Halloween Ending Notes

This was a fun experiment. I wrote Severus and Johans stories entirely on Halloween (there might have been one epilogue I finished the next day). Basically one them would make their suggestions for what happened with the costume, I'd write the part, by the time I finished I'd see the other had made their suggestions, write their part, see the other's suggestions where in, repeat.

Eight characters was way too many, especially with the potential for them all to be major in the events. I should have taken a little more time to think about how many characters I wanted/when they would appear.

I wanted to follow the plot of the episode, but the costumes took the characters in directions more quickly than I anticipated. I think it worked out, but I would have liked more variations of the same scene.

I wanted every branch to be of equal length, but it just didn't work out. I reached what I thought was a clear conclusion on Severus' part more quickly than the others. His is also the only one without an epilogue because I just liked the idea of ending on cutting back to Cordelia.

I definitely should have been clearer about my expectations on the suggestions. I didn't post it, but for one of the costume changes Hypno typed around 800 words That was about 20% of the length I hoped the overall story would be.

The nature of this type of story is that each part has to be relatively short (ideally under a 1,000 words). That meant having to gloss over/cut out things.

Writing within a single episode was harder than I anticipated.

I wouldn't mind doing something like this again, though probably not for a little bit. I feel that I learned quite a bit based on how this attempt went and would come at it from a different angle. I'd also make sure all of the contributors were actually free on the day of writing.