Behind The Blogs: Dinner Party?

Writing Process
The third episode was written a BUNCH of times. The first time I tried writing it, it was a bit too awkward, wacky and confusing. That was draft one of Looks Can Tell and it was written around August 2014. I gave up writing it around early 2015 because I just didn't like the story. Around July of 2015, I decided to rewrite the story because I wanted to do something like a steven bomb except with Blog-iary. This was the canceled Danny Five Day Week. I stopped writing this draft because I knew I couldn't finish in time and I didn't like the last part of the draft I had. It was a bit uncomfortable and bland to read read so I completely scrapped the idea. In January of this year, there was a short story contest at my school and I wanted to write a Blog-iary episode for it. I originally wanted it to be a remake of Looks Can Tell but with a different plot that hit a few beats to the old story. I never made it to the deadline of the contest because I was busy writing Jake. 

I still wanted to publish it because I actually liked the story. Around that time, I had already written four pages of the story and I only needed to write a few more. So, about a week later I got back to writing it. I did get a bit stumped around the part where Dan describes Mike and Val. I already drawn pictures of them but there was a sentence I was a bit stumped on. Reading it felt a bit too weird and awkward to put in. I could really find a way to rephrase it to I decided to just keep it in there.

Editing Process

I wanted to edit on my tablet for this story but I wasn't able to. You see, I lost my tablet around the time I had to start editing and I didn't find it until after I published that blog post. So, I decided to physically edit everything. Unlike "Jake...", I didn't have a lot to rewriting for certain scenes. They only part that need a lot of rewriting had to be the ending because I felt like it forced the moral down the reader's throat. I'm still a bit unhappy with the paragraph and if I wasn't on a deadline, I'd probably rewrite my rewrite. Speaking of rewrites, if you didn't noticed, the beginning and preview look a bit different. Well, the editor, Caroline, edited the beginning on the day I had to publish the story. I didn't want to give her 10 pages of text for her to edit, so I gave 2ish pages (I even felt uncomfortable giving her that much). I'm most likely not going to have her edit any other stories since I don't feel conformable asking her to do for my blog. It feels like I'm using her when I ask her to edit and I don't want that. Anyway, a huge edit I had to make was the interviewers. Before, The Finebros were interviewing future Danny. With the entire PR disaster, I want Blog-iary nowhere near that crap. So, I've replaced Benny and Rafi with Sadie and Page and instead of them working at scumbag entertainment, they'll be working at Blooface Entertainment. I don't think anyone is going to mind this change since most of the internet hates the finebros anyways.

Formatting Process

Not a lot of problems arose while formatting. One of the problems I had was formatting future Danny's font. Google Docs doesn't have Century Gothic so I had to use Microsoft Word. I'm not too fond of word because of how glitchy and unresponsive the program can be. This was exactly what happened when I tried formatting. Putting what I had in blogger gave what a wrote a bunch of random spacing. I tried it again and the font came out as Times New Roman and smaller in the preview. To solve the problem, I took the text from an already published episode, and added the text for the episode next to it. Overall, when formatting, blogger can be very frustrating. It's hard changing the problem when Google is impossible to contact. 

For the first time ever, I added an upper toolbar from phones in my text message graphics. I wanted the bar to resemble an Android Lollipop toolbar because Dan owns a Samsung Galaxy Note 4. When I was making the graphics, I just felt like putting a taskbar because why not? I did make it when I lost my tablet. Maybe my tablet withdrawal caused me to do? Anyway, I noticed a small problem that arose when I was editing text bubbles. Microsoft Powerpoint, my graphics editor, would make large text bubbles tails look weird. So, similar to TARL, I saved a bubble, cropped out everything but the tail and used it for the bubbles. Although, I'm worried the color might look weird on other monitors like the new TARL texts. 

Final Step

Now that I'm finally done with the story, I can share it.

Overall, I loved writing Diner Party. It was the first time in a long while where most of the story flowed so nicely out of my brain. Writing Looks Can Tell was really frustrating. I was constantly stumped with writing and I hatted how the plot was going. I'm glad to be done with this episode and I can't wait to progress the series