project-lily

[project-lily]

The purpose of this blog will to be a record of my time working on, and hopefully my motivation to finish, this project I started on the date 12/18/2022.

I will record my personal writing process, from the initial idea to the research to the first draft, revisions, and if I want to see about getting the novel professionally published, I will talk about that process as well, but we'll get there when we come to it.

I am going to be working on this project as I am also working on my fanfiction series, so there will be days that I want to work on The Abyss and other days where I want to work on this project (I'm probably going to create some sort of schedule).

Anyway, this is Project Lily, a dark academia romance novel about Oliver Hill and Matilda Cortez as they investigate the tragic history and mysteries of the prestigious academy they attend, with a hint of lycanthropy.

[project-lily]

Episode One: The First Night

Inspiration had struck me. It had to first crash land into my lap, frayed and little disfigured, but it had struck, nevertheless.

I had recently become infatuated with the idea and concept of romance and finding love in unlikely circumstances. It had always been this way for me, finding great entertainment in enemies-to-lovers fanfiction tropes, and upon the first hours of reading A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, I realized I had to write my own version of romance. So, I looked at the closest thing I had and the closest thing I experienced: my loving four-year relationship with my girlfriend.

Last night, we both experienced the pure joy of realizing the love we felt for each other through a piece that I wrote to her that took about fifteen minutes to type down in a Google document. We had both shed tears of realization that we were going to love each other and never be alone in worlds that only we stood on. That was my inspiration. I wanted to write about her.

Not just her, but our experiences loving each other and being so close. Being best friends that touch lips, hold each other close, look at the other, smile, and think: "Wow. You leave me without the words to describe how much I appreciate you. How much I respect you." That's a romance book that I wanted. And rather than go through pages of the kind that wasn't my style of romance, I wanted to create something special for my girlfriend and me. That's the inspiration.

Inspiration crash landed, becoming frayed and rough because I wasn't expecting my love to promise that I'd never be alone again. I've been alone in my own galaxy my whole life until she showed up in my dimension four years ago. I need that sort of love represented because it's the love I feel, and that's described among many different relationships of many different people, but it's not represented. I haven't seen it been talked about in fiction.

So, this writing project has been titled Project Lily, after my charismatic, charming, and stunningly beautiful girlfriend, very soon to be my fiancée, and in a couple years' time, my charismatic, charming, and stunningly beautiful wife. She deserves it, after all, she is my muse.

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Recently, I have been looking into the dark academia genre, wondering what the hell it means, but I believe (and correct me if I'm wrong) it's dark material that takes place in an academia setting, usually involving magic and is a critique on the idea of Ivy League schooling. I had several other genre ideas that I possibly wanted to dabble into, such as a Western, but decided against it because there's one factor that was absolutely necessary.

Werewolves.

My partner is enthralled with the concept of werewolves and lycanthropy. I want the story to reflect our time together, and most of the time that I have known her, she's been invested in werewolves and stories that involve such creatures. And by God, will I indulge her.

Now, a Western with a werewolf character is something that I already had come up with and didn't necessarily enjoy and I wasn't able to get any traction with the story. It didn't go anywhere. So, this time, I decided to stick with the theme of magic and magical elements and lean into the dark academia genre. The initial synopsis reads:

"Two characters attending an ivy league school investigate the mysteries of the academy, meanwhile one of the characters deals with the effects of lycanthropy."

I felt like it was an interesting concept to tackle, the concealing of something that could be potentially dangerous for others to know meanwhile trying to tackle something as strange, and also potentially dangerous, as figuring out what the hell's going on. Focus on that romantic aspect between these two characters, then you have one that wants a relationship, but feels like they shouldn't have it, but can't tell the other why. Which would be the main conflict on the romantic aspect of things because there is a lack of communication.

Then, I narrowed down what research I would have to do for this book, which would be researching the genre types further, what exactly Ivy League is and was, and potentially what commentary and metaphors I wanted to explore. I order to explore the genres, I bought The Secret History by Donna Tartt, Wolf Marked by Veronica Douglas, and Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. For researching the term and history of 'Ivy League', I will look at various different articles and perhaps even a book on the Ivy League to see if there are any specific criticisms of this style of academia. And off the bat, I knew that I wanted to explore the metaphor of the werewolf and what it meant for one of the main characters to be a werewolf. Let me know if you have any suggestions for what I should read, look at, and/or consider.

Lastly, I wanted to start drafting my characters. Characters are really important for me because the structures of my stories ride on top of the characters. I wanted this story to be M4F (male for female) because it's a story that's personal to my partner and me, but there are most likely going to be queer elements. So, the first thing I do is look for names that have certain connotations (for this I used soft boy names and strong girl names, since that's the inspiration called for) and whatever names connect with me is one that I write down. Then, after I found six names for each character, I started to draw designs for the names. This helps me match a name to a face.

The names I came up with were Oliver Hill and Matilda Cortez. Those two will be our main characters for this project. Let's see if they last.

12/19/2022