Cenotaph was born out of contrarianism. As best I can recall, someone argued that it would have taken a significant butterfly to put Taylor in the Wards. And I, not immune to the lure of someone being wrong on the internet, thought 'that's not so.' 1.1 was written as proof of concept, a demonstration that something as small as a delay in Taylor's explicit rejection of the Ward life in her conversation with Armsmaster would do the trick.
Again, as best I can recall, some poster or collage of poster reactions concluded that she would have to end up in the Wards now, and only good things could come of this change. That was so clearly and staggeringly wrong that I went out and wrote 1.2-1.5 by way of showing a) a limit case of how things can always get much worse and b) she could still end up in a position to go anywhere... which is where Taylor is placed at the end of 1.5, having suffered as much as I thought would be believable, and then some I thought wouldn't be, with plausible entrée into most of the BB organizations, or the chance to go independent.
Somewhere around 1.c enough encouragement from readers had come in suggesting that I write this out that I thought about doing it. Fiction writing isn't my strength (I do have a day job, and have worked much harder on that), and this is the third project I've attempted (a tiny oneshot being the first, and an abandoned 20k word attempt at making HP make sense being the second). And that left me in the awkward position of having to write a story from where I was, from a situation I'd selected for argumentative purposes instead of entertaining ones, one on the border of plausibility or a bit beyond. All in all, not the best of foundations.
Those structural flaws remain, and are visible even now.
Other issues are sensory — I tend to a highly interior style, with few descriptions of the world outside, even across viewpoints. Thoughts tend to interest me more than sensations, and while it's rarely a bad idea to write what fascinates, it's definitely an issue.
Likewise, conflict. I believe that fair fights happen when they are arranged, as (occasionally) in competitive sports. Otherwise? The closest thing in the wild is when at least one party has screwed up seriously, and everyone has to fear a golden bb regardless.
This makes writing fights with uncertain outcomes, interesting fights to read... problematic. I attempted, with imperfect success, to shift the conflict from 'who will win' to 'at what price / with what consequences.'
There are some things now visible that I challenged myself to do along the way (e.g., Arc 4 is the one without a single fight scene) and some that are necessarily fading from view (e.g., Arc 5 is the one I put up in a week). I did do what I could to leave easter eggs everywhere from the macro-structure (set aside all the non-Taylor viewpoint snippets, and look for the exact center of her story), to the micro (there's a direct/indirect quotation game running there), to the throwaway (the flower-language references).
Taylor's courses of action were chosen among those plausible for her character in that circumstance, and told as seemed likely to entertain. I greatly enjoy unreliable narrators who play fair, and Taylor's belief in the rightness, necessity, or advisability of any particular action isn't much guarantee of any of those qualities, nor even necessarily a guarantee of what she herself believes to be true (as opposed to is desperately rationalizing). She's not a viewpoint given to lying, save that she (as we all do) lies to herself often enough.
I do think that the question of what to do when the system fails you — as it inevitably will, though usually not on the scale or with the spectacle depicted above — is a hard one, without an answer satisfying all criteria. Taylor's final answer — that there's nothing to be done in life but live with your mistakes, make up for them where you can, and keep on trying — is as close as the story comes to a statement I'd personally endorse.
It would be inappropriate to close without particular thanks to Wildbow, whose world this is and whose example of simply writing day in and day out led me to think of something on this scale as conceivable. It's been great fun to write and fantastic exercise both, and it remains a daily delight to know that others enjoy this work.
[Comments will have responses, but not likely before AO3 gets around to implementing PMs.]
P.S. A sequel is in process, and may be expected here sometime in October, 2014.