New Infinity Addendum: The Origins of New Infinity
New Infinity started life in late 2013, though this was by no means my first original fiction project. In 2011, I had uploaded a fan fiction to Fanfic.net, and while it had generated plenty of traffic there and I'm still proud of those numbers years later, I was unhappy writing fan fiction due to the limitations it places on writing. You need specific characters, specific settings, and must meet specific themes and a specific style, otherwise it's out of character or just plain sloppy. I made the jump to original fiction, adapting at the time the big project I was working on for Flipnote Hatena into original fiction, changing character names and settings and writing what I thought at the time was a moving, dark story of a world torn apart.
Looking back at it, it was horrendously amateurish, and as plot holes piled up and things I couldn't explain or added just because I thought they were cool grew and grew, I eventually gave up, scrapped it all 28,000 words in at the end of 2012, and it's been on the back burner ever since. I was frustrated with myself, and until I could come up with a solid way to convey what I wanted without falling into cliches or the like, I needed a writing sandbox I could update indefinitely. I named this project New Infinity, with the intent being that I could add to it as much as I wanted, it could be a million words long, and it wouldn't end. Evidently, my goals for the project changed. I began drafting ideas for arcs in 2013 and started writing it in the fall of that year. I started with just five or six arcs I knew I wanted to do, and out of those I ended up writing the first, second, and the second half the fifth arcs, as well as utilizing bits for the tenth arc.
Originally, Felix was going to have a more antagonistic role in the series, with shifting motivations and a conflict centering on Ash trying to escape New Infinity arising. If/when I did end it, it was to be revealed that New infinity was a digitized version of Infinity, a town ran by an old man going by the name Felix, who would send Ash and her family on their way back to Jefferson and giving Ash the idea to get involved with writing, and it would be revealed she had been writing the entire series, not me. I scrapped this idea during what was then the second arc (which I've never released, skipping over it in favor of uploading the third arc as the second), in the middle of writing a loud, profanity-ridden rant for Felix. It just didn't feel right to me and I felt the character had more dimension than that. I turned the first chapter of that forbidden arc into an arc interlude (a single chapter arc, essentially), and led right into the new arc 2, giving Felix a more supportive role in the series.
New Infinity is revealed to the reader to be a digitized civilization, with a vague implication that it might be real and the first arc just a nightmare, but this was mostly done to cover my own ass, so I could make mistakes or do some wild and crazy arcs like involving magic or ending the world, and have everything back to normal following that. Likewise, I could change up where things were located and play around with that, changing what I felt was the optimal scenery outside Ash's window to whatever I felt looked right at the time. This was properly revealed to Ash about partway through, but after I wrote the arc interlude and included Twitch, I knew at that point I solely wanted to focus on the digitized civilization, and that led to me coming up with the overarching plot of the series, which required a specific beginning, middle, and end.
One aspect of the series that I always considered unique is the addition of Team Fortress 2 segments, because at the time I was playing TF2 practically religiously. I included these segments to serve as a break from the rest of the action and tension, tell a story about Ash and her long-distant friend Isaac still getting to bond, cement Ash's characterization as a PC gamer, and lastly (and maybe most importantly) to subvert the normal manner gaming is shown in fiction. Fictional depictions of games are usually incredibly lackluster, almost to the point of frustration, and as an aspiring game developer, I knew my writing project should avert common depictions of games and show them as they actually are. The TF2 segments are based on actual maps, events, and gameplay, and aside from a bit of dramatization they are shown very faithfully to how the game actually plays.
By the time I finished the second uploaded arc, I had begun writing an overarching plot for New Infinity and fitting it into my own fictional timeline, and at that time it looked like it'd be about 8-12 arcs, total. I hit the exact center of those two figures, ten arcs and 37 chapters pretty solidly. That said, it took a while, but I still did it, and it's been pretty satisfying to do so.
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