the Magi (EAT, Blind Man, Manufactured Newborn) would turn on the Masks. And of course, at this point, the Manufactured Newborn would have upgraded itself to the point that it was practically unstoppable, constantly improving and reproducing itself. They’d still stop it, of course, by launching an attack on the Tower that was controlling all the iterations of the Newborn that were around. The other Magi would be easily dispatched.
 
There would also be a reveal sometime during this blog that Canis is one of the Timberwolves, serving the Archangel. Around this point, his interests cease to align with Kenny’s so he becomes a flat-out antagonist.
 
In one of the final conflicts, Kenny’s staff probably would have broken. The idea was to find someone in the ‘verse with more mystic powers to lead them to Yggdrasil, where Kenny would forge a new weapon out of wood from the tree. Why? Well, because my incarnation of the Slender Man was in fact one and the same as the Bleeding Tree, Yggdrasil’s opposite. If Yggdrasil is the world tree, the Bleeding Tree is its antithesis, breaking down worlds and causing them to meld together. Dimensional bleeding, y’know. So a weapon made from Yggdrasil would be the only thing capable of hurting it.
 
This is probably about the time that the final blog would have started, in which Kenny and the Masks begin their final assaults. I don’t know whether I would have tackled the Cold Boy/Wooden Girl/Masquerade or the Four Horsemen first, but they’d be the first to fall, with the Slender Man himself finally taking direct part in the action.
 
Then, of course, the final battle with the Slender Man. I have no clue how this would have ultimately gone down. Maybe Kenny would have succeeded. Maybe he wouldn’t have. I like to think that he at least cuts the Slender Man out of his version of reality and he and Maggie get to have a happy ending together. Because of course Kenny and Maggie get together at some point. Last dies, though. He was definitely going to die at some point.
 
And looking back on everything I’ve written, it sounds really stupid. That’s probably why I lost interest in it. Because it was a narrative of epic-length scope with far too many climaxes that I didn’t know how to execute and a setup I wasn’t particularly pleased with. We learn from our mistakes, I guess. At least Last, Kenny, and Maggie were really fun characters to write. Maybe I’ll revisit them in another project someday.
 
I’m incredibly sorry to everyone I’ve let down by not finishing this project (though by this point I suspect most people don’t care), especially Raggedy for essentially killing his own momentum. Maybe he’ll go back to his blog after this. We can handwave the absence easily enough. He probably escaped the Empty City after everyone else was killed or something. If he does something it's ultimately up to him.
 
So the Wanderer Trilogy has been officially abandoned, but if you really liked my writing, I have other projects! I’m rewriting Don’t Shoot The Messenger, which is being serialized in my school’s online paper and which I’ll probably convert to ebook once it’s finished and I’ve gone back and tweaked everything. And there’s one more project I’d like to write for the mythos before I decide to stop creating and become just a fan. It’ll take a while so that I can focus on some other projects and life events, but I’ll probably be posting about it when it’s ready, so keep an eye on this blog and/or DSTM for announcements regarding something called “Operation Stirling.”
 
Well, I guess this is goodbye, everybody. Thanks for reading. And again, I’m sorry.
 
~Andrew A. Koerner