Welcome back to me rambling on about all the cool facts and secrets about my Web novel Continuous school. Seeing as it’s now finished I thought I’d share some secrets about it. If you haven’t read the last one that came out last week, go and read that to learn some facts about characters and chapters. If you haven’t read Continuous School then what are you doing? Go and read it now.
https://www.webnovel.com/book/13779118605197705/Continuous-School
Unreleased Chapters:
Getting back into it let’s talk about chapters that never saw release. There are only 2 chapters that never came out and both were meant to be before chapter 20. There was one about Owen and Ethan waiting outside the schools changing rooms for Sean. It was removed as it was pretty shit. Simple as that. I replaced it with Chapter 6 – Rock, paper scissors.
The other one was about Ruby and Owen practising for a music exam. It was written and I still have it. I won’t ever release it because there is no reason to, but it was scrapped because it didn’t fit the characters. It was about Ruby not being able to play a piece she wanted to play for an exam, kinda boring if you ask me.
There were several other ideas I had but never used them for whatever reason. I didn’t really try and come up with new ideas once I cut down all the chapters and my notes weren’t very helpful with some chapters.
Next! A spicy one, there is only 1 chapter I don’t like. If you told me to publish this again, then this chapter would be removed and replaced with something different. That is chapter 43 – Ruby’s band. I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote this. Although it does (kinda) lead the way for her backstory, it was just such a random chapter and felt so unnecessary. Looking back on it, it’s my least favourite chapter.
Backstories:
Speaking of backstories, let’s talk about how they came about. Each character has some past that is explored and I like them all. My favourite is Ruby and Owen’s past but Lily’s past is also good.
Speaking of Lily’s past, that was really toned down for release. It’s hard to tell what your audience will like and even who your audience is. At one point I had something about her cutting herself but removed it because it was too dark for the audience and I was worried about the age rating. Creating the pasts were a lot of fun but also were the most challenging. There were constant changes to a lot of past chapters and they have some inconsistencies in them.
Inconsistencies:
Inconsistencies are something I try to make sure are never shown. However, that’s a hard task when you have a lot of chapters, basically, you have a lot of room to contradict yourself. It’s impressive something like One Piece, which has 900+ chapters, does it so well. (or at least I don’t notice them)
There are a few that I can think of off the top of my head but you might be able to spot more. There were some I caught before release and changed but let’s talk about the ones that slipped past.
Chapter 138 – End this love Part 3, Ethan claims he will move on from Kaylee. I forgot this ever happened. You can probably tell by how he doesn’t move on, but I play around it by using it as a joke.
Kaylee and Simon’s relationship was very strange to me when writing. Whenever it was brought up I struggled to write about it because I didn’t know a lot about it myself. I couldn’t remember if I ever said how long it lasted. And if I did, it may have changed in different chapters. I wasn’t sure about a lot of it. There were a lot of blanks I left out not only for you readers but also myself.
Speaking of these two, first off Kaylee. Chapter 159 – The cursed sports festival Part 2, remember a note Kaylee was writing? Because I didn’t. Yeah, I forgot all about that note, it was actually meant to be important but then a lot of Ethan and Kaylee’s story was changed. They were meant to get together at the prom in chapter 100, I just thought it would be better for the story if they didn’t. (I did mention the note in an epilogue thought, I think)
As for Claire, I forgot she met Kaylee in her past. I had to shove it in somewhere last minute that those two met. I think I pulled that off well as it kinda shows a bit about Claire always wanting to get with Simon and by becoming friends with Kaylee (the way she did) shows that off.
Inspiration:
I’ve always been a fan of school-life stuff. Manga such as Sket-dance and even A silent voice were big inspirations for this series. It was a lot of fun writing.
When writing the chapters, there came a time where I had around 70 chapters ahead of release. This was clear towards the end where I went from posting 1 a day to 3 a day, and even sometimes 4 or 5 on one day. By that point, all chapters were written and I wanted to publish it to start on other stuff. Although, I originally wanted to stop writing afterwards to focus on university.
Characters:
One character I didn’t mention was Pars. He isn’t based on anyone except for the name. A friend of mine asked if he could be in a chapter and I said sure, I didn’t know how to put him in so I created a student that was full of mystery and nothing was known about him. Everything that is said relates in no way to the original inspiration, the only similarity is the name kinda resembles his.
The name:
As for the name ‘Continuous school’, this was actually just the temporary name and I liked it so I stuck with it. It was called it because it would have been about various stories around the same group of kids that would have kept going. I guess thinking about it, back then it had less of a story to it and more of just random things these kids got up to. But as I worked on it I knew that I wanted it to be about their school lives and how they progressed with each other, ending in graduation.
Subjects:
One subject that I want to talk about is L4L (Learning 4 Life). It’s a strange subject that goes by a different name depending on your school. It was the length of a normal lesson but there wasn’t a full qualification at the end of it. It was meant to teach you about the “real world”. You would think that would be about taxes and other adult stuff like that but it wasn’t like that until you do it in sixth form. Even then it wasn’t really that. It’s a hard subject to explain and it was really just a stress-free lesson where you could just talk whilst going through the booklet they gave you.
Chapter stats:
One last thing I want to talk about is Chapter stats. I have a spreadsheet of each chapter along with notes on what it’s about for planning. In the spreadsheet is also how often the characters appear. This is based on if they are important to the chapter or not (somewhat). So if they are mentioned they aren’t counted as being in it unless they talk, for example, Chapter 59 has several people watch Sean play a football match, but because Sean doesn’t talk he is not counted as being in the chapter.
The final chapter count is as follows:
Out of 205 chapters:
Owen – 160 Chapters
Ethan – 140 Chapters
Sean – 119 Chapters
Ruby – 87 Chapters
Kaylee – 88 Chapters
Lily – 70 Chapters
Simon – 43 Chapters
Claire – 32 Chapters
Charley – 21 Chapters
Bella – 17 Chapters
Matt – 12 Chapters
I think it’s interesting to see how often characters appear
I also have another little table of how often each character appeared with each other, for example, how many chapters had both Ethan and Owen in them, or how many chapters had Sean and Charley. You should be able to find that on my twitter somewhere. So make sure you follow that.
An interesting stat from that board, out of the 140 chapters Ethan is in, 130 of those feature Owen. Strange, huh?
(It may be hard to find it on my Twitter, so here is the board)
I think that’s everything I wanted to talk about. If you have questions, please ask. I’ll happily answer them. If you want to know more then I’ll do another one (only if I get enough suggestions on what to talk about)
Also, let me know what you want to see on this blog. What reviews, rants or general ramblings you’d like to see.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll continue to support me in the future.
SlippyfopTV's Random Ramblings 