Zagaroth

I'm going to second @[email protected] here in that you should just write what you want to write.

Coming from a fiction writing perspective, it would be "write the story you want to read, because no one else is writing it." This is advice that has been floating around for a while, I forget who first said it.

Writing because you feel you should, will never feel as good as writing what you want to write.

I've given this way too much thought:

Goth magical girl is the younger sister of the leader of her particular squad of girl power heroes and puts up with being dragged along for the heroics.
But the setting is more of a wild-west-themed fantasy world, and has the magical equivalent of Digimon (perhaps they are fey creatures instead of digital creatures)
Their adventures lead them to needing to conduct a raid against the vault of the biggest church of the lands, where they fight off a powerful (but misguided) young priest.
One of the items they successfully raid is a scroll with a prophecy that seems to indicate that the heroic older sister is supposed to fall in love with that same young priest and have a child who will be the final key to saving the world against [Threat]. But the two of them hate each other now.
Twist: Goth girl thinks that priest boy is kind of hot.

I also cross-posted this idea and thread to Royal Road here.

Hate to love is the harder sell generally, unless the hate is built on misunderstandings. But that's sort of been overdone too.

My serial starts off with a circumstantial convenient marriage rather than love, but at least it kicks off with everyone trying to make it work.

Honestly, I was going to try and trope-flip some of the Harem sub-tropes, but I found that just having three people was enough and nixed the idea of adding more romances to the group.

With a little more thought: Maybe you need to expand the story more (but not with meaningless fluff) and cut it into three pieces for a neatly wrapped trilogy. Sell it as a trilogy. Name the trilogy and have it as part of the title.

Bold Print: [Title Here]
Smaller print: [Part One of the {YYY} Trilogy]

I have had to face what you are dealing with, but I am writing a very different sort of story and publishing as a serial, so it was much easier to break off "volume 1" earlier, I just had to find a place where the was enough of a shift in the story development that it made sense to put a small break there. Not so much as the end of a mini-story as the end of that stage of the story, if that makes sense?

I don't know if this will help you, my experience is different in several ways, but it's the best I have to offer right now.

Would it be proper advice if it wasn’t the always present: “Just start”?

This is how I did it. I didn't even do a proper outline. I had been reading on Royal Road for a few months, and had a couple of ideas burbling in the back of my head. I eventually pulled some together and just started writing. 2k-ish word chapters, initially posting at three times a week (I've actually slowed down on the main story, but that's so I can add additional material and work on other ideas too).

I had a sketch of a campaign setting that I realized this story would attach to very well, which gave me half a dozen deities for my world and a reason to keep expanding.

I'm now past 200k words/over 100 chapters, and no reason to stop. I am enjoying everything about this process. I'd never have been able to do it if I had spent too much timing planning and prepping and outlining. But my story is very character-driven, instead of plot-driven.

Can I get a drum roll here, please? ;)

So this sounds like it's one of those arbitrary technicalities that isn't a big deal, in a single flow of dialog at least. When a character is speaking, the difference between a period and a comma is a convention of the written medium, in the spoken word it's not such a clear delineation.

Now, if another character was responding to what the first character said, "this" over "which" seems like it might be more important.

The disgruntled younger sibling of the “Chosen One”

What do you mean by bad idea?! this is a great idea! Admittedly you are aiming for a comedy of some sort, or a subversion of Fate, or are otherwise deliberately flipping a trope, but this makes a great idea for a potentially interesting character point of view. Same with the Taxidermy-obsessed medical girl. I want to read a story about a goth magical girl now, I'm already sold.

Cowboys and digimon.

Well, Jim Butcher already did The Lost Roman Legion and Pokemon (the series is called Alera), I don't see why this couldn't work.

And aren't all office buildings already an extension of purgatory? ;)

The love story feels too much like some bad anime tropes, I wouldn't want to read that. A heist on the Vatican vault on the other hand, that sounds interesting.

That's the ones that provoke some thought in me.

And if no one writes about the goth magical girl, I might do it myself.

I would say that it is closer to the feedback having given me the confidence that I don't have to fight my doubts so much. But it is also feedback from a lifetime of experience, from having read novels for 40ish years and having been doing online, text-based roleplaying in both chat rooms and forums/play-by-post. I can compare my technical writing against the works I've read, and I can feel confident that my ability to write a character is at least up to average.

My story feedback initially came mostly from my wife, but I also took a chance and started writing a serial story on Royal Road (my story here ). I am currently approaching 900 followers, over two hundred of whom have marked it as a favorite, and despite some clearly trollish or hostile/anti-competitive 0.5 ratings, my story has remained about a 4.3, with 5.0 remaining my most common rating. So I have developed feedback that complete strangers like my story to keep reading 100+ chapters later.

Now, for keeping track of my stories: All three of my stories are taking place in the same world/setting, so a campaign website is useful (there's tons of them out there, they offer different things at the free level and have different organization, pick the one best for you). This means the general details of my fantasy world are all in one place.

The stories themselves: I am writing very character-driven stories. I only need to know a few details about what the future holds for me to keep writing right now and develop as I go. So for each story I have a 'notes' file, and I reference that to keep track of what I have already done or what I have named certain characters etc. And I have organized the notes into relevant sections, such as all of the royal family that has been named being grouped together.

To get into the headspace of a particular story, I just reread the last chapter. I know where I am at, what people are doing, and I can move on. If there are multiple character perspectives and I need to focus on a character we haven't seen for a few chapters, I go read the last chapter they were in.

I mostly focus on little steps, but I have certain external forces set to act at certain time periods, but those aren't completely pre-determined. It's closer to "when these characters have reached this point in their story or development, that's when event X should happen." and I don't worry too much about the details of event X until I get close to the point where it's going to happen.

My antagonists have developed from the backstories of my protagonists, which I started detailing after the story got going. I didn't need to know the details of the antagonists because the story of my protags is about what they are doing, and the antagonists are in part responding to them. This is a bit of a script flip from the standard fantasy story where the protagonists are reacting to the actions of the antagonists.

Though I suppose it depends on how far back you want to go about who is reacting to whom. But for the purposes of what you are seeing in the written narrative, it's the antagonists who are responding to the protagonists.

That was quite the ramble. Sorry. That last bit had me looking at my story in a new light, this script flip was not premeditated. XD

Final Fantasy XIV is my singular favorite, but given all its expansions that might be cheating a touch. ;) The Final Fantasy series in general tends to have great music.

Nier series, chrono trigger, Skyrim, and there are a lot of others I've liked as well, but I think that covers all my favorites. :)

I kind of skipped Fark entirely, but other than that, yeah that was my route here.