Today (roughly) marks the three year anniversary of the Saga of Life. I write this article to give a general update on the project and my thoughts for its future. (Which, because I can’t predict the future, will really only be about next year.)
What does the three year anniversary mean?
- I launched the first version of the website three years ago. (It was only the Dutch version,
delevenssaga.nl, and it was technically in November.) - Since then, I’ve written and published a new cycle (10 short stories, 1 per time period) every year.
- Since this year, the website is also fully English and all stories completely translated.
What went well
I think the website is really solid. The code is clean, the design is clean, it’s really usable for actual reading, and it’s quite easy for me to update and manage.
The final kinks have been ironed out. The only tasks left in my todo document are really big visionary things that are also very optional.
I also think the stories are becoming better and better.
- The original Dutch version is already strong.
- But then I do both an edit and translation at the same time (to English)
- Which catches way more errors and revealed way more issues (or “potential improvements”) for my general writing style and story structure.
And yes, manual translation takes more time and effort than asking AI to help (for example). But it’s also much better. I learn a lot in the process, and the final translated story is way more colorful. And, erm, actually correct.
Finally, when I started the saga, I explained the process towards physical copies (or “actually earning an income from this”).
- Every pair of stories (story 1+2, story 3+4, etcetera) are a “bundle”.
- I’d like to allow people to buy actual ebooks or physical copies of said bundles.
- For that I need two things.
- Very easy and cheap way to upload many books to a self-publishing service.
- Very easy way to turn all my stories into the formats/outputs needed for that.
For the past three years, I’ve had to delay this task because some of my requirements simply weren’t met. Step by step, however, I’ve found solutions and possible ways forward.
Until, this year, I finally found the way.
- The past 6 books of mine (mostly Wildebyte Arcades) have already been published at an international self-publisher that satisfies my requirements.
- I have no upfront cost per book, which means I can do many bundles for Saga of Life without creating issues for my own bank account.
- I have enough experience with them now to know exactly how their process works, and also that they can be trusted and can achieve what I need.
- When you go to the website, every story has a button to instantly get a PDF version of the book.
- This is nicely formatted and high resolution, exactly what you’d need for a book. In other words, I can simply press that button to get my bundles.
- I can use the exact same source files (one markdown file per chapter) through another easy pipeline of mine to create ebooks as well.
- Thanks to my work on the Pandaqi website, I have a strong system that can dynamically draw any layout. In other words, I don’t need to do 100% of the “print wraparound” for these books by hand, I can just create the book cover and let everything else (the spine, the blurb on the back, the bar code, blabla) be done for me in a few seconds.
I’m not making any promises, but with all obstacles out of the way it’s just a matter of creating all the physical copies. Next year, I should be able to schedule a single week for doing just that and getting the Saga of Life into shops (finally).
The biggest obstacle is that I need to find a cool art style/design for the book covers that I can carry for the entire saga. I have some general ideas and sketches, but so far nothing conclusive that makes me say: “Yes, I can hundreds of unique book covers out of this same consistent style, without too much trouble.”
Most likely, this art style will be more like an old fairytale book. A simple design with simple symbols or shapes, but highly textured and decorated around the edges. But we’ll see.
What went wrong
Two things.
Double Translations are hard
First of all, my new editing approach was great for learning but terrible for productivity and finishing. As a reminder, this is what I did for all Cycle 3 stories.
- Write in Dutch.
- Later, Edit + Translate to English.
- I’ll most likely find loads of tiny improvements, which I must then backport to the Dutch version. This, in practice, means a sort of weird double translation of the story, going back and forth.
- Create an icon, blurb, metadata, opening poem => completely done.
This is just too much work. The Saga of Life is supposed to be a side project that keeps me writing short stories, during the times I’m fed up with other projects but still want to keep strengthening that muscle. It’s probably never going to earn me enough income, and that’s fine. I knew that going in and it’s why I purposely set it up the way I did. (Short stories, mostly independent, varying update schedule thanks to website, etcetera.)
I learned a lot. I became a better writer in both languages and a far better editor of stories. But looking at my schedule, and how much time I had to spend on that—time that made it impossible to do other projects I would’ve liked to do—it’s just not sustainable.
As such, from now on, stories are written in English first. The Dutch translation is optional and most likely won’t be happening anymore.
The website already has 30 stories in Dutch. And they’re written well, because they were written in Dutch first and translated later. If there’s any Dutch kid who discovers the saga, I’m pretty sure they’ll be able to read the English ones as soon as they’re done with all that content :p
Without the overhead of translating, stories are simply done in 50% of the time. More likely, it’s an even lower percentage, because translating is so hard and time-consuming that I become demotivated and drained.
I can create a new cycle for the Saga of Life by devoting ~10 weeks of a year to it (at most), instead of 20 (in a stress and panic).
Enough is enough, this is the right call.
Stories are too long
I set a clear upper limit of 15,000 words. The idea was that some stories, if really needed, would reach that. In reality, however, I subconsciously changed that to the target length of each story :p
Instead of writing 11,000 words with the occasional story going beyond that, all the recent stories had become ~15,000 words, sometimes on the dot.
No, no, no. They’re supposed to be short stories focused on one interesting thing about life (biology or history). Now it feels like I’m trying to put an entire novel’s worth of plot into 15,000 words. This, too, makes the process slower and drains the time I can spend on the project.
As such, stories will go back to being ~10,000 words on average.
I think it’s better to look at this the other way around. Every cycle or two should have one highlight story. A story idea that I think is absolutely the best of the bunch, perhaps because it has the most important event of them all.
Those stories will actually feel special and become a highlight (or “climax”) if they’re the ONLY ones allowed to be longer. If they’re the ONLY ones I translate to multiple languages again.
Stories have to earn this extra effort from me by being the highest possible quality.
And yes, in my rough planning for the Saga of Life, I can clearly mark those highlight stories already. (Major events, climax of a long-running storyline, just a really cool idea, etcetera) As stated, they happen once every cycle or two cycles.
What changed or will change?
The Dutch domain will be deprecated soon. The entire website is at thesagaoflife.com, where you can switch between languages. This is simply the best and most intuitive system, and it makes no sense to keep hosting it on a different domain too.
Previously, I added the animal species to character names. So, if the character Gulvi was present in a story, and they’re a dolphin, the metadata would contain characters: ["Gulvi (Dolphin)"].
This was just a silly idea and I got rid of it. It makes the website much slower to build, it makes characters harder to search (because they’re saved under not just their name but ALSO their species), and it doesn’t help at all.
Instead, at some point, characters will just get their own page (when you click on them) where I can place any custom background, data, or other interesting notes about them. They already have that individual page now, but it’s just a list of all stories in which they’re present and nothing else.
Why did I do this in the first place?
- Because I had no plan, and once I started including metadata this way, I just kind of … continued. It’s always better to be consistently wrong in programming than to constantly change your mind. Because now I could just CTRL+F search-and-replace stuff across the whole website with ease, because I had been consistent in naming characters.
- Because I was afraid of naming clashes. But really, how likely am I to accidentally use two characters of the same name all across the Saga of Life? And, on top of that, to never realize or catch that error or distinguish them in any other way? If I reaaaally need two characters called James, I just give them a surname.
And, as explained before, from now on there is no certainty new stories will have a Dutch translation.
Conclusion
That was my update on the project. Lots of good stuff, a few sad realizations about the fact I am not an immortal writing machine :p
I am a human with limited energy (mental and physical), and a brain that gets distracted by a thousand other creative endeavors. The fact the Saga already has 3 fully finished cycles is a good sign, but also just a confirmation that I can’t keep that up indefinitely.
Actual copies you can purchase are likely to come in 2025, but not a certainty.
I am also not opposed to writing other books “set in the Saga of Life universe”, but simply not part of the website. Those would not be short stories, but more like spin-off fantasy novels that are a regular length. I simply have too many ideas for worldbuilding (based on science/biology/a weird historic event) that are too big to put in a short story, but too similar to the Saga of Life to not connect them.
But those are just my rambling thoughts at this point, and we all know how much I loooove to surprise myself and do nothing of what I planned.
Onto another year of the Saga of Life!
Tiamo