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zorosmalewife · 22 days

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Chain Reaction Notes - General

Want to know about my writing process? Want to see my POV style guides and areas of concern? Discussion of the writing of the fic, the writing of my notes, an old outline of the fic, and some other random shit under the cut!

As you all know, the last chapter of chain reaction that I wrote before the hiatus was chapter 9. I finished chapter 9 mid December 2022. I was working on chapter 10 soon after that, but my hyperfixation had shifted and I was more focused on other projects. That being said, I was still plugging away at chain reaction, and ended up finishing chapter 10 about 5 months after the hiatus started. At that point I had already decided not to post anything until the whole piece was completed, though, so it just lived quietly in my word processor.

Once again, I slowly worked on it in the background, and after a little over three months, I finished chapter 11. That puts us in early September 2023. I had started reading the One Piece manga around that time and it really inspired me to pick this piece up and try to finish it. By the start of November, chapter 12 was done, and I'd decided to take part in NaNoWriMo with the goal of finishing the fic by the end of the year. 10 days after finishing chapter 12, 13 was done, and I was really picking up steam. Two and a half weeks later I finished chapter 14. Three weeks after that I finished chapter 15. Eight days after that I finished chapter 16. Ten days later, I finished chapter 17. Three days after that, on January 19th, 2024, I finished the epilogue. After writing 50k in three months (a lot for me!) I took a nice long break from looking at or even thinking about the fic. Then, in late February, I started my final round of edits. I sent it to some friends and got feedback. And now we're waiting for my beta to check for grammar and other minutiae I tend to fuck up on my own.

Ultimately, this piece is 107k. Depending on how edits go, I expect it to end up pushing 108k, maybe more. That's long! The longest thing I've ever written, in fact! That's a lot to keep track of, especially considering that half of the fic was written over a year ago, so I kept a lot of notes, especially during the hiatus.

While writing the first half of the piece, all my notes lived in a single Google Doc. As you may remember, chain reaction is actually based on someone else's fic, so in the early days, the Doc was filled with a basic summary of that fic and what I was keeping, what I was changing, and what I was getting rid of entirely. Then my piece got farther away from the source material and I used the Doc to plan out my story beats. Even before chapter 9 was finished, I had the whole fic outlined, though that outline ended up changing significantly. (More on that later.) When it came to actually writing the hiatus chapters, though, I was getting frustrated with my notes in the Doc - they were wordy, and I find it very annoying to scroll through a long document in search of specific information. By the time I was working on chapter 13, I was starting to get genuinely frustrated. My Doc notes just didn't have what I needed - specific details about what I'd written, not what I planned to write. It was essential that I knew what happened in each previous chapter without having to reread prose every time I wanted to check a small detail. And I certainly didn't want to keep scrolling on my computer, clicking in and out of my word processor with my little trackpad. So I broke out an old sketchbook and started to take notes the old fashioned way.

Step one was figuring out what I needed to keep track of while writing the new chapters. What did these notes need to say? What was worth writing down? The more I wrote, the harder it would be to find what I needed, so I had to be selective.

Mostly, the answer to that was character dynamics. It was essential that I kept track of how the characters felt about each other, so everything progressed naturally instead of happening arbitrarily when I remembered to include it. I also created a list of things that needed to happen regularly that I regularly forgot to include. I'll list out all the variables I tracked at the end of this post, as well as the POV style guides I created for Ace and Zoro. I'll also put the original fic outline down there, too, one from November 2022. The final fic ended up much different, so it might be interesting to see how things were originally supposed to go!

Once I decided on the Essential Variables and Information for my sketchbook notes, I started writing them out. The first page was filled with the important variables, the POV style guides, some doodles, and a color coding guide. Then I set up one page per chapter. Each page had the chapter's theme at the top, followed by a summary of each scene in the chapter and all the relevant information for it - the scene's POV character, its corresponding number in the outline doc, how long until they have to return to Sabaody, how long Ace and Zoro have been together, and any of the Essential Variables that were included in that scene. Then, at the bottom of the page, after I'd written the chapter and finished writing up its notes, I'd pick the title!

Despite the fact that I was working on chapter 13 when I started keeping the sketchbook notes, the first chapter I took notes on was 10 (the first hiatus chapter and second timeskip chapter). This was because chapter 10 is the first one that's unpublished - if there was a variable I forgot to include, or if I made a mistake with the continuity, I could still change it! On top of that, chapter 10 functions as a baseline; the theme of the chapter is literally 'learning our new normal'! So it was really important for the progression of the piece that I kept good notes about what, exactly, that baseline is.

Then, once my notes on chapters 10, 11, and 12 were done, I felt ready to continue with 13! I wrote the scenes from my Google Doc outline while regularly checking the sketchbook for variables. Honestly, I was often changing the order of scenes in the Doc, or changing their contents, or deleting them, or adding new ones, but I was still (generally speaking) following the outline there. Eventually, I abandoned the Doc, copying the scene ideas right into my word processor and organizing the outline in the drafts of this very tumblr!

By the time I was writing chapter 16, things had changed so radically from the original outline, and I was so close to the end, I got a little lazy with the notes. The notes for chapters 16 and 17 share a page, and all I did was reorganize the outline again, as well as change the way certain scenes played out. For the epilogue, though, I ended up writing 3 pages of notes. This is largely because I hadn't decided what it was going to look like until I got to writing it - I had one scene in mind, but that was it! So I had to decide 1. how much time I wanted to cover 2. what happened in that time frame 3. how much of that I was actually going to depict and 4. how I was going to structure it. I ended up going with something radically different from the body of the piece, but I think it's both effective and fun!

In the near future, I'll be typing up those pages of chapter notes. I'll post them here one chapter at a time. They'll have spoilers, obviously, because they're a summary of the events in the unposted chapters, but they're not very detailed, so it shouldn't actually ruin anything for anyone. They'll be under a cut so only those who wish to see them will!

Wow, okay, this post ended up really long. Wow. I'll put the POV style guides, Essential Variables, and original outline under this, and that'll be it, I promise. Thank you to everyone who has read any of my posts on this silly tumblr account about my silly fic. It means the world to me, truly.

POV STYLE GUIDE - ZORO

a lot of cursing

gets poetic sometimes (often)

holy mother of parentheticals!

a lot of "oh my God"s

calls people assholes / dickhead / fuckhead

says [word] ass

repetition girlie (in twos)

POV STYLE GUIDE - ACE

more casual voice (IN DIALOGUE)

um, uh, etc. (IN DIALOGUE)

doesn't really say fuck unless it's about sex

more hypothetical questions

loves 2 spiral

milder insults like jerk

repetition girlie (in threes)

can't feel heat

more formal prose

VARIABLES I TRACKED

Perona + Zoro's relationship

Mihawk + Ace's relationship (they are @ odds until a particular chapter)

Mihawk + Zoro's relationship

Perona + Ace's relationship (they become besties between two specific chapters)

Acezoro relationship obviously but this was the Point of the fic so the progress was baked into the outline. That being said, I did make sure to write down any instances of either of them using the word 'love' or something similar in regard to one another. The scene summaries contain information about the progression of their dynamic

Perona calls Mihawk 'boss'

Ace falling asleep in his food (I WAS SO BAD AT REMEMBERING THIS ONE)

Ace spirals. Always guilty

Zoro Autism Meltdowns (tm)

Zoro's always drinking

Perona shoots negative ghosts at the drop of a hat! (I was bad at remembering this one also)

Zoro calls Mihawk 'hawk eyes'

Zoro's training progress. esp w haki

Ace can't feel heat. (Really important!!)

ORIGINAL HIATUS OUTLINE - FAR DIFFERENT FROM FINAL PRODUCT - ANNOTATED TO SHOW WHAT STAYED AND WHAT DID NOT

The numbers are from the full timeskip outline, so the first 5 scenes are in chapter 9. The hiatus starts with chapter 10 so we'll start there

Chapter 10:

6. The alpha humandrill. Ends up being easier than anyone expected (zoro does it by himself) bc he's not fucking stressed out about his crewmates or ace or anything. He's like Back On Form and fully healed and everyone is like um. Okay. hello [stayed!]

6.5. Spar interlude! Happens right off the tail end of 6 and ace is like. Distracted and flustered and ends up getting cut because of it. Ace explains that you have to consciously transform to avoid hits, but if you're good enough at observation haki you can pretty much do it automatically. Admits to 1. Being distracted by how sexy zoro is and 2. Not being good at anything other than armament haki [stayed!]

7. Farming! This is supposed to be an all 4 of them activity but perona quickly fucks off to go make lemonade and snacks for everyone so she doesn't have to slum it in the dirt. Mihawk makes her anyway. They have kind of a fun time time throwing dirt at each other and eventually manage to goad mihawk into throwing zoro into the lake [stayed, with less dirt throwing but zoro definitely still goes into the lake!]

7.5. Family Dinner interlude! Mihawk complains about how little work they got done that day and zoro grumbles about not being able to train and mihawk's like look idiot taking breaks is important. What do you think about this wine. And the two of them go back and forth about it and ace and perona are watching like :pogchamp: father and son…… [stayed! though it ended up shifting a bit to focus on mihawk and ace being at odds, and happens the day after 7 instead of the same day like i originally planned]

8. Mihawk explaining haki. The canon scene, expanded. [stayed!]

8.5. Spar interlude! This one is obviously zoro trying to get better with haki. Ace gives him tips and kind of accidentally teaches him ryuo [stayed - sort of. it's zoro practicing, but it's ace pov. he frets about being a bad partner, doesn't actually help zoro much]

9. Ace and zoro drunk convo number one. this one is about their relationship and what they want from it. also they go camping. Trying to figure out what it means to be together, what they want that to look like. [stayed!]

Chapter 11

9.5 Family Dinner interlude! Set up 10 [stayed!]

10. Perona doing zoro's nails. He won't let her do his fingers bc they'll chip from his workouts but he'll let her do his toes. They talk about his ankle scars and she can't decide if that's funny or infuriating. Ace thinks it's hilarious but does ride zoro's ass about it later lol. First inkling of zoro's sword throwing tendencies [stayed - sort of! perona does his fingers first, actually, bc she talked him into matching with her. then, when she's doing his toes, she see the ankle scars. instead of the reactions in this outline, they both freak out - they're upset that his first impulse in that situation was to cut his legs off. and they're even more upset when zoro is dismissive of their feelings and concerns about that. perona has to leave the room and ace and zoro have their first argument as a couple]

10.5. Spar interlude! Zoro's first spar w mihawk [changed! this became a resolution for 10, involving zoro examining his own tendencies, a mushy apology, and intense makeup sex]

11. Mihawk bonding! He and zoro go spearfishing [stayed!]

11.5. Family Dinner interlude! Talk about baths nd the devil fruit user feeling of powerlessness. Ace esp hates being cut off from his fruit bc it's become an essential part of himself [stayed! focused on ace's Issues]

12. Zoro and ace take a bath! Mihawk probably has a huge huge (room-sized) marble tub around somewhere. Ace agrees to heat the water up with his powers but zoro convinces him to get in. A very tender trust exercise. First inkling of ace's deflated sense of self worth [stayed but was moved to chapter 12!]

Chapter 12

12.5. "Spar" interlude! (it's just naked wrestling) [changed! this became a spar with mihawk to show the progress of his dynamic w zoro]

13. zoro lets perona give him a piercing… that's right. zoro nipple piercings. Ace gets his navel done in solidarity. Love wins [stayed! expanded a bit to cover the change in the dynamic the three of them have, and also to reassert the bond between them]

13.5. Family Dinner interlude! "Roronoa your nipples." [stayed!]

14. Drunk convo…… 2! They talk about sabo and kuina. ("so. Why three swords" "the honest answer?" "i think i deserve that. We're together, aren't we?" "yeah. It's just… i've never told anyone." "how about i tell you something in return?") They learn about each other's baggage. This, too, helps them get stronger [stayed!]

14.5. Spar interlude! Z spars one on one w mihawk again. Appreciable progress [stayed, but was moved down into chapter 13]

15. The first "i love you" and it of course comes from ace. Happens during very tender sex. Zoro does not say it back (yet) [stayed, was also moved into chapter 13]

15.5. Family Dinner interlude! This is where perona drops the infamous "he sacrificed his eye for you, the least you could do is give him your last piece of fish" and ace is like he WHAT. he and perona start freaking out and screaming at zoro and eventually zoro is like OKAY. BYE. and jumps out the window. [whew. okay. this scene stayed in the fic with a few changes, but ultimately ended up being the final scene of chapter FOURTEEN. this is because i wanted to expand more on zoro's reaction to scene 15, so i added 5 new scenes between 15 and 15.5. details on the new scenes will be in the notes for chapters 13 and 14]

Chapter 13

16. Zoro doesn't come back like they expected tho and by day 2 ace is like i'm going after this mf fr. ace repeatedly tries to play charades w the humandrills to get them to tell him where zoro is and eventually they lead ace right to him. [stayed (sort of. he only has to play charades with the humandrills once) but, because of all the new scenes, this ended up being the opener of chapter 15. i also added a new scene after it]

16.5. Spar interlude! This is actually a genuine fight between them, not really a spar. Ace tries to talk to him during it but zoro shuts it down. "But your eye!!!!!" "but nothing. You were going to die and now you're here, alive. That's all there is to it." they don't exactly work it out but ace does start to understand zoro more completely. He is going to make his own decisions independent of everything and then always double down [stayed - sort of. they do fight but it doesn't last that long. it's more of an icebreaker than anything. they eventually work it out (tho zoro doesn't say it back) and have more makeup sex. the dialogue in this outline was heavily edited in the final piece. again, so much stuff was added that this ended up being the final scene of chapter 15]

17. Cold snap. Lots of everyone following ace around bc he's a furnace. Even mihawk seems to always end up in the same room. It's very funny [deleted!]

17.5. Family Dinner interlude! Mihawk thanks ace for ^ but is like. Super cringe abt it. Perona starts sniffling [deleted!]

18. Perona gets sick :^( zoro takes good care of her. Ace hovers. Mihawk make soup. They're all being cute about it and graciously ignoring that abt each other [deleted!]

18.5. NO spar interlude! They worried about perona [deleted!]

19. Zoro, ace, and mihawk cooking (fail) compilation [deleted!]

19.5. Family Dinner interlude! Perona's all better :) [deleted!]

Chapter 14

20. They get a news coo that finally announces the fact that ace went missing. His bounty is increasing to a billion and the "He's Gol D. Roger's Son" thing is dropped, an attempt by the gov't to make ppl more likely to hunt ace and turn him in. he has a whole Mega Breakdown over everyone knowing, over ZORO knowing, and zoro finally hits him with the completely earnest "i don't fucking CARE!" "but you sacrificed your eye for me, someone with bad blood in their veins!!" "you think that matters to me? Do you think for one second that something like that would've made me okay with leaving you for dead? I love you! I'd DIE if it would keep you safe, bad blood or not!" "but i'm the son of–" "I DON'T CARE!!! YOU'RE MY PARTNER!!! YOU'RE MY CAPTAIN'S BROTHER!!!! YOU'RE THE ONLY MAN I'VE EVER LOVED!!!!!" (first time he's said it and not "me too" or some shit equivalent) and he Storms Out and ace has to really wrestle with how much he's allowed roger to cloud his vision. Mihawk is like well i met roger once and he seemed chill. Perona is like i really don't see why it's such a big deal now. You're twenty one years old. Like, would you care if the roles were reversed and zoro was the one who was roger's kid? And ace is like :O no…….. I wouldn't…… Wow Thanks Perona [wow okay so this scene stayed. technically. but only so far as the premise - they do get a news coo announcing that ace is still alive and has a one billion berry bounty and is also roger's son. but it plays out totally differently. more details on what actually happens in the chapter 16 notes!]

20.5. Spar interlude! Swing over to zoro, who is frustrated. Who feels unseen, misunderstood. It's him against the humandrills and he goes so wild that mihawk comes out and is like fucking. Stop. and zoro raises a sword against him in earnest anger and while he still cannot win, he pushes mihawk back. [okay so this scene kind of stayed, but it was moved into chapter 15 between ace's charades w the humandrills and their reconciliation spar. zoro does go crazy against the humandrills, but when mihawk comes out to stop him, he stops. and they talk]

21. Epic reunion. They understand each other and are like okay sorry for being dismissive of ur position. Let's both agree to not let this shit we can't change bother us. They will have to accept these things about each other (zoro's need to throw himself on the sword, ace's complicated feelings about himself and his value and history.) Finally get the "thank you for loving me" speech (edited of course) which zoro meets with "thank you for living. Thank you for letting me stay by your side" [this got deleted, mostly. some of the ideas were pulled into the highly edited version of scene 20]

21.5. Family Dinner interlude! Everyone is like um okay that was awkward. Why don't we own mihawk over his music tastes now [deleted!]

22. Drunk convo the third. What's next for us? Can this really survive beyond the shores of kuraigana? Do we want it to? [changed and moved - not a drunk convo anymore. combined with 25, ended up the penultimate scene of chapter 17]

22.5. Spar interlude! Zoro and ace spar. Zoro wins decisively. [deleted - didn't need to be a scene. it's a milestone that happened and is mentioned but that's it]

23. zoro doing perona's hair. Maybe ace's too bc it's been growing out [stayed - sort of. moved to be the first scene of chapter 14. he only does perona's hair]

23.5. FD interlude! Mihawk "are pigtails in season…?" [deleted!]

Chapter 15

24. Mihawk bonding! Ace talks to him about what his next step should be. What he wants it to be. They talk about whitebeard and legacy and what it means to want the best for your children [stayed, with significant changes - still a conversation between mihawk and ace about the future, but it doesn't really hit the beats in this outline. ended up in the second half of chapter 17]

24.5. Zoro and ace spar. It's Very Fucking Intense and when zoro pins him ace gets heart eyes and they smash on the forest floor like animals [deleted </3]

25. Ace and zoro have a serious talk. Ace "i'm staying by your side. Let's get married" "THAT'S how you propose to me?????" "yes?" "yeah ok. Let's get married stud" [stayed! dialogue changed slightly. ended up the penultimate scene of chapter 17]

25.5. Family Dinner interlude! Announce their plans + engagement, talk about how they're gonna get to sabaody [stayed!]

CHAPTER 16 - Epilogue [Not a breakdown of scenes, but basic notes about it]

– + them getting back to sabaody. All 4 of them go. Intentionally about a week early to make sure they can get married and have a little honeymoon lol. Perona and mihawk are their witnesses for the wedding. [true]

– + mihawk and perona say they're leaving but definitely stick around and watch to make sure everyone leaves sabaody together. They're both too aware of the straw hats' luck [kind of true - perona sticks around at least]

– + ace notices this by day 4 and is like hey. Let's go to the amusement park, as one final hurrah! [untrue - ace and zoro do go to sabaody park, but it's just the two of them and it's also off screen]

~ ace has to be in disguise. He has a whole Thing abt covering his tat, but it's also like c'mon brother. [kind of true - they do wear disguises but ace is not seen caring about covering the tat]

– + eventually they get the call from rayleigh that's like "ok everyone is back. You should head to the ship." and they're like :thumbsup: and they make it to the sunny first. When nami rolls up, zoro and ace are making out against the mast [kind of true - no call from rayleigh happens on screen but they ARE making out against the mast when nami rolls up]

~ nami "what the FUCK is going on???? Is that ace?????" and they're like "yeah. We're married now." namigetstrolled.png [true!]

#chain reaction by zorosmalewife

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