Behind the Scenes : Trailing Stars Final Chapter

A look behind the scenes on how chapter 28 of Trailing Stars was finally completed after 10 years of working on the fanfic!

Trailing Stars has always been a huge part of the Blog, and all the way back in April 2013 the very first chapter of this huge project was posted. To me, Trailing Stars has always shown the creative efforts of the Blog and our collaboration as a group better than anything else, having everyone working together to edit and write sections of this fanfiction.
However, after 10 years of progress, and still the fanfic hadn’t reached its conclusion I don’t think I was alone in my fears that Trailing Stars may never be finished- at least not during my time on the Blog.
And now, with the final chapter posted, I thought it would be the perfect time to showcase some of the wonderful efforts behind the scenes of the blog, which helped this finally be completed!!

Pre warning! This article may be difficult to view on a phone due to the size of some of the images!

Organising the Final Chapter

Most of this section is one big shoutout to the WONDERFUL Aquila. (You’ll notice a running theme of Aquila solving and organising around every potential problem here, I can’t stress enough how awesome she was at this <333)

All the way back in July, Aquila sent a message in the moderator discord server, asking if we wanted to try and finish up Trailing Stars this summer! Of course the immediate response from everyone was OF COURSE!!! It was such an exciting thought that we would finally get a chance to complete this incredible project and round it off with an awesome final chapter. With summers getting busy, Aquila proposed the idea that if 4-5 moderators wrote a chunk of the chapter, rather than one person having to write the entire thing it could be done a lot quicker.

There was an immediate hurdle- the final chapter summary was not one that was easy to divide between four people. We had to work out how to separate this prompt “Chapter 28: First person. The author wakes up in the real world and checks the blog to find that there is a new blog post about the dream.” into FIVE parts.

And here’s what Aquila came up with!! The parts were (as you can see by this list) divided amongst the authors so that we knew exactly what to write to link it all together

This is the draft plan taken directly from our planning efforts!!

Perspective 1: Eagleflight – wakes up after the events of chapter 27 and is full of tension, expecting to need to help find a way to become humans again. Starts to stretch as she wakes up but then realises that she is no longer in the body of a cat. Shocked, she gets up and runs to her computer, to open up BlogClan.
Perspective 2: Lilybreeze-
Is on a search engine and puts in the URL for BlogClan. Opens up the front page and sees a Blog post about a dream one of the mods (maybe Viper? As chapter 27 was her perspective? But could be anyone) had. Reads it through becoming steadily more and more incredulous as they realise it is the exact dream they had. Utterly shocked and surprised, they type a comment explaining they had this dream too.
Perspective 3: Mapledrift –
Is scrolling through the comments on the post, realising how many people have had this exact dream. They have too. They step away from their screen and stare out of the window, wondering how on earth this is possible. They grab their phone (or other device) and open up discord (or another BlogClan platform e.g. the Instagram group if you’re on that). Immediately, they begin to message all their BlogClan friends about this, perhaps they have a theory about what happened and they share that?
Perspective 4: Ospreysplash –
is out doing something irl having gotten over being a human again. They haven’t checked the Blog, putting it down to just a Blog dream they made up. Their phone starts to buzz frantically with all the messages they receive (including from Mapledrift) and they realise that others have had the dream too. They are very surprised, and send a message to Eagleflight, asking how come this has happened.
Perspective 5: Eagleflight –
receives message, and possibly comes up with an explanation (like something sweet about BlogClan being a big interconnected family) or leaves it ambiguous. Sees the Blog start to return to normal as the excitement dies down slightly and smiles, thinking this was a very cool adventure they all had.

With the organisation done, and parts assigned, it was time to write!!!

Writing the Chapter

This is the least exciting part of all of this!! There’s not many stories to share- we all wrote our parts separately, with deadlines arranged by Aquila (I would NOT have been able to finish it if they weren’t so good at keeping us on track).

My part was actually written twice! I wrote one segment, came back to it later and fully rewrote it as it just wasn’t in a style in enjoyed. There was a lot of discussion in the moderator discord about our word counts for each part, with everyone panicking that they’d gone a little overboard on the parts!!! Lil and Osp wrote INCREDIBLE pieces which I loved reading, and I often opened up Lil’s to ensure our stories were all lining up as I wrote my part. You’ll notice that in the final chapter there’s a lot of reference to other members- a really fun part of the process was going through recent comments and making sure that all of the newer members who had joined after the majority of Trailing Stars was written got a mention in the final thing! Trailing Stars is for EVERYONE regardless of when you joined the Blog.

As the editor, Aquila had the task of compiling all of our pieces into one final story, editing out any errors and just making it flow together a lot better!! And finally, we could sit back and look at the finished chapter, all put together in a draft post for the blog.

This was when we reached the final hurdle- cover art!

Creating the Art!

Obviously with a chapter featuring human characters- when most of the artists on the Blog prefer to draw cats- art was a bit of a hurdle. On impulse, I offered to draw the final chapter art, recently I’ve been doing a lot more art of humans so it was within my skill set to attempt this!!

Now, what I’m about to share with you is a piece of high art. This masterpiece will blow you away, and you’ll wonder why we didn’t submit this as the finished piece of chapter art. Here is the concept art that Aquila provided me with to act as a guideline for what she thought the chapter art should be

It’s gorgeous, I know. All jokes about the art aside- this was INCREDIBLY helpful in plotting out what the final art would look like.

And now, here’s the first sketch created of the final piece!!!

After this initial sketch, I sent a message to the moderators involved and asked them to vaguely describe themselves! That way I could clean up the sketch and actually add the hairstyles that everyone had in real life. It was easy enough to add these details for myself- but I’m so grateful for the other moderators helping me add details for them! A fun detail in this image is that I hadn’t actually read Osp’s chapter yet- so I put her in a maths class, not a history one!!

The next stage of the process is to clean up the lineart!! Whilst I can do lineless art, it requires a lot more effort, so my goal here was to have a more cartoon style! Lineart is a tough bit to get looking good, but I’m so happy with how this turned out
Another thing to note here is that during the lineart process, Aquila’s cat Honey was added to the image!! This cat was drawn without ANY sketch layer, and no prior planning, so I’m very proud of my free-handed Honey!

Here’s the fun part!!! The flat colours!!!
Each piece was coloured based off the information I had about each of the mods, and they were good enough to provide a few images of hair, and in Lil’s case the back of her head to be used as a reference! So when colouring, I was able to get a pretty close match to some hair colours!!
On top of this, another fun detail is that the frog teddy that you’ll see featured in my panel, as well as the outfit I wear, and the bed sheets are all meant to match actual things I own!!! I’ll add a picture of this frog for your enjoyment.
In Lil’s panel, my favourite detail is that she owns a jacket similar to this which appeared in the back of her head photo that was used as reference! It’s really cool so I just had to include it.
And course, Aquila’s cat Honey features, glorious as always

And as promised, here is the frog who features in this image. Everyone meet Pepper! She uses any pronouns, and has been sat staring at a wall whilst I write this article. They’re now facing me because I felt too bad with him staring at the same blank wall for hours. Excuse the brief detour, I just wanted to share Pepper with the world. And below is my other inspiration! Aquila’s cat Honey <3 She’s adorable

Now!!! The piece was almost done, everything is coming into place!! And so the final part was to add the shading. This was planned to be a much quicker exercise than it was, but I went a little overboard with the shading on the final piece!!

And here it is!! The final piece!! Trailing Stars was finally ready to be uploaded to the blog. There was one last thing to do, get the piece of art as the featured art on the post. And I would like to present to you a saga of messages to show you exactly how that went

It really was a long saga of fighting the blog file size limit

And with that (and 7 versions of the same image saved to my laptop) Trailing Stars Chapter 28 could finally be posted!!

Final Words

I want to say a big thank you to every single writer and editor of Trailing Stars so far!!

Thank you to our writers, Sundance, Wolfpaw, Hawksky, Brightshadow, Leafpaw, Copperclaw, Dawnfrost, Cinnamonswirl, Swiftfire, Jayfrost, Lightningpaw, Owlsong, Jaypaw, Flowerstream, Kat, Meadowpaw, Geckopaw, Willowpaw, Darkwing, Winterwhisper, Lionfire, Cheetahspark, Viperfrost, Ospreysplash, Eagleflight, Lilybreeze and myself!!! Every single chapter felt so unique and incredible, and this couldn’t have been done without all of the writers from the very beginning

Thank you to the editors as well!! Thanks to Eagleflight, Monkeyfur, Viperfrost, Emberdawn, Spottedpaw, Sorrelstream, Lionfire, Cindertail, Hazelburrow, Dawnkit, Mistpaw, Shimmerfrost, Olivepaw, Snakepaw, Kat, Dawnmist, Cinnamonswirl, Embersky, Jayfrost, Copperclaw, Sundance, Embersky, Dawnfrost and Winterwhisper for being our amazing editors!! This project would not be as neat and tidy as it is without your contributions.

A HUGE thank you to Jayfrost for providing basically ALL of the cover art for each chapter of Trailing Stars!! This was a monumental feat and one that I’m sure we all appreciate on the Blog as the chapter art always looks beautiful.

Thank you to Kate Cary and Jerry the Jar for picking our writers for a good portion of Trailing Stars!! The name choosing process couldn’t have done it without them (if you’re bored I’d recommend going back and watching the old jar movies, they’re really funny)

Thank you to Moonbreeze!! Who created the INCREDIBLE official cover for Trailing Stars in the competition that was held back in 2018!!

Again a sneaky thank you to Aquila for organising the final chapter, she was incredible and so were Lil and Osp doing their INCREDIBLE work on their parts of the chapter (it’s really wonderful I loved reading it all finished) <3

And one final thank you, to you as the reader’s of Trailing Stars! Without everyone’s constant love for this project it definitely would not have gotten as far as it did!! I’m so happy to finally see this story completed, and I hope you all loved it and loved seeing it progress as much as I did <333