Starting date: November 1, 2011
Ending date: December 6, 2011
Pages in MS Word: 130
Words: 58,414

FAQ

Q: How did you plan this out so intricately?
A: I didn’t. This will be discussed in detail later. xD

Q: What’s the significance of the queen/her death? That was never explained.
A: It was supposed to be symbolic of Chunhee’s own “death” when she shut herself off completely from reality.

Q: What about HyoDong, JaeWon, and the not-really-love-triangle between SeulYeolJong? What happens to them?
A: I’d like to think they found some sort of happy ending, LOL. I could potentially write a separate companion fic that details what happens to them, but that would be kind of weird since they’re doubly fictional characters…Fictional characters squared? LOL. They’re fictional characters from the mind of a fictitional character. But if enough people are interested, I’ll consider it. Honestly, I’m kind of attached to those characters after spending forty-one chapters on them, so I don’t really want to let them go quite yet…it was sad when I had to end the worldspace plotline and go back to Chunhee’s reality. :/
Update: Spin-off fic is here. :)

Sources of inspiration:
-the Paradise mv, of course
-Inception and Shutter Island. I watched those two movies for the first time just before and when I had just started writing Locomotion. Of course, my approach to the whole mind-power thing is more fantasy than sci-fi.
-Digimon Season 4 (Digimon Frontier). LOL. I loved that show as a kid. As for what exactly inspired me? The train thing I guess…plus the AU idea…and Kouichi went into the Digiworld in spirit but his body was still back on Earth…
-Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle—the whole quest to recover memories thing. I actually haven’t finished that series LOL. It ended a while ago, didn’t it?
-.hack—I’ve only read a few of the manga and novel adaptations, and I’m not a huge fan or super familiar with the franchise, yet for some reason it kind stayed with me while I was writing as an afterthought. Probably because of the virtual reality concept…

Things I had planned from the beginning:

• The train would be a focus. The basic idea for this fic was born around the time Paradise was recently released. It was a very haunting image, the train and the lighting, so I knew I wanted to have a scene with the train.
• Woohyun would be Chunhee’s boyfriend. A few months ago on Tumblr I was in need of inspiration, so I asked if anyone had requests for fics, and someone wanted an Woohyun fic (at the time I’d just finished Risoria and started Believing is Seeing, I think…), and I realized I had a very vague story idea that I could use for both NaNoWriMo (I remembered it was coming up) and to fulfill my promise to the anon.
• The journey to recover Chunhee’s memory would be in an AU/fantasy world, and that she would go through several “stops” to reach the end. I knew she would live the lives of girls of different social classes (I thought it would be interesting to change up the perspective a bit) and get closer and closer to the king, who would be a key part in unlocking all of her memories.

Things I randomly thought of later on:

• Sungyeol would be Chunhee’s best friend in real life. At first he was only supposed to be a construction in her worldspace, and the focus was supposed to be on Chunhee and Woohyun. I quickly realized that the fic would lose its fuel if I didn’t flesh it out more, so I added more to Chunhee’s past. The main goal was to get to the king, but along the way, she would be picking up bits and pieces of her memories.
• Sungjong and Sunggyu’s role in everything. I didn’t have the others’ roles planned from the very beginning, but they were established pretty quickly after I started writing. Sungjong and Sunggyu I knew wouldn’t appear until near the end, so I had to figure out what role they played.
• The connection between Psyche and Locomotion. That was a moment of epiphany when I realized I could link the two together and make it work.

Things I was going to put in it but didn’t:

• Sunggyu was supposed to show up in the AU/world space as someone working in the palace, but then he didn’t. Biggest reason being that if he did, then it would be very obvious who the king was by process of elimination. This actually helped keep people guessing at the conductor and the king’s identities. Those who said the king was Woohyun were right, and those who said the conductor was Woohyun were right, but they pretty much all said that Sunggyu must be the other person, when in reality it was the same person. I even had someone guess that Sunggyu was both the king and the conductor, but no one got it fully right, lol. The brown hair was misleading…because Woohyun has dark brown hair and Sunggyu has light brown hair…*troll face*
• Originally I thought of creating a fourth girl, someone who had grown up on the streets, to use for the last part of the story, but then I decided it wouldn’t work and brought back Seulhee instead. Part of the reason was that she got so little screen time (…page time? Lol) compared to Jaesun and Hyora that I knew I needed to add more to her story. Plus, giving her relationship with Sungyeol a bit of a resolution was nice.

Easiest parts to write:

• The scenes on the train. They were particularly vivid in my mind, so it was easy to transfer my ideas to words
• The scenes that had more important significance to Chunhee’s memories. The other things were kind of fillers, so it was harder to get those down because they weren’t as relevant to the central plotline.

Hardest parts to write:

• Any of the parts where the girl with the missing memories temporarily detached herself from the different personas. Those were kind of awkward to do since it was jumping between two points of view.
• Transitions between the major plot points. I found myself wanting to skip ahead, but I had to write those transitions. Half the time I wasn’t sure what was filling the gaps between the major plot points, so I had to make something up. xD The Festival of Lilies was one of those random things. But it was a convenient way to work in the SeulYeol friendship resolution thing…

Random facts:

• I literally had no idea what Chunhee’s name would be until I was writing the last chapter. Names for OCs are hard because I always want to avoid using names of kpop idols because people will think they’re supposed to resemble the idols, and then I have no familiarity with Korean names in general, plus I realized there are certain names/words that are pretty common, so it was just a pain to come up with a name that didn’t sound too much like my other OCs names or like an idol’s name…Anyway, I knew I was probably going to use part of one of the three girls’ names (Seulhee, Jaesun, Hyora) in Chunhee’s name, and in the end I combined the queen’s name with Seulhee’s to get Chunhee. \o/
• I was originally going to have the word “Paradise” in my title somewhere. Chunhee created a “paradise” for herself, but it was created from delusion and fantasy, so…But then I realized that would just be unoriginal, so I found something else that sounded cooler and related to the story.
• I don’t know if any of you noticed, but I did alter the lyrics to Paradise when King Woohyun was singing them. “This paradise where I was locked up against my will.” The original was “where I locked you up against your will.”

Things I feel like I didn’t do well on:

• LOL can I say everything? This whole fic was kind of a mess/crapshoot because of the time constraint on getting to 50,000 words in 30 days. Basically quality was sacrificed for quantity of words…I don’t know why I decided to post this as I was writing, despite knowing that it would basically be a rough, ROUGH draft.
• Details…I have always been bad about describing surroundings and clothing and stuff, but in this fic in particular I kind of avoided it like the plague because it was awkward for me to put Korean characters in a decidedly Western fantasy AU…next time I’ll do a better job of that. I’d considered making it a Korean period fic, but I didn’t have the time to research that kind of stuff, so I went with what I knew, which was European medieval settings…but now I am actually very interested in medieval Korean history from centuries ago…xD
• One of my slip-ups (that comes from not reviewing my own fic frequently enough before writing more) was that Jaesun never actually used an alias while she was in the capital. She was supposed to in order to throw anyone looking for her (from back home) off her trail, but I forgot about that detail, and everyone knew her real name, OTL.
• The timing of everything in this story. The timeline definitely wasn’t as carefully mapped out as it was with The Crimson Thread That Binds, so about halfway through I had to sit down and write down a timeline that went by the month, plotting the major events. Seasons were kind of nonexistent except toward the end, even though a total of almost fifteen to sixteen months passed between the king getting married (which isn’t even the start of the plot…) to when Seulhee met the king. Meaning they went through the entire seasonal cycle, and then some.
• Earlier I said Dongwoo met Hyora the second day he arrived in the capital, but later on, during Hyora’s segment of the story, there’s a gap of a few days between when he arrives and when she meets him. When she asked Sungyeol what day she would meet Dongwoo, he said “this Saturday” rather than “tomorrow,” so even though the day she asked that was never specifically defined, it’s implied that there’s a span of at least more than one day between that day and Saturday.
• The conspiracy and the council…that was just an awkward weird mess. I didn’t feel like the setup was believable at all, especially with the part where the king is just MIA and chilling in the castle…ugh, the regrets I have…if you want a good example of political intrigue and conspiracy, read Tamora Pierce’s Trickster’s Choice and Trickster’s Queen, LOL. I actually kind of used some of the stuff I remembered from those books to help me with my fic.
• My treatment of magic within the AU wasn’t as thorough as my usual. In Corvus/Risoria and Believing is Seeing, I spent more time developing the system and explanations of how it worked, whereas here it was kind of a hand-wavy, oh look, kind of deal. I didn’t really elaborate on the nature of magic except for that one snippet about people being born with it or not and stuff…
• In conclusion, this thing needs to be rewritten. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I’ll ever find the motivation/time to actually do that, so it might forever sit as is…

My plans from this point:

• Go back to Psyche and finish that. I assure you that Psyche and Locomotion, while linked together, overlap/intersect almost barely. Reading this won’t have spoiled the ending of Psyche, or anything, really. There will be a bit of dramatic irony at certain points, but nothing more…I have plans for Psyche, hehehe, and they aren’t at all related to this fic. Reading Psyche first wouldn’t have given away the ending of this fic, either because the connection between the two isn’t apparent/revealed until the end. I think you’d have to be some sort of creepy genius (or stalk my mind) to be able to connect this fic to Psyche if you read Psyche first (from start to end, even, not just from start to where I’ve updated to) and didn’t know anything about this fic (no spoilers).
• That said, I’m actually considering writing a sequel to Psyche/companion to Locomotion (or would it be a companion/sequel to both? It’s hard to define what exactly it would be) that details what happens to Chunhee and the gang from since she has the powers as well…very strong ones, I might add, since it took the eight of them to get inside to fix the issue. Implications that I didn’t think about myself until just now, really…I was already considering writing a sequel to Psyche, but with this added factor of Chunhee, that means I have another character. xD

If you still have specific questions or points you’re confused on, feel free to ask. You can even ask about stuff that happens later/happened before/isn’t in the actual story. It’s possible that I might have the answer actually figured out in my head, but decided it was extraneous information and not important enough to be included in the plot. If it’s something that would be spoiler-ish for any of the aforementioned fic (Psyche) or potential fics (the sequel to Psyche/Locomotion and the AU/worldspace spinoff), I won’t tell you, but otherwise, I’ll answer the best I can.

Oh, and last but not least, thanks for reading!