The "Moult" sequel is finished!

Today, I finished writing the sequel to Moult. It's called Moult and Purify and it's one of the stories I'm most proud of. It does get a bit weird compared to the first part, but I don't think it ended up being too weird or going too far off the rails or anything like that. Well, I mean, maybe for some people it ruins the first one even if they liked that, but... eh, that's how sequels work.

There are kinda spoilers in the following ramblings, but not really.

A big struggle was avoiding infodumps while including at least some kind of explanation of what happened in the first part, and in the end I decided to make it have a couple of infodumpy parts but make sure they also deepen the mystery in a way.

Also, the plot went through two major revisions. Honestly, the first version was so batshit insane that when I read it after it was close to "finished", I just thought "wtf did I just write?" and knew I had to rewrite basically two thirds of the whole thing. Even the notes started getting ridiculous, to a point where I was coming up with characters that lived 300 years ago and had zero relevance to the plot just to keep track of the timeline... I shit you not, the first version went so over the top with everything and in such a different direction from the original "Moult" that I'm embarrassed I wrote it as a sequel to that.😂

Oh, and there was a part where I first wrote this because it just had to be written:

Makes absolutely no sense in the context of the story as it turned out, but at that time the story went in such a stupid direction that that paragraph didn't feel at all out of place. So yeah, that's why writing it took so long. Or I mean, I still haven't finished some stuff I started writing in 2013 so maybe this was still fast compared to my usual pace. Well, whatever. I'm just glad I got this sequel finished.

Will there be a third part? Uhh... I do have a potential plot in mind for that, but I'm not sure yet.

My story was translated and narrated by a German creepypasta Youtuber?!

Last December, I wrote a story called Moult and posted it on the Creepypasta Wiki. The next day, somebody commented on it. To this day, it's the only comment on the story, a clear indicator that very few people have even read it.

...but last night, I found out that some dude had translated it into German and narrated it on his Youtube channel called Hellscythe German Creepypasta!😳 The video has over 30,000 views and over a thousand likes, which is absolutely baffling to me since, you know, the original story itself has probably been read only a dozen or so times. So, one of those few people who read it then put in the effort to translate it, narrate it and upload it to Youtube. He even included a link to the story in the video description, which I've heard is something a lot of creepypasta narrators on Youtube don't do. You can't imagine how happy this makes me.😊

Contrary to popular belief what a handful of people have assumed, I don't speak German (I only know a couple of words and very basic grammar), so I can't tell whether the translation is faithful or if something was changed, but I'd at least like to assume that the only changes, if any, would be ones that make sense in the context of translation; I know translating stuff can be difficult and time-consuming, and I'm also aware my writing style is a bit wonky at times.

If one of the three(?) people reading this blog post happens to know German and has the patience to sit through the 23 minutes of German narration while simultaneously reading the original in English, I'd like to know if there are any obvious mistranslations or such. I'd be especially interested in how he handled file-virus, considering that was intended to be a mispronunciation of filovirus; I can hear the word virus in the narration, but... well, like I said, I don't understand German haha. It's about 17 minutes into the video.

Running all the comments through Google Translate, I found out that there are several people who'd like a sequel. It's something I've been considering ever since I finished the story, but now I finally got the motivation to actually start writing one. No idea when it'll be finished, but I'm off to a good start.