No, not annoying, just….sigh….hard to talk about.
No, there’s no new chapters or anything on the immediate horizon. While I know there’s a future for that story, and those characters, somewhere, I feel like I’ve lost the thread on what that looks like, especially after the chunk I wrote for NaNoWriMo a few years back.
I touched on some of my worries about that story, and others like it, a couple of weeks back, in an ask I answered about politics in my writing. Looking at City of Bears in particular, something I’ve always said, and always thought, was that the series itself was *never* meant be become as large as it got. It fact, that first series was just meant to be a string of silly, off hand vignettes inspired by a few drawings I’d seen online, and some of the stupid observations around my college campus.
That said, it grew. It was somewhere around the eighth episode of Big Bears on Campus that I started to really feel like there was something bigger there that I wanted to explore, and honestly, I’ve always felt like I kind of butchered it relentlessly every step of the way. It’s a good story! Don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t regret writing it, but the person who wrote it, and the person I am now don’t…line up well in terms of skill, or vision.
I’ve batted around the idea of rebooting the whole thing a few times, but it’s such a massive undertaking, that even thinking about it is difficult, especially given the rapid pace that I have to generate writing. Still, that’s just praxis, really–the truth is, if I knew what I wanted the story to be, I’d write it, but I don’t know what it is.
The central issue I run into, when I do sit down and think about it, is the question of whether the City of Bears story I want to tell treats the setting as something static, or dynamic. That probably seems a bit strange, so I’ll try and explain. The first three chunks of City of Bears treat the setting as something dynamic–that is, it’s an origin story, describing how the city developed through the actions of Tristan et. al. and the setting is very fluid. But when I hit the third arc, something really fundamental shifted in the story. It wasn’t about the city changing anymore–everyone was essentially changed. Now, it was a story about people actually having to learn how to exist in that new world, while grappling with the remnants of the old one at the same time. It was a lot more complex, and a lot harder to write, but it yielded a lot of writing that I’m proud of.
I’d like to explore the setting more, that much I know. What needs to happen most, I think, is that I have to just break the scab off, and get back into it. It’s become such a monster to me, because I’ve never known how to “resolve” any of it, especially given where the story last left us. But I’ve come to wonder if these sorts of things really need a resolution, or consistency. Certainly Pigtown isn’t consistent, and all of those stories make sense together. I think City of Bears needs to become something more like that.
So, long story short, yes, there will be more. No, I’m not sure when there will be more, but I’d like it to be soon. Whatever I produce, I doubt it’s going to be a direct continuation of the story, but it will probably pick a few of the characters and delve a bit deeper into the issues arising from the setting itself. Beyond those vague notions, I honestly don’t know.
Bracken's Corner 