Question for Author:
Whatever happened to Dale’s manager from his introductory story?
Answer:
Blair bailed out when he was tapped to join Fourth Fist. She wasn’t interested in working alongside the sort of people that the Regime would Link.
I always struggle between two contradictory impulses. The first is basically myself-as-reader, wanting to learn absolutely every detail of anything that is going on. This wins most of the time, leading to the occasional update which is just everyone standing around justifying whatever they are currently doing. The other is the urge to move the story, which wins more rarely.
Leaving out how everyone got from the end of their first individual stories to meeting for the first time was a rare victory for the latter impulse. but it did have the cost of losing a bit of information.
Question for Author:
Is there anything that you wish you’d done differently?
Answer:
The thing that I get, by a wide margin, the most complaints about is the ABAB nature of my updates. That is, the way it goes story, supplement, story, supplement and so on. A lot of people feel that the Sunday supplements take them out of the overall flow of the story.
I didn’t see that coming at all. I wanted to update more than once a week, but I knew that I couldn’t possibly pull off 2 story updates. The short Sunday updates were supposed to be a compromise, a way to get 2 updates without having to do 2 updates worth of work.
I’m not sure how I’d do it differently. I felt like a bunch of the early Sunday updates were delivering important exposition. I guess I’d try to figure out a way to get that into the main story. It would have been difficult, but going by reader input, perhaps worth it.
Question for Author:
Was there any particular inspiration for this story?
Answer:
Yeah, definitely. A buddy of mine recommended Worm to be, way back in the day, and I was just astonished. The idea that you could just write your own superhero story and put it on a website was amazing to me. Then I was like “why am I not doing that?”, and I decided to do it.
For the longest time I felt like there was going to be another shoe dropping. Like, some authority figure would appear and scold me for writing words onto the internet, but it turns out they let anybody in here.
The story itself takes inspiration from my overall skepticism regarding mainstream comic books. I always thought that the fact that the best people got the best powers was really convenient, and I’d always thought that it might be interesting to have some stories that were set up differently.
Question for Author:
How much of The Fifth Defiance is improvised versus planned out ahead of time?
Answer:
The overall story was blocked out from the beginning, but I have added a lot of minor twists and character arcs as ideas struck me.
Question for Author:
Why don’t you set up a Patreon or similar?
Answer:
I looked at the Patreons from the other stories that share my space at the bottom of the TWF ladder, and the amount that they take in is basically equivalent to how much I pay out every month to other web serials / web comics that I like. It feels like if I set one up then the money folks would be sending me would just be paid out again, with Patreon taking its cut twice.
I basically thought, why bother? I’m not good enough to make a living at this, and anything short of that feels like it is too much trouble. I am doing ok, financially, so I figure the money ought to go to the people out there trying to make content creation their real job.