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I tried to put down the word "right" and spelled it wrong twice before I reached the correct one.

Which tells you everything you need to know about my mental state write rite right now.

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I'm feeling less optimistic about getting everything done by my deadline, so I've gone ahead and lowered that on my list of priorities and I'm working on getting a final page count to my cover artist in a reasonable time frame. I think that's still a fairly solid goal, but not quite so draconian (especially with a convention around the corner to completely wipe me out).

Given my energy levels lately, I've been backing off on refining and adding connective tissue, and more focusing on just putting everything in the right order (this is more work than you would think, considering how many pieces this is in and how very small some of them are). So of course, my tracking and numbering system isn't quite as relevant as it used to be, but I'm hoping it'll give me a better ballpark for how big this book is going to be by the end. (Right now I'm guessing 120k, but that is a very, very rough guess.)

Progress so far: ???/97k

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Between the biting kink and the potential of knife play, I think it's not just the bad guys.

bad guys see juno steel and go. now there's someone whose blood should be Elsewhere

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When I took a script-writing class in college, my professor introduced me to something known as the Save the Cat Beat Sheet. It's basically a map of how stories (movies, specifically) are typically structured.

I want to stress that I'm a believer that stories take as long as they take, and it's more important to tell the story you're trying to tell than to conform to any sort of guideline*.

What it is, though, is a tool you can use if it seems like it might be helpful.

In my case, I've been noticing that one section of my story feels bloated compared to the others-- but maybe it's just that I'm sick of working on that section and the vibes are off. So I whip out the beat sheet, map out what I've got against the typical. (I use Scrivener, which is really good for this sort of thing.)

In this case, the first and third section map pretty decently for a 100k story, but the second section is more than twice as long as it typically should be-- which matches the vibes I've been getting from that section. That tells me that 1) I'm not crazy or second-guessing myself, and 2) I can probably afford to trim that section down or rearrange bits of it into later sections

(Progress so far: 62k/94k

(*Major caveat there: a lot of professional projects have very strict length requirements, and in order to keep that project you need to either get very good at figuring out how to pace a story within those requirements, or get very comfortable leaving massive chunks of your work on the cutting room floor.)

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I Need people to actually read this book once it gets out there.

Not because of the book itself, but because I've decided that I want Decoy Bath Time to be a fanfiction trope.

Maid very badly needs to get cleaned up, so Lady calls for a bath for herself for Maid to use instead. Only it would be suspicious if somebody else walks in to find Lady chilling in her bedroom fully clothed during the requested bath, so she's got to hang out in the same room while Maid bathes, and they have some good conversation. Behind a dressing screen for modesty, of course.

(Progress so far: 55k/94k)

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I just tried to describe fanart of Jean Valjean trying to use his back to lift something as "you know, the way he did when rescuing that guy whose name I forgot" and my brain shortened it to "a la cart"

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Watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with my roommate, and we got to the internet demon episode.

When I last saw this episode, it aged terribly.

But now if you replace the stranger danger subplot with genAI, it's... weirdly relevant.

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Apparently I look young for my age-- according to one coworker, I'm "like twelve".

Madam, I'm a divorcee with a mortgage.

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Right now I'm averaging a little more than 700 words per day. Which is less than I tend to do while writing fanfic, but it's still going to add up to a good 18k if I keep it up, in addition to what I've already got written. It's also not quite as pretty as I'd like it to be, but that's something I'll be refining on the next pass, where I'll be doing things like fixing the pacing and making descriptions pretty.

I'm past what I had of a coherent narrative, and now I'm in the territory of big chunks of scenes that don't necessarily fit together, so a lot of what I'm doing is adding connective tissue and correcting continuity errors to make it flow.

(If you're curious, that's what the numbers in purple are referring to: the first number is what's actually got enough connective tissue to be a linear story, and the second number is the total wordcount including all the random bones of scenes just floating unconnected in the document. Not all of the scenes in the document will make it into the final draft.)

Progress so far: 50k/93k

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Nureyev and Noel would absolutely be having a charm-off, for funsies on Noel's part, for professional pride on Nureyev's. There would be no survivors (unless post-Carte Blanche, in which Jet would be scraping a drooling Rita off the floor and carrying her off to get a snack while Buddy appreciates the showmanship.)

of the opinion that juno steel would have great chemistry with arthur lester. arthur is a dangerous man under the surface and juno would definitely pick up on it (we know that's his type). he'd flirt with arthur. john's a little charmed too, but it's arthur who's thoroughly flustered by the end of it

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100% Juno would figure out that John is sharing Arthur’s body, but wouldn't necessarily figure out what he is (alien would be his best guess, especially after knowing the Ruby 7).

There would be an ill advised one-night stand, preceded by bonding over poetry and beating the absolute shit out of someone who really deserved it, and followed by a bout of guilt and self-loathing, because these folks are just Like That.

Overall, a fun time for all.

of the opinion that juno steel would have great chemistry with arthur lester. arthur is a dangerous man under the surface and juno would definitely pick up on it (we know that's his type). he'd flirt with arthur. john's a little charmed too, but it's arthur who's thoroughly flustered by the end of it

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I got the first sketches back from my cover artist, and they are stunning. I really love how visual artists can take things in directions I'd never considered before. When I pictured an illustrated cover, I just assumed she'd ask for a representative scene to illustrate, rather than a vibe. As someone who thinks in narrative, that's hard to wrap my head around.

(This is different from photoshopped covers-- even custom-made covers depend on the availability of stock photos, which means there's a very limited amount of poses and models available. I went with object-based covers for my first books because the main character was fat and the selection of fat models in the artist's available libraries was just that limited.)

One of the things I noticed in my artist's preliminary sketches is that she made the protagonist a little more sly looking than I'd intended, a little less melancholy. And I could ask her to change it to make her look more stoic, but I think that's one of the advantages of writing something while the artist does her work-- I can tweak the writing to suit.

(Other details, less so. It turns out that people are not, in fact, generally familiar with stock collars outside of a very particular subset of the Les Miserables fandom. Who'd've thought?)

Progress so far: 46k/91k

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You know that mistakes have been made when you find yourself looking for a laceration kit at the local CVS.

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I've gone ahead and found a cover artist that does commission work that I can afford and doesn't use AI, so now they're commissioned and that's a major worry off my shoulders

(Seriously, finding a premade cover for a werewolf story that's not modern, not Red Riding Hood-themed, not sexy, and doesn't look like it's for a novellization for a Hammer Horror movie? That's practically a full-time job on its own.)

So now I've got a cover artist, and I'm working on negotiating that commission.

And in trying to figure out what timeframe I needed to give my artist, I went through and did the math on how long it would take my printer to get the books to me from first submission to arrival.

Aaaaaaaand it turns out I only have until July 1 to actually get that final draft done. So that's gonna be fun and relaxing.

(On the plus side, that means I should be recovered in plenty of time to get my Big Bang piece finished by the deadline)

Fortunately, I've got a good chunk already written; I need to get the basic details cleaned up and put it in the right order, which is much faster going than actual writing/editing.

Progress so far: 31k/89k

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I ought to add that the thing that was giving me the most trouble before I shelved this book was properly intertwining multiple POVs following almost completely separate plots in a way that didn't mess up the pacing of either one. In the past I've written books where POVs alternate, but typically the characters are sharing the same scenes more often than not, with who's holding the POV ball changing depending on who was the most impactful narrator, and a few points of divergence when the characters separate. In this case, the POV characters rarely ever actually interact with each other, and the pacing of both plot threads have to be worked on their own, which is an entirely different skillset.

Juggling unconnected POVs also happens to be a core part of two of the largest fics I've written since I last put this book down.

So I'm going to call that time a necessary period of developing those skills.

I'm actually making a little bit of progress with this story.

It doesn't hurt that I already had 44k of it written; it needs some restructuring, but less than I was worried that it would.

(Meanwhile I'm posting bits and pieces Malevolent smut that I already had written, because I need to get that daily dose of serotonin one way or another)

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I'm actually making a little bit of progress with this story.

It doesn't hurt that I already had 44k of it written; it needs some restructuring, but less than I was worried that it would.

(Meanwhile I'm posting bits and pieces Malevolent smut that I already had written, because I need to get that daily dose of serotonin one way or another)

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It seems we have a consensus.

Thank you @5qui99l3draws @fluffyllamacorn and @briwhosaysni !

So Radiopublic died and I'm kicking Spotify to the curb.

What podcast apps do you all recommend?