are the plans to rewrite big bears on campus still out there?

Short answer: 

Yes.

Longer answer: 

Yes, but I haven’t managed to hit upon what form, exactly, that rewrite might take, or if I want it to be a rewrite at all, all fighting with me wondering if I should just abandon the thing altogether.A lot of this confusion stems from the fact that Big Bears on Campus and City of Bears were never supposed to be this long. They weren’t supposed to be long at all! The initial run, Big Bears on Campus, was actually intended to be a series of short vignettes without any backstory or further development, making fun and riffing on the college campus where I was currently going to school. But it took off! Not only did people enjoy it, I really enjoyed writing it, and I found myself becoming surprisingly invested in these characters. So I left it open to a possible sequel of some form, and started figuring out where to go from there.

Bear Boutique was, at the time, the longest continuous story I had ever produced. That thing was hard to write. I still think it’s the weakest of all the sections, even though it has a few stand out parts here and there that I return to on occasion. What came from that was another series of vignettes, Special Delivery, which, like the first series, I had intended to be relatively unconnected to anything else. These were also my first commissions, and so my first attempts at trying to wed my own vision of a story with someone else’s with decidedly mixed results in places.

Then came the final chunk, written over the course of a month for NaNoWriMo. I love those two arcs that I put together–I think they’re well plotted, the characters are interesting, its one of the few pieces I’ve written which I felt managed to transcend to boundaries of the genre and push my ideas in new directions. But this was exactly the problem–I still had no idea where I was going with any of this. I’d never known where I was going with any of this. Sure, I had ***ideas*** of what I might write, but there was no clear sign of resolution. Was I just going to keep writing it forever? I didn’t know. I stopped, hesitated, put it on hiatus, and decided that the Frankenstein that it is was impossible to wrestle with–that what I needed to do was take everything I’d learned writing these disparate chunks, go back to the beginning, just start over and do it right. 

Turns out that’s easier said than done. I had a long burnout, where I over committed and had to stop writing for a few months while I put myself back together. I got back on my feet, and then I started my Patreon with the goal that if I could pull in a decent income, I could set more time aside to focus on longer pieces like City of Bears. Well Patreon was a great success (Thanks Everyone!) but also a sizable commitment. It’s taken a lot of work to juggle four sizable entries a week, as well as five commissions every month. I love doing it, and this last year has been amazing, but it hasn’t left a lot of time for deep work on projects like City of Bears (especially when you throw in all of the other turmoil of last year, including back surgeries, new jobs, etc.)

I still love this story. I have had about half a dozen false starts over the years, trying to figure out what this story looks like and how to tell it. Is it one massive novel? Is it a series of extended vignettes without much relation to each other? Is it a series of staggered close third person narratives which interlock? Is it simply a story world that has no real beginning or ending, but thousands of stories inside of it? The truth is, it’s all of those things to me, and cutting off any of those avenues to pursue one of them is excruciatingly difficult to decide.

At this moment, I’m still not sure what I want to do. There are some stories that I want to tell for sure. I have no idea how any of it ends. I secretly feel like every story I write is a constant continuation and rebirth of City of Bears, and that I will be writing new versions of this story until the day I die. This probably isn’t very satisfactory, but this is where the issue currently stands, as honest as I can render it.