Welcome to the Q&A/afterword! This'll be a quick one lol

1. How much of Chance did you plan/what was the size of your outline before you started?

The outline was THIN in the beginning. The VERY EARLIEST pitch for the story was, I shit you not, essentially "OC goes on a trainer journey and also her pokemon have cool names." From there I added the actual time travel conceit, and also some of the early stuff with Lucas and Thomas. Over time I continued adding to the outline, and it evolved into something more complicated than I initially had planned.

I've been plantsing it for a while – aka I usually plan the major events (and some of the minor ones) and then fill in the gaps between them off the top of my head. It's a lot of bridge-building between moments, and often the bridges surprise me by bringing up things I don't expect. So in summary: yes I've been planning Chance as I go, but also a lot of it happens on the fly.

2. Did you write this linearly or did you skip around to scenes you wanted to write then connect them later?

Mostly linearly, due to the nature of publishing chapter by chapter. That said, some of the longest chapters (the Trainer Ball comes to mind) got written in pieces and then strung together later so that they were less intimidating for me to approach just as a writer. As the prophets say: How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time.

Apart from that, there were a couple scenes that I wrote drafts of wayyyyy ahead of time, both to get an idea of what it would look like when I got there and also to get multiple drafts of super important chapters. Chapter 93 (Willpower) comes to mind, because I've never written something quite that intense and I wanted to do it right. After a variety of approaches (and a LOT of research that made me look a little like a serial killer), I settled on a sort of negative space-based approach, and I very much think the final result worked out.

3. Did you ever plan a scene then later realize that something else fit better/it didn't work anymore?

Yep for sure! I remember one time I didn't want to write a major battle scene (I think this was Lake Valor – the encounter with Mars), but then I realized: I'm the author! I get to decide what and when I write :) So I wrote something else first and then came back to the encounter later, and I genuinely think it worked out better that way.

Another thing that comes to mind is the events at Mount Coronet + Spear Pillar. The fact that they amassed a full-on trainer army was a later idea, and was largely me trying to repair the pokemon games' tendency to have 1 10-year-old versus the world. It's a little bit inspired by Black&White (where the gym leaders fight the Sages), and the scene where Evelyn guides the reader around the crowd of trainers she's met over time is further inspired by the movie Big Fish (I've been referring to coming-together-with-all-the-friends-you-met-along-the-way scenes as "Big Fish Moments" for a while).

There were a lot of versions of how Spear Pillar played out – the version I wrote was actually pretty similar to the original. There were versions where Galactic took different people hostage, or a main character died, or even where Evelyn really did have to go back in time again (hence the fake-out of Looker giving her the time travel app back lol). But weirdly, the original plan ended up working the best.

4. Did everything work out as you wanted it to, or did the characters change the story in ways you didn't expect?

Yes, but also yes. I'm super satisfied with how Chance ended up, but I was also surprised along the way. I didn't realize that Coeur and Emmy were the same pokemon at first. I had no idea where things were going with Dawn until late in the story. I didn't expect Lucas to turn less standoffish towards Evelyn by the end. Looker wasn't originally going to quit the IP; I just realized things were heading that way and leaned into it.

Thomas often surprised me the most directly – I had no idea why he was traveling around the Sinnoh region randomly, but then I discovered (in a very surreal way that I think a lot of authors can relate to) that it was because of how much he was hurting over April. And that ended up informing me about a lot of his motivations.

Thomas as a whole was fascinating to write – by the time I started publishing Chance, I'd already fallen out with the person he used to be based on. So while the person he became still had some connections to that person, he also evolved in other directions. And at the same time I realized it made sense for Evelyn's relationship with him to reflect reality in some ways, hence the conflict between those two. And then in a wild turn of events, life decided to imitate art right around the time I was writing that part of Chance, but that's a whole other story.

In summary! I love how Chance turned out, and that's largely thanks to how the characters helped me shape it.

And that's all!

Just so you all know – since with my author's notes, the word count tends to be a little off on this site – Chance ended up being around 251k words, which is almost as long as the longest HP book and LONGER than A Court of Silver Flame (which is fricken crazy have you seen the width of that book?). I'm so excited to have finished this ten-year-long project (and honestly relieved that I'll never have to write another pokemon battle, I'm exhausted lmaooo).

Moving forward – this is the last major fanfic I plan to write. I'll finish up APiP if/when I can, but otherwise I'm shifting focus on to my first novel (a loosely-Circe-inspired retelling of the Trojan princess Cassandra's story). But I hope you've enjoyed Chance, and if you enjoy non-Pokemon related work, maybe find me in the future?

Thank you once again for reading Chance!

Best wishes,

Sarah Jensen