rowyn

Thursday, December 5

Too long ago; I don't really remember what I did on this day. I recall that my new tablet had been originally scheduled to arrive on Wednesday. Then I got an email that it was delayed until Friday. At 10PM, I checked my phone and discovered it had been delivered an hour ago. Eliyahu brought it in for me but recommended I let it warm up before playing with it. They'd actually damaged a motherboard by using a too-cold computer once, which surprised me. I've had issues with batteries being unhappy about cold weather. Regardless, I left it in the box overnight.

Oh, and I illustrated three Apothecaria entries on Thursday. One in the morning to post, and two in the evening so I'd have entries to post on Friday and Saturday. I laid out a fourth entry and made the sketch for it, but didn't finish it.

Friday, December 6

I got up around 9AM and unboxed my tablet while making breakfast. I spent some time getting it set up. As soon as I got it connected to the internet, it went "Conducting set up, this may take a few minutes", and downloaded a ton of apps I didn't want. It also tried to convince me I wanted to copy things over from another device (I don't; I have welcomed our Cloud Overlords and don't store anything locally that isn't backed up in the cloud). Eventually it let me log in to my Google Account and install Time Princess.

I also deleted every pre-loaded and loaded-upon-connection app that it would let me uninstall, and disabled some that it wouldn't let me uninstall so I wouldn't have to look at them when I was searching for the few apps I care about. (Seriously, there's like a "Youtube Music Kids" app or something that can't be uninstalled. So much cruft taking up so much space on the apps list.)

A little later, the tablet popped up a notification asking me to either "complete setup" or "remind me later" because "no" isn't a thing modern tech bros understand. x_x I picked "complete setup".

It reinstalled all the cruft I had uninstalled, and re-enabled everything I'd disabled.

...

So I uninstalled it all again. It has not asked me to complete setup again, so there's some hope that I'm not just gonna spend the rest of this device's life telling it "remind me later". We'll see.

I understand why people jailbreak Android devices, though. I don't enjoy digging into the inner workings of my devices but I may yet end up being one of those people who does it.

This aside: Time Princess plays nicely on the new tablet. I had primarily gotten the tablet because my phone has two issues: 1) the battery is pretty degraded and 2) it doesn't have much storage space free.

1) is a little inconvenient but given how rarely I am away from home for any length of time, it's fine. For the rare time when it matters, I can use an external battery.

2) is because Time Princess is enormously, ridiculously, storage-intensive. It had grown to consume 33 gigs of space on my 64-gig phone. You can tame this growth by telling it to prune individual books, or, more dramatically, prune everything. But both approaches mean that you have to re-download a bunch of stuff to access various aspects of the game and eventually it'll bloat up again and you have to prune and then re-download and bleh. Anyway, my phone is like 50% Time Princess and 40% OS and 10% everything else* at this point. From a storage perspective, I practically don't have anything else* on the phone.

*Technically, I have installed a total of 12 apps on my phone. The Tapas app also bloats up and can only be pruned by uninstall and reinstall, but it's still under 5 gigs. The Kindle app is just over 1 gig. Everything else is tiny.

So I wanted a device that could easily handle Time Princess's bloat and -- perhaps! -- even let me install a Second App. Obviously, I could get a new phone, but I thought that a tablet would not only be significantly cheaper than a modern phone, but might be more pleasant for things like Time Princess and even some other things I do on my phone (reading comics and books).

I'll probably try ArtRage on it at some point, just because, although I don't think it'll have any advantages over my Surface in running that. I also installed Learn2Speak, a gamification app for learning languages that I backed in Kickstarter ages ago and that just came out for Android. I should put some reading apps on it, too, but haven't yet. For now, I've only used it for Time Princess, but I enjoy it for that. Time Princess is a lovely game and it's nice to see the details on a larger screen.

Around 10AM, Eliyahu woke up. I asked them if they wanted to get challah for the Sabbath from the Jewish bakery.

Eliyahu: "...well, if you have the energy for the drive."

Me: "I wouldn't have offered if I wasn't up for it. Also, we can get bagels." I like their bagels; their onion bagels are definitely better than any other onion bagels I've tried in the city. But my favorite bagel type is asiago and they don't make that, probably because asiago is a bagel abomination in their eyes (fair). My second favorite is cinnamon crunch, also, one presumes, an abomination, and definitely not available.

We drove the 20 minutes to the Jewish bakery and acquired challah, six bagels, and a tub of rosemary-garlic cream cheese.

Me: "So, do you want to go for a walk while we're already out or do you want to go home and enjoy our bagels?"

Eliyahu: "Will going out for a walk later be an option or...?"

Me: "Probably not. I mean, I might have the enthusiasm later? But I definitely have it now. When we're already in motion."

Eliyahu: "We'd better do it now, then."

So we drove to the park. It's 20 minutes to get to the bagel place from home, and then 20 minutes to get to our usual park from the bagel place, and then 20 minutes from park to home. They're not all equidistant; the park is physically closer to both home and the bagel place than home and bagel place are to each other. But the park is in midtown and there's no highway near it, so getting their takes longer for the distance. The drive time was another reason I didn't want to go back out later, especially if we were going to the park.

It was high 40s Fahrenheit out; Eliyahu wore their jacket and leather hat. I wore a sweater. After two laps, Eliyahu tapped out of the third because they were too cold. This was partly my fault -- if I'd mentioned the possibility of walking before we left, they'd've brought their mittens/scarf/toque. In any event, we returned to the car, stopped for Reward Bubble Tea, and went home.

During the Coffee's stream in the evening, I made good progress on The Secret Dragon outline, resolving most of the remaining plot issues.

Saturday, December 7

I gave up on sleep relatively early, at around 8:15AM, I think. I heard LawnGuy outside raking leaves. I don't usually do anything with the leaves because there's only a few places where the leaf cover is dense enough to impede plant growth, and also I don't care about the yard beyond making sure nature is not going to eat my house and the city is not going to fine me. However, I plan to sell the house next spring, so having the lawn look less awful would be helpful. Plus, LawnGuy's wife passed away from cancer a month or two ago, and I wanted to help him out. He's messaged several times asking for work, so he's clearly having a bad time of things.

I first hired a lawn service back in 2017: LawnWoman, as mentioned here: https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/615832.html and here: https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/616357.html. LawnWoman never ran the business in a very formal way. I've always paid in cash on the day of service, and she seldom bothered with receipts or invoices. She often had people working for or with her, though. At some point, a year or three in, LawnGuy became one of those people. Then LawnWoman and LawnGuy got married. At some point, LawnGuy more-or-less took over the business; I stopped seeing or hearing from Diane. The reason for this became clear later, when we found out LawnWoman had cancer. x_x She outlived Lut, but not by much. I will never forget her kindness in taking on my much-neglected lawn and doing an incredible job with it (she charged for much more than a mow but did SO MUCH MORE than mow it, ZOMG.)

LawnGuy asked me to give him half after he'd done most of the work, so that he could pay for his room. And then he'd come back to finish up. I gave him the full amount and a little extra and then he didn't come back. o_o;;; But he came by while I was out the next day and finished the job, so that was fine.

In the morning and early afternoon, I struggled to start writing. The outline for The Secret Dragon was mostly complete, but still needed some denoument scenes. Eventually, I started to poke at those. Around noon, Lyric stopped lying on my feet in the loveseat, so I was able to get up, feed the cat, and make lunch.

Eliyahu got up in time to eat lunch with me. After lunch, I poked a little more at the outline, then gave up and took a nap. Which meant we didn't go for a walk today, alas. Though after the cold walk on Friday, Eliyahu was kind of relieved to be absolved from walking Saturday.

I got up from the nap about an hour before Coffee's stream, and poked at the outline a little more.

During Coffee's stream, I spent three hours in multiplayer, working much more diligently at the outline. I outlined the denoument scenes and made some adjustments to earlier parts of the outline to reflect material I'd come up with later. I also started writing this entry. In the last hour of stream, I took a break and spent most of it playing Time Princess on my new tablet.

After stream, I started reading through the outline, making adjustments as I saw issues or remembered things I need to reference earlier. And also reading my favorite bits aloud to Eliyahu. Eliyahu commented that it was nice that I enjoyed my own outline so much because it'd be sad if, having put so much work into it, I found it tedious and unpleasant to go through. I know some authors don't like their own books very much, but I have no idea how they keep themselves motivated to stay at it.

It's getting near bedtime now, so I'm working a bit more on this entry before I play more Time Princess near reset. The new tablet's battery is perfectly healthy and capable of making it through an entire day of my playing Time Princess on and off, which is nice after getting used to plugging my phone in often throughout the day.

Sunday, December 8

I got up early, around 8:15 AM, but didn't do much in the morning beyond finish the Apothecaria entry I'd started Thursday night, so that I could post it now. Because I'd forgotten to finish it at any point in the last two days.

Around 11AM, I lay down for a nap. When I got up around 1PM, Eliyahu was making food. We waited for the food to finish cooking and then I ate some for lunch (Eliyahu had already eaten and had made it to have ready for their dinner in the early evening). Afterwards, we went out for another walk at the park. The weather was very nice for December: mid-50s Fahrenheit, albeit breezy. We each dressed as we considered appropriate for the weather.

Eliyahu, who I feel compelled to note is from Canada and grew up in central British Columbia, wore two pairs of slacks, two scarfs, a toque, mittens, and a jacket over a long-sleeved shirt.

I wore a t-shirt and leggings. I brought a sweatshirt in case I got cold, but left it in the car.

90% of the other people walking at the park: pants and a hoodie/sweater/sweatshirt.

Over the course of three laps, I didn't add any layers and Eliyahu didn't remove any. (Honesty compels me to admit that I was chilly during the windier stretches, but it didn't bother me enough to get the sweatshirt out either time we passed the car.)

We saw a few people in shorts and hoodies but no one else in a t-shirt. So basically, we were both freaks.

I have always been a heat-tolerant person: I keep my house at 78-81F in the summer because I am quite comfortable at those temperatures as long as the humidity is low. (The outside humidity is high in my area, but AC does a great job of keeping it low inside my house.) Eliyahu is the only healthy person who's ever made me feel like I'm cold-tolerant, though. They walk all the time in Canada -- they don't drive so they've always considered it unremarkable to walk several miles in a day, just for things like groceries or appointment -- and they manage winter weather via Many Layers and warm clothes.

After three laps, we picked up bubble tea (Eliyahu got malted hot chocolate with crystal boba, and thereby discovered the difference between crystal boba and popping boba) and went home.

I showered, drank my bubble tea, worked on this entry some more, and played Time Princess. My tablet started bonging at me, as if it had some important notifications. It had many irrelevant notifications. I couldn't even tell which notification it thought was important enough to bong over. I have taken away its Making Noises privileges. (Its speakers were already muted but apparently that is not enough to keep it from making notification sounds.

I am down to 13,600 words and 2.5 days left for the "250k in 44 days" challenge. I haven't done any dictation in the last two days. I should really do some tonight because I haven't written much else today, either, and there's only two hours left until my bed time.

It'd be reasonable for me to start writing The Secret Dragon now, but I'd like to finish looking over the outline first. The outline is Very Long -- over 20,000 words! -- because I've gotten in the habit of making very detailed outlines. To the point where I wonder if they qualify as zero drafts now. Anyway. some of that is me talking to myself as I try to work out a solution for a plot problem. You would think that there'd be no difference between me thinking "the characters need to come up with a clever solution here. Which unfortunately means I need to come up with a clever solution." "..." "clever solutions sure are hard, aren't they?" and me writing those exact thoughts down. But it's much easier to keep myself focused on Resolving This Issue if I force myself to write about it. Talking about it is almost as good. I solved some of my plot issues during dictation this time around. But writing about it is somewhat better.

If I'm just thinking about it while staring at a blank screen or into space, I'm more likely to let my attention drift to something more interesting and immediately rewarding. I have occassionally managed to focus on plotting entirely in my head, but it's rare. (One notable incident was when I accidentally locked my phone in a rental car after returning it after hours. I spent the four-mile walk home plotting out the climactic scenes of Golden Coils in my head instead of on my phone, as I'd planned. But doing it in my head actually worked for a change and I was able to write out the outline of the stuff I'd worked out when I got home.)

Anyway, I want to make sure I've got all the details in the right places in the outline before I start writing it. Even if it's unlikely that any changes to the outline will affect the first few scenes.

My wrists hurt.

Partly because of this and partly because it's really hard physically typing over 5,000 words in a day, I finally decided to try dictation software. After however many years it's been since people told me “you should try dictation software”. I remember Maggie read a book 7 or 8 years ago about how to write 10,000 words per day and one critical tip is “use dictation software”. Imagine typing 10,000 words every day. Wrists. What even are they. I’ve been writing 5200-iish words per day for the last 22 days and my wrists are already annoyed with me.

But I didn't try dictation software. One reason I didn't try dictation software is that I don't think coherently out loud. My thoughts just ramble in many different directions, especially trying to tell a story out loud. It always seems like an insurmountable barrier: how would you even do that? When I'm having a conversation and telling someone about a story I wrote, or plan to write, I'm keenly aware of how directionless and wandering I am.

I'm looking at the text that I'm writing -- well, speaking -- and it's a mess. But I’ll keep going.

I don't know where I'm going with this. One reason this is a mess is that this software doesn't punctuate anything. It’s just building one enormous paragraph of Oops All Words, no periods, no commas, nothing.

So to decide on which transcription software to use, I did a Duckduckgo search. Yeah, I'm too hipster for Google these days. Did I already write a blog post about why I don't use Google? I don't think I did; I think I wrote a thread on fediverse?

I don't use Google anymore because Google kept giving me a frontpage of Oops All Reddit and Quora. And I didn't want to know what Quora and Reddit had to say about, eg, whether all near-sightedness can be corrected with glasses. I think Google has an agreement with Reddit now only they can give search results from Reddit or something like that? So I was saved from Reddit in my search results by going to DuckDuckGo, which was great in my opinion. That's a feature, not a bug. I can't believe Google paid you for the privilege of giving me irrelevant results from Reddit. Anyway, that was the thing that did it even more than the AI summaries. I hate AI but I could ignore them. But when the entire first page of results is just Reddit posts: nope.

The best thing about this post so far is how it illustrates what I don't like about talking vs typing. Where am I going with this? Who even knows. Not me!

I said “woo!” but the transcription software noped out on transcribing it. “That's not a word. That's just a filler noise, like ‘er’ or ‘um’ or ‘uh’. I’m not transcribing those either.” (I typed them in for you). It doesn't transcribe when I laugh, either, which is good.

Anyway, I did a DuckDuckGo search for “best transcription software for Chromebook for writers”. Because I don't have a microphone for my desktop.

Believe it or not, it's the year 2024 and I don't have a microphone for my desktop. I used to have a headset that my workplace gave me, but I gave it back to them when I retired, with everything else. I guess I could use Lut’s microphone. He had a microphone that he used for gaming. I didn't even think about that. He had a gigantic monitor that wider than both my screens put together, though somewhat shorter. I still don't use it. It’s hooked up to his computer. Eliyahu used it when they were visiting. I'm not impressed by much about this software, but it spelled Eliyahu right on the first try, so I have to give it that. It did not spell it right on the second try, but hey, good job, you got it right once.

Anyway, the article from the search results, which I haven't gotten to yet because that's not how my brain works when I'm talking, suggested, as the top possibility for dictation software, Google Docs voice typing. Which is just an option on the Google Docs Tools menu: you select “voice typing” and click the microphone icon that comes up: there you go. So on the one hand, really easy to get started. On the other hand, no punctuation. Which is a downside in my opinion. For a while, I was talking on the Chromebook and also editing on the Chromebook, like a normal human being. And then it struck me that I didn't need to use the Chromebook for the editing part. I could talk with the Chromebook next to me so its microphone can hear me, but use my desktop’s keyboard to edit the same document on my desktop. Which is important, because half the point is to save my hands from having to do all this typing and using the Chromebooks keyboard to type is not the ideal ergonomic experience. It’s okay, but I’m trying to aim for minimal hand impact.This is not minimum to impact I'm still doing a lot of typing. But less typing than I would to have gotten this far otherwise.

The article that recommended Google Docs’ built-in voice typing said that live transcription software is slow and you have to talk slowly and distinctly in order for it to understand all your words. I looked at this and I thought “are you really telling me in the year of Our Lord 2024 live transcription software is slow and doesn't get all the words?” Because my father uses it on his little Android tablet as an assistive device (he’s hard-of-hearing). And that sucker is fast. It keeps up with live conversation, no problem. It also has punctuation. And paragraphs. I am seriously tempted to go download it instead of continuing to use Google Voice typing because this no punctuation or paragraphs thing is not great.

The same article also suggested that instead of using dictation software you should use transcription services. Just record your book -- your entire book, or whatever it is you're writing -- and send it to a transcription service, have them run it through machine transcription, and then clean up the machine transcription for you.

And one thing the article author touted as an advantage of this is: if you’re using dictation software, you’ll be tempted to edit it while it’s on the screen. And all I can think is: yes, you are right, I have edited this document a lot already since I started writing it. Speaking it? I don't know. Both.

But it's hard to imagine anything more nightmarish than having spoken an entire book out loud and getting the transcription back and then having to edit that. Because it's not just that I had to add the punctuation and paragraphs. That's fine. Not great, but fine. It's that I keep having to rearrange words because my thoughts don't make any sense when I speak them. This edited version is already much weirder and more rambling than my usual ‘I'm just posting to get some words out this morning before I go work on anything I care about’. I know that this article author’s concept is ‘if you edit while you're writing, you're just going to get caught up in editing, and you won’t get your book written. The first draft doesn’t need to be perfect! You just need to get that first draft out there.

My dude. I have four first drafts written and ready to be edited. I have gotten the first draft out. I am past that stage. I am so far past that stage. What I don't need is Yet Another First Draft, this one more desperately in need of editing than any first draft I have ever created before. Thank you. I'm good.

So for me, editing while you're writing is a feature, not a bug. I edit when I'm typing too. It's more natural than this “talk for a bit then edit” thing is. But I delete and rearrange sentences and add material and whatnot. That's the whole reason that my 4thewords word count is higher than my words-added-to-documents count. It's just part of the process.

I keep turning the microphone back on and not saying anything so it times out. It times out in a kind of an annoying way if you’ve been talking a while and stop. Because instead of turning the microphone icon from red (listening) to black (not listening) because you stopped speaking, it leaves the icon lit but doesn't do anything when you start talking again. Turning off automatically makes sense: you don't want to use battery power when no one’s doing anything. But I do wish it would turn the microphone off icon off.

Anyway I kept turning the microphone back on and it would time out very quickly (and turn the icon black, so that part was nice?) because I didn't start talking soon enough. Because I don't know what I want to write next on this rambling thing that I have created. If anything.

Also the time out thing kind of encourages you to keep rambling. I don’t need that. I really don’t need a thing to encourage me to ramble even more when I have no idea what I actually want to add next. Thank you.

I should maybe try different live transcription software.

Or, alternatively I could look at the instructions for the dictation software I'm currently using? Yes. That's a thing I could do.

So it turns out Google voice typing will do punctuation, you just have to say the punctuation. “Comma”, “period”, “question mark”, “new paragraph”, etc. (I typed that bit, as you might guess.) I think some live transcription will guess at the punctuation? Pretty sure Zoom’s does, though it’s not very good at it. But I don't hate having to speak it. I have noticed that it doesn't automatically capitalize after a period, although it was clever enough to figure out that saying “a period” is not me telling it to place a period punctuation mark. Good work, Google Voice.

I also fetched Lut’s microphone to plug into my computer. I even correctly figured out which socket it went in on the first try! (It's not a USB microphone; our computers are so old we have audio jacks and audio jack-using equipment). Which was more guessing than Anything else. “Well, I can't identify this icon. The plug is red and one port is orange and the other port is green. I guess I'll try the orange one? Orange is kind of like red? Maybe they’re color-coded.”

I was hoping using a microphone on my desktop, which doesn't have battery power, would convince Google Voice not to just turn itself off when I stop talking for a few minutes. This hope did not prove fruitful. Time to look at the instructions again!

Now, I've been playing with the voice commands. Saying “voice commands” brings up the list of voice commands, which is good to know I guess. It turns out that when it stops listening, it's supposed to start listening again if you say the word “resume.” So now I have to let it time out and test this. Yeah, no it does not resume typing when I say the word resume. I also can't figure out what's up with the capitalizing. Sometimes it capitalizes! It capitalized the “yeah.” But not “sometimes” or “it” or “but”. Mostly it doesn't capitalize. Saying “capitalize this word” does not make it capitalize the word. Although sometimes it writes “capitalize this” and then deletes it and shows in the microphone icon “Google Voice heard ‘capitalize this’.” Maybe I need to select a word to capitalize?

So selecting a word and then telling it “capitalize this” is awkward. Maybe not more awkward than grabbing the keyboard and editing everything. Especially since I have not yet gotten the hang of talking for long enough that it doesn't time out on me. And it seems like the workaround for that is just to leave the mouse cursor on top of the icon. I've spent like the last 5 minutes editing this paragraph with my voice to fix the capitalization and punctuation. It's sort of magical and sort of super annoying? I guess more magical than annoying. It is definitely easier on my wrists.

Okay, no. Using voice to fix the capitalization problem is too annoying. I feel like this is a problem with my desktop and Chrome and that I didn't have this problem on my Chromebook? A cursory DuckDuckGo search suggest this is not normal behavior for voice typing and gave me a “why don't you try resetting your settings in Chrome?” suggestion from Google Support. Which did nothing. So I'm gonna grab the Chromebook, and I'll try voice typing on it again.

Yeah, no. It has the same problem on the Chromebook. I hadn't noticed when I was using the Chromebook because I hadn't figured out punctuation at all when I was using the Chromebook. so there weren't any periods for it to fail to capitalize things after. I wouldn't say this makes Google Docs’ Voice Typing useless, but it is pretty annoying.

I think I've played with this enough that I'm willing to try actually writing something that isn't about using dictation software. Although I would like to know a keyboard shortcut for turning the microphone on and off when it times out. Oh, it’s ctrl-shift-S and it’s labeled right in the menu. D’oh.

I think of myself as a relatively focused writer these days. I'm not at maximum focus, "exactly one project at a time" level and I do not aspire to be. My ideal pipeline is something like:

One work-in-progress that I'm outlining.
One WIP I'm drafting.
One WIP in initial edits
One WIP in final edits/layout

I dislike having Just One WIP that I work on from outline to publication because I want each project to have some rest time in the editing process: time after I finish writing a draft to let the draft sit so I can edit it with relatively fresh eyes. Time to let first readers read and comment before I do final edits. Also, having some limited variety lets me switch projects when I don't feel like one, without returning to my pre-2012 years of poinging between ideas and seldom finishing anything. I've published 17 books and two shorter works in the last nine years with this kind of pipeline as aspirational if not exact practice. I am far from one of the most productive writers I know, but I am content with my output.

One author friend, CoffeeQuills, counts their WIPs at well over a hundred. If I understand correctly, this count included undeveloped ideas as a WIP -- so if they've written down a sentence of "ooh this would be fun to write", that's a WIP.

I sometimes wonder how many WIPs I'd have if I counted every unfinished idea. Another friend on a Discord server pulled out all their fiber arts WIPs and took a picture, and I thought "oooh pretty and all in one place like that, very nice". So today, in this entry, I'm gonna take a stab at doing just that: all the works of fiction I’ve started and never published.

Active WIPs

Outlining: Be That Way: A goblin, a catgirl, and a werewolf walk into a coffee shop. Now with 200% more lesbians!

Writing/illustrating/playing: Apothecaria, cozy fanfic about a witch gathering reagents and brewing potions to cure patients while wrestling with her past, new suitors, and her own romantic longings. In theory this is a game I'm doing just for fun, and in practice it requires creative energy just like writing original fiction does. It's not as much as writing a book, because I can draw cards for prompts when I'm not sure what to do.

Editing: A Dragonling's Family: Assured that no dragon wants the child, the Crow Lord adopts a dragon's egg after the mother passes away. Until the dragonling's uncle arrives to dispute this assertion.

These three are very solidly in the WIP stage: all things I have worked on in the last week, even.

Total so far: 3

I Will Definitely Finish This Someday

A Game to You: Grandmother in her sixties gets sucked into the world of MMO she played. She's supposed to fight off "a Great Evil", but the ethics of killing opponents in a game are nothing like those of fighting real, living people. LitRPG

The first draft is complete but also an intimidating mess of "I should have fleshed out this plot more UGH why is there so much to fix/rewrite/redo." I love this draft, though, so I will tackle it eventually.

Total so far: 4

I Already Wrote the Draft So Maybe I Should Edit It?

The Jewel-Strewn Night: After Kiran saves Jewel's life while diving in deep underwater caves on terraformed Mars, Jewel rescues Kiran from their abusive family. With the full encouragement of Jewel's betrothed, Caress, of course. But can Kiran accept that they're allowed to have nice things without falling in love with their benefactors? Polyam sf romance.

Fellwater: A triad plays a fully-immersive kink VR RPG run by their domme, in a fantasy setting full of extremely dubcon submission/sex/denial for the characters, with a bonus over-the-top plot about using dubcon sex to protect the world. Sff polyamorous erotica.

These have somewhat different problems; there's a climactic event in Jewel that I'm not sure works and the whole book is built around it so just taking it out leaves Giant Plot Void but idk that there's a good fix for it. Fellwater is in a genre I've never written and barely read, plus it needs a lot of edits, plus it's all weird kink stuff. I wrote it because it was fun to write but idk that there's a point to publishing it for the audience of 10 people who would find/read/enjoy it. But they go into a similar category of "arguably I've done most of the work for these and might as well finish and publish them."

Total so far: 6

I Have an Outline but Meh

The Fey, Her Fox, and Their Goddess: Originally an outline for an M|F fantasy romance that needed a few alterations to put it in continuity with the Etherium books. Instead of making those, I started re-working it to be an FFM romance and now it needs WAY MORE alterations idk what I was thinking. Thought about making this my next WIP. Shelved it because it's another book about rich powerful people and how their decisions impact their world, and I wanted to write a small-scale book about middle-class people with personal problems instead. There's a reasonable chance I'll write this some time.

The Immortal Etheriums: Prequel to the Etherium books. Queer polyamorous romance focused on three of the researchers who made fey immortality a reality. Shelved because my books with a 'magical research' theme have been pretty unpopular. I don't know that I'll ever get to this. Maybe? Everything I write is unpopular now so it doesn't matter as much if this is especially unpopular.

"Bowracer": Callie may have put her career on hold to marry Anthser, but she still wants to return to competitive bowracing. For that, though, she'll need a human partner...

This one was a novelette that I'd planned as part of Further Arrangements. But trying to write Callie & Anthser as a happy couple without writing out the events that brought them together was a struggle, so I wrote "A Regular Hero" instead. I don't have an outline for any other shorts and dislike publishing short works by themselves, so never wrote this. No particular reason I couldn't write it later, though.

Total so far: 9

Special Circumstances

The Lair of Dragons: A fantasy polyamorous kink romance unexpectedwonder and I were writing together. We had an outline-ish sort of thing and and a fairly clear idea of where it was going, but writing it was more like text roleplay than anything else. We'd just take turns writing different characters. One of us would write and then let the other know 'it's your turn' and then the other person would write. IIRC, UnexpectedWonder had some RL stuff she needed to focus on and couldn't keep writing it. I still remember this fondly and wouldn't mind revisiting it if my co-author was interested in doing so at some point.

PollRPG: An interactive fiction I ran on Dreamwidth and Twitter in early 2017, with diverging storylines in the same setting. This was fun in many ways but the pacing of it was challenging. Posting a story installment every day is easy for me (witness Apothecaria). Writing a story installment on a specific schedule is much harder. And because the course of the next installment was dictated by reader choices, I couldn't write ahead or build a buffer. Weirdly tempted to try a play-by-poll game again anyway, but I'd have to start a new story because no one's gonna remember or read through the beginning of this one in order to play along with a new one.

Total so far: 11

This Is a Cool Idea and I Made Some Notes

The Twin-Souled Empress: Doomed Empress prays for a saint to take charge of her life. Saint: "I don't see how I can possibly save her but maybe I can give her a dignified death?" Drama ensues. Fantasy polyamorous romance.

The Way the World Ends: After forseeing the end of the world, a prophet tries to avert catastrophe. She has frequent visions of how her recent actions impact the future, from a spirit guide who varies between coaching her on how to avert the apocalypse and telling her she cannot possibly change it and needs to focus on protecting a handful of people through it instead.

This is so convoluted I don't know how to plot it out, much less make it work. But I like the idea.

The Least of All Monsters: The humans of Tizhoir call them angels: beautiful, alien, human-like beings with inhuman abilities. But earthly life is not kind, and Eleonor knows her brother Aristide is more demon than angel, however much he loves her. What Rafael is -- she doesn't know at all.

I did a whole bunch of world building and backstory for this, and then could never figure out what I was trying to do with the actual story.

Real: Rosalee Dannon is a freelance journalist in 21st century America. Rosario Chantell is a space marine fighting a losing war on unfamiliar worlds against alien invaders. Princess Rose is trying to unravel a curse at work on her family's palace. But they all share the same problem: they are all insane.

I still look at my notes for this and go "maybe I should try to make this work?" But it's the sort of story where not unraveling the mystery would frustrate me and any unraveling would be much less interesting than the mystery was. Also, it could easily turn into a bunch of bad stereotypes re: mental health and plural systems.

Although I did just think of a thing that would help counter the Bad Stereotypes angle, Imma write that down before I forget.

"Laudan": A tarot story, from when I was taking prompts and writing stories based on the prompt + drawing three tarot cards. I made an outline for it and wrote the first half and then never finished it because I didn't like my planned resolution anymore. The first half is weird and cute, though.

Among Monsters: Five of the "word of the indefinite time period" stories I wrote back in 2009 were loosely connected. They were kind of low-key and slice-of-life small-town fantasy and I always wanted to make a book out of them somehow but didn't know where I was going with it.

The Way You Play: I haven't even figured out all the revisions I want to make to A Game to You, much less mage them, but for some reason I decided to start making notes for the sequel. Like 5700 words of notes. Brains be like that.

Total So Far: 18

Started Writing, Didn’t Know Where It Was Going, Gave Up But Still Kinda Like the Idea

Annabel Cane: Annabelle Cane loves everything about the Helena N. Taskit School of Theory and Practice: the enchanted grounds, her classmates, her teachers -- everything! Except, perhaps, the part where they expect her to learn things.

A school of magic with furries. This was relatively recent, 2011, but I hadn't yet given up on the idea that I could just start things with no idea where I was going and still finish them.

"The Memento Box": The diary and correspondence of Treis Traynor.

This was kind of an interesting project -- a physical box that contained mementos, letters, and a diary with sketches, all with the conceit of belonging to Treis Traynor, a character from the Silver Scales setting. It was more an artifact than anything else; not designed to be reproduced. The diary was hand-written and hand-illustrated, using pencils and markers. I didn't get very far in writing this, though I collected several tokens to include in the box.

The Changelings: When the Fae folk steal human children, they treat those children well -- but not all of the children forget where they came from, or that they were stolen.

This one is super old, from when I was 17, but still kind of intrigues me -- it was a group of kids from like 8 to 17 or so, with an implication that the faerie had stolen them from their human families and given them magical powers for some sinister purpose. Maybe the faerie had lied about giving them magical powers and the kids were stolen specifically because they already had magical powers? I didn't know where I was going with it. Doubt I’m ever revisiting it, though.

Total So Far: 21

Sequels I've Considered But Made No Real Effort to Start

Pyrite Chains: Third book in The Warlock, the Hare, and the Dragon.

Wisteria's Daughter: Everyone would be disappointed by what I have in mind for this one because the daughter takes after Justin much more than Wisteria.

Another Fey-Touched Novel, this one about Lightning, Raindrop's older brother.

Sequels to the Demon's Series. I have more plans for these characters, but these books are really hard to write and I'm kind of like "I've got 50 other ideas that would be easier." o_o;;; Counting this as two WIPs because it’d be at least two more books.

Total So Far: 26

Nothing But Vibes

I have a "Story Ideas Master List" which has really short notes on things, like:

Gorgeous, dangerous, sexy woman who deals with gorgeous, dangerous, sexy men constantly. Hopelessly In love with her responsible & vanilla assistant but doesn't tell him because, y'know, doesn't want to sexually harass him.

That's it, that's the whole idea, two sentences, nothing else. I'm not listing these individually because there's nothing to list, but I'll count how many of these short items are there. 21.

Total So Far: 47

Any rational calculation would stop here because I have no intention of ever revisiting anything lower down on this list. But I’ll add up all the other unfinished stuff anyway.

Abandoned

Delight-in-World-Tree: A fanfic serial I wrote, mostly in 2010. I finished several arcs for it and everything I wrote for the journal is posted, so it's not like an unfinished draft no one has seen. I never got to some of the stuff I'd planned to do, though. I don't see myself revisiting this journal at this point, though. It's been too long.

Total so far: 48

Technically I Drafted This But I'm Never Publishing it

Prophecy: Prophecies have ruined the lives of Mariel Sunfire and all of her ancestors for a hundred generations. If the only way to stop Fate from ruining her children's lives too is to destroy the world, then that's a price Mariel is willing to pay.

The first draft I finished as an adult. It's very literary and grim because I thought literary and grim were cool at the time. I am no longer impressed by literary and grim and have no interest in publishing it. If this seems too harsh, I want to point out that I edited the draft and sent it to six or so volunteer beta readers. None of them ever sent feedback on it.

Riddlequest, book 1: A novella-length work I wrote in my teens, as book 1 of 5. I'm missing the first and last chapters, IIRC. Even when I was writing this, I thought of it as practice (unlike books I started when I was even younger and thought would be masterpieces). There's nothing in it that makes it worth digging up and working on again. I don't think it's even entertainingly bad, in the way Jim Hines gave the MST3K treatment to his own first novel draft.

Total so far: 50

So Close But Oops

Sign & Sacrifice: My 2007 NaNoWriMo novel. I still like some parts of this idea and especially main characters, but it turned into a mess of half-formed social justice concepts before I got to the end. Also the central mystery has serious Wait No This Was a Mistake issues. I don't think it's salvageable.

Total so far: 51

Started Writing, Never Finished, Didn't Know Where It Was Going, Little to No Interest in Revisiting

Flight Rising Fanfic: Back when Maggie and I used to play Flight Rising, we wrote dragon bios that sometimes became intricate and intertwined; I even wrote out a long arc that came to a dramatic and catastrophic conclusion, and sucked in half of the Dragon Writers' Chat participants to come to my aid. Anyway, Flight Rising, a site about buying, selling, and breeding sapient dragons, deleted some of my bios without warning for either (a) mentioning that kink exists or (b) for being adjacent to a dragon whose bio mentioned the existence of kink. (Only some of the bios that mentioned kink exisiting, tho. Not all of them. None of my bios on the site had sexual content.) I lost interest in writing fanfic for the game after that, and also in having anything to do with the game. Still at negative interest today. Arguably, this is miscategorized: I don't know that I had anything "unfinished" about this. I don't think I was in the middle of any story arcs when I quit. But without the random unwarned bio-deletion, I expect I would've written more. As it is, I went through, backed up, and deleted all of my remaining bios, so these writings are no longer available anywhere and are very unlikely to ever be available again.

Nightmare Waking: Ashlin tried to retire and take up a nice hobby, like gardening, but a Nightmare's work is never done.

I had recently finished Silver Scales without an outline and thought I could write another book based on a vague idea of where I was going. Nope. Wrote 14,000 words before I quit, though. Worked on this in my 30s.

"Reema", "Furtown", "Tangled Web", "Bullet": Wrote 1000-2000 words on each of these three shorts. I had specific plans for "Reema" and "Tangled Web" but lost interest in writing them. I never really knew where I was going with "Furtown" or "Bullet". These were also in my 30s.

The Caged Bird: Being the queen's newest pet means a nicer sort of cage than being a prisoner in the town's dungeons -- but it is not a much safer role.

I had more plans for this story than I wrote down or wrote out, but I never knew how I was going to resolve it or even had a clear idea of what the central conflict was. I was in my 20s for this one.

Hope: Hope loses her world as a young woman, and spends her life on a generation ship headed for another. But will the new world welcome them when they arrive?

I did a six-page comic of the start of this story when I was in my early 20s. It's literary and grim and was in competition with Prophecy when I was picking a novel idea to resume work on in 2002. I'm not writing Hope for the same reason I'm not doing final edits on Prophecy: I don't actually enjoy literary and grim very much.

The Lost River of Tears: Shadowsteel knows he's not the most conventional sort of unicorn, but he never thought even he could misplace his entire river.

A rare attempt at comedy for me! This was an amusing concept -- unicorn gathers motley band of animal/monster allies to help him find his missing river -- but I didn't know how I was going to resolve it. I did know what happened to the river, though! Better than I was usually doing at this period -- I was 19 at the time.

A Deal's A Deal: What happens when the sword that can kill any target is set against the shield that can stop any weapon? (Hint: it's not good.)

Perhaps the first time I tried to write a detailed outline for a novel. I made notes for the first four chapters, decided "surely that's good enough", and started writing. I didn't make it through the four chapters.

Day and Night: When the Sun worshippers set out to destroy the night forever, a lone priestess of the Night must convince them of the necessity for balance.

Goodness, this was melodramatic.

Kelly and the MacGuffin: An alien presence wants Kelly to save the world by finding an unpronounceable and unidentifiable artifact. "And this is supposed to save my world?" "Oh, no. Not YOUR world."

I think that last sentence was the best part about this story start. Don't know where I was going with it. Wrote three scenes and quit.

Thief of Argus: As long as Terry has been alive, her native city of Argus has had more abandoned buildings than occupied ones. She finally finds out why, when Argus's army returns from its twenty-year campaign -- and decides to assume control of the city.

A friend was running this as a D&D campaign, and the first several sessions felt much more story-like than most of my RPG experiences. I started writing it as a book, but eventually the game lost focus and I couldn't figure out how to resolve the story I was writing either. I was 16 or 17. It was not good. I still have parts of this, but I don't even want to re-read them to see if they're as bad as I remember.

Draco: Sometimes the dragon needs to rescue the knight from the evil princess.

The elevator pitch is better than the actual text was. I wrote at least 50 pages of this and at no point had any idea what I was doing or where I was going with it. A protagonist's horse randomly became a major character. If you're thinking "wait, that sounds cool": no, it wasn't. I was 15 and extremely proud of it at the time, though. All drafts are lost to time, I have nothing of this and no regrets about losing it.

The Princess, the Witch, and the Evil Advisor: This might be the first thing I ever tried writing? I think it was on 8" discs. It was arguably AU fanfic for "You Can't Do That on Television", although I don't think it was recognizable as such. The witch was the protagonist and the princess was a vain, annoying dupe, I think. I remember nothing else. Nothing remains of this, either

Total: 66

I think that's everything I could conceivably count as either a current or former WIP that is by some standard not "finished". The first six are the only ones that I personally think of as WIPs. I even have them organized as WIPs in my Google Drive directory. They're subfolders of my "Fiction" folder, and start with numbers so that they sort to the top when sorted by alphabetically by filename. All my other projects (finished and not) are also there but not numbered. If I removed the numbers from Jewel or Fellwater I'd think of them as "abandoned" rather than "WIPs", though.

The parable of the pottery class goes like this:

Two groups of students take a pottery class. One group is graded only on their best pot. The other group is graded on the total number of completed pots they produce, regardless of quality.

At the end of the class, the group graded on total number of pots not only produces more pots, but has also produced better pots. The group graded on their best pot -- agonizing over trying to make each pot perfect -- learned less about how to throw pots. Their best work is not as good as the other group’s best work.

As far as I can tell, this story is apocryphal: it never actually happened. It makes a good story and it rings true, which gives it a longevity that many scientific studies lack.

My recent obsession with digital painting and completing one study of an hour or so each day has brought this parable to mind often.

In contrast, one of my friends quote-tweeted a comic artist saying something like ‘your audience can tell the difference between your best work and phoning it in. Fix your mistakes.’

There is a natural tension between the quantity and quality. The parable of the pottery class is flawed. It only works if the students want to improve despite the lack of incentive or reward for doing so.

You always need to care about both. If you don’t care about quantity, you’ll never finish anything. If you don’t care about quality, you’ll never improve.

But most advice I hear is on the lines of “finish things and move on.” Don’t rewrite the same book endlessly. Don’t labor over the same painting for years. Declare victory or declare defeat, but call it done and do the next thing. That quote-tweet has stuck with me because of the rarity of hearing someone advocate for no, don’t give up. Make each thing the best.

I gave up on today’s CuratorPrompts (#79) at 37 minutes, because I didn’t want to work on it any longer than that. It’s not my best work. Every painting I’ve done for CuratorPrompts is not my best work. Instead, I am doing the best I can in a limited amount of time. This one is done. There will be another CuratorPrompts tomorrow. I can try to do better on that one.

It stands in contrast with the third and fourth Demon’s Series books. I finished drafting the fourth book in January of 2021. It’s been eighteen months and I’m still not ready to release either one. I haven’t spent much of that time actually working on the books, of course. I’ve written two other books and 5/6ths of a third during that time, and edited one of those. (This is slower than my productivity in some previous periods, granted). Mostly, I’ve dragged my feet and postponed doing any work, rather than labored but made no progress.

In many ways, it is easier to let go of a picture than a book. If I give up on a picture and show it to everyone, and two years later I decide to paint the same picture again but better -- the same people will still look at it. Many artists make a habit of re-doing paintings to see how they’ve improved or changed over time. And I have even less investment in the CuratorPrompts paintings: these are studies completed for practice, not my own vision that I want to share.

But if I give up on a book and publish it, that’s it. If I made substantial revisions to it or rewrote it years after publication, few readers would give the new version a try.

So I will persevere.

I was talking to my partner about how Nanowrimo is popular because many people -- perhaps even most readers -- dream of writing a book. And Nanowrimo’s roots are in “stop saying you will write that book ‘someday’ and do it. Do it right now.”

Many people who start Nanowrimo do not write 50,000 words in November, and many of them never finish their draft. If they do finish the draft, they don’t revise it. If they do revise it, they don’t publish it. It’s a path with a lot of failure points.

One of those failure points is realizing that this is a lot of work and maybe you like the dream of writing a book a lot better than actually writing a book. Maybe you give up on that image of yourself as an author. Maybe you decide: this is not something I want, after all.

That last one made me reflect on my own path. I did eventually turn into the sort of person who writes, edits, and publishes books. Pretty often, by most standards. But I did give up some big parts of my self-image along the way.

I loved reading from an early age. I came from a family of avid readers, and I loved science fiction, fantasy, and romance when I was growing up. I got a bachelor's and then a master’s degree in English Literature.

Throughout my education, I had an image of myself as a person who enjoyed books of all kinds. Maybe I liked fantasy/science fiction/romance best, but I liked classics, too. When I was in middle school, I read the Iliad and the Odyssey for fun. (My mother reminded me of this recently, because it boggled her at the time. From my perspective, they were fantasy. Why wouldn’t I read them?)

As a teen, I wrote a fair bit of fiction. After I started college, my fiction writing trailed off. I wrote a few short stories for college assignments, and did some work on a novel or two, but for 13-14 years, I wrote little fiction on my own time, apart from text-based roleplay.

In 2001, I decided to make a serious effort at writing a book again. I had two ideas from my twenties, one science fiction and one fantasy, and I decided to write one of those two. While neither concept was literary fiction, they were heavily influenced by what my education said was Serious Literature. They were pretentious, dramatic stories exploring big ideas, with a lot of tragedy and suffering, and protagonists who died at the end.

At the time, I thought “I only have these two ideas that are worthy of becoming a book.”

I finished the draft and revision of one of those books, a fantasy epic with a working title of Prophecy. I never did a second revision of Prophecy based on reader feedback (I can’t remember now if I ever got any critical feedback on Prophecy, for that matter, although Greywolf read it as I wrote it and did a lot of cheerleading for me.) I never attempted to publish it.

I hated writing Prophecy. While there were parts of the book that I enjoyed reading, I’ve never read Prophecy for pleasure. I’m not sure I’ve even opened its files since I finished the second draft.

Over the next several years, I wrote other stories in fits and starts. I started A Rational Arrangement on a whim, and finished the draft in less than a year -- more than twice as fast as either of my previous drafts.

And over time, I realized that I do not like Serious Literature. I don’t like grim stories, I’m lukewarm about big ideas, and I am almost never in the mood for tragedy.

I do have a genuine and unstrained love of some classics. I love watching Shakespeare’s comedies, and reading Jane Austen’s books. I love Jane Eyre. But one thing these and almost everything I enjoy in a story have in common is that they’re not serious.

I am an extremely fussy reader. It’s hard for me to read a book by someone else and enjoy it. I pick books apart, questioning the choices the author made on plot or pacing or climax. But despite my weirdly exacting standards, I don’t actually like the things that most people look for in Great Books. My culture says that Great Literature is most often serious, dramatic, and tragic. Even awards that are exclusively for stories considered unserious by the mainstream -- sf&f and romance -- privilege grim and serious over light-hearted romps. “Award-winning” is a predictor that I won’t enjoy a story, not that I will.

It took me most of my life to realize that there really aren’t awards for the kind of stuff I love best. That when light-hearted, upbeat books win awards, it’s in spite of being light-hearted and upbeat, not because of it. To finally stop telling myself “this is supposed to be great so I have to like it.”

No, I don’t. I don’t mind that other people love grim and serious and dramatic, but I have come to terms with myself. When I enjoy a book like that, it’s despite being grim and serious and dramatic, not because of it.

I love fluffy and upbeat. I don’t want to spend months immersed in crafting a story full of sorrow and heartache.

Young Me wanted to write Great Literature, and didn’t think anything else was worth the effort. Old Me just wants to write cheerful stories with happy endings. They’re not Great Literature, and that’s fine. They're exactly what I want.

“How many other characters do you have?” Frost asked, as I worked on a picture.

“I don’t know. I can’t even remember how many books I’ve written on the average day,” I told him.

“No, seriously. What if we just count the point-of-view characters?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I told him, but it was too late.

“Nikola, Wisteria, Justin. Anthser, Southing. Mirohirokon, Ardent Sojourner. Jinokimijin, Kimikireki. Zenobia -- ” Frost ticked them off on his fingers, then ran out of fingers and summoned a floating ledger to count them on instead. “Kildare, Madden. Sunrise, Bright, Raven, Mercy.”

“Look, is there a point to this exercise?” I asked him, as he conjured up my webpage to look at the list of books.

“Myself, Thistle. Spark, Komyau. Cherish, Dyaneli, Eclipse. Raindrop, Jaguar, Worth. I daresay I’ve missed some of the minor PoV characters -- ah, wait, you’ve some unpublished books, too. Let’s see, Kalisha, Rachel, Griffin. Swan, Breeze.” He flicked his fingers to total the calculation. “So thirty-one. Including myself. How many of them have you drawn?”

“If I include the covers -- ”

“By all means.”

“And the little interior sketches for Scales and Coils --”

“Of course.”

I glanced over the list of publications. “Twenty-five,” I pronounced, with a note of triumph. “See, I draw most of my characters.”

“Splendid. And whom have you drawn more than three times?”

“Um. Thistle. Ardent and Miro. Uh. Kildare and Madden, I think. You.”

“In truth? You’ve drawn Thistle four or more times?”

“Yes! Twice in pictures with you, and then two portraits.”

“Ah, yes. I did particularly enjoy that second portrait,” Frost said.

“Thank you.” I returned my attention to my tablet.

“So. More than four, then?”

“... just you,” I admitted.

“More than ten?” he asked. “Still just me, is it?”

“That’s how numbers work, yes.”

“But there must be an upper bound. You’ve not drawn me a hundred times. Yet. Have you?”

“No! Like ... twelve,” I said. He gave me a skeptical look. “Maybe twenty if you count all the sketches and the non-canon drawings when I was trying to decide what you look like. Or twenty-five. Not more than thirty, I’m sure.”

“Are you, now.”

“Look, it’s not my fault you’re the prettiest of my characters.”

“Setting aside that you created me and my appearance is quite literally your fault, I am far from the prettiest of your characters. Moreover --” Frost gestured pointedly at my tablet “-- I am indisputably not the one with the most prominent bust.”

“Just because it’s a boob meme doesn’t mean you have to use a character with big boobs for it,” I protested. Frost eyed me. “It’s not! Most of my friends and acquaintances who did it used small-chested or male characters.”

Frost sighed. “I do not understand your fascination with drawing me. Could you not draw someone else? Do you not tire of drawing the same person over and over again?”

“I haven’t drawn you enough times to be bored yet. Don’t look at me like that! Comic artists draw the same characters thousands of times. I drew myself like ten times just doing that silly two-page tribute comic for The Three Jaguars.” I pulled it up and counted. “Eighteen times! In two pages! Twenty or thirty times is nothing. Also, Lut was in the hospital and I wanted to do something self-indulgent and fun.”

“You’ve succeeded at the self-indulgent part, I will grant.” He eyed my drawing with another sigh. “I suppose it serves as a good excuse.”

“Look, send someone by to cure Lut’s cancer and I promise, I’ll draw Thistle like a thousand times for you,” I offered.

“Hah. Fair enough.”

I really did spend too much time on this goofy meme, though.

This struck me as a good blog post prompt: “think of an occasion where you exemplified the Dunning-Kruger effect.”

I’ll pick an amusing area that came to mind on this, rather than, say, the horrific and cringe-inducing ones that also come to mind.

Me-1984: “I’ve read SO MANY books! I know exactly how to write a novel! Watch me, it’s gonna have a friendly dragon and a talking horse and princesses rescuing their lovers and I’m just gonna dive right into it because world-building and outlines are for people who don’t know what they’re doing.”
Me-1987: “Yeah, Me-1984 was wrong. Maybe I should give this ‘outline’ thing a try. I don’t need to write, like, a WHOLE outline, do I? Like if I just know the beginning and the end, that should be enough?”
Me-2002: “No, Me-1987, that is not enough. But I know what I need now! A detailed outline!”
Me-2002: “And because writing is so hard, I should pick a Truly Great idea, not just toss together my favorite tropes. I should write the kind of story that I’ve never read before. Like one where the world is awful and the protagonists lose in the end! The kind of story that literary figures love!”
Me-2006: “So, uh, Me-2002, you know that the reason that you’ve never read that kind of story before is that you hate it, right?”
Me-2002: “Nonsense! I love great literature.”
Me-2006: “Noooo not so much.”
Me-2002: “But this idea is so special and unique that no one has ever written something like it in SFF -- “
Me-2006: “GIRL IT IS OUT THERE. You don’t read it because you don’t like it! You don’t enjoy reading it and you think you will have a good time writing an entire book like that??”
Me-2002: “LA LA LA IT’LL BE GREAT.”
Me-2004: “... so I finished it.”
Me-2004: “It was not great.”
Me-2004: “But I figured out the problem!”
Me-2006: “Oh thank goodness”
Me-2004: “Outlines are bad!”
Me-2006: “... we’re sure about that?”
Me-2004: “Well, it’s one of the problems, anyway.”
Me-2006: “Okay, well, I finished a book without writing an outline, so that must be it.”
Me-2012: “Yeah I don’t think that was it.”
Me-2006: “What why not?”
Me-2012: “Haven’t finished a book since 2006.”
Me-2006: “Oh. Whoops.”
Me-2012: “Gonna try that outline thing again.”
Me-2021: “So I’ve completed, uh, a lot of books now.”
All My Past Selves: “Ooh really? How many? Are they published?”
Me-2021: “Um. Lemme count. 11 novels, 1 novella, one collection of three novellas. 1 novel awaiting publication. 3 manuscripts that needing editing. 1 WIP novel.”
All My Past Selves: “Wow! You must know everything now! Tell us the secret! How did you do it?” *chinhands*
Me-2021: “Yeah I have no idea.”
Me-2021: “I mean, I have plenty of ideas.”
Me-2021: “But they’re probably wrong.”
Me-2021: “I have an incredibly long history of being wrong so”
Me-2021: “idk magic or something.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have to wonder how much of the “experts lack confidence” side of the Dunning-Kruger effect is “after people gain experience, they realize they’ve been wrong SO MUCH in the past, and therefore the odds that they’re right THIS TIME seem pretty slim.”

Anyway, if you can think of times where you too served as an example for Dunning-Kruger, I'd love to hear it, either in comments or your own post. *chinhands* :)

I’ve had three different friends ask me variations on “how do you outline?” in the last month or so. My response goes something like this:

Sure, um, here’s a tip or two
Howabout I send you an example of one of my outlines?
Maybe I should write a post about outlining
Wait, surely there are much better people to get outlining advice from than me

But like most writers, I love to write about writing, and this love is undeterred by my lack of expertise on any given aspect of it. So with the caveat that actual experts can offer much better ideas, here are mine. I’ll use A Rational Arrangement as my example because it’s the book my readers are most likely to be familiar with.

Ideas

I start with an idea, or more often, a whole slew of ideas. The first idea for A Rational Arrangement was “wealthy heiress makes extremely blunt and clinical marital proposition to titled-but-poor man*, which horrifies all of their relations but intrigues the man, who appreciates both her forthrightness and her contemplation of non-monogamy.”

Other things accreted to this. Wisteria became neurodiverse because that went well with “confused as to why she’s not supposed to be forthright about various things.” I like fantasy and wanted to write a character with mental powers used for healing instead of mind-reading or control**, so Nikola became a mind-healer. (There was, btw, no connection between these two ideas; I was halfway through writing the outline before it occurred to me that at some point they should talk about whether or not Wisteria wanted to be neurodiverse and whether or not this was a condition Nik could treat.)

I wanted religion to be a meaningful part of the world and the characters’ lives, so Nik’s culture regarded his mind-healing gift as a blessing from their god. I wanted to write a polyamorous romance, so I gave Nik a boyfriend and made their society homophobic to explain why he hadn’t married the boyfriend. I didn’t want to succumb to the traditional horses-like-bicycles*** of most fantasy, so I added giant riding cats and made them sapient because the only thing better than a cat you can ride is a TALKING cat you can ride.

At this stage, I don’t know how the story goes. I just have a pile of “this sounds cool! And this! And ooh that! Shiny!”

Glueing ideas together into a story

The outline is where I stick all my ideas together into some kind of narrative. In the case of A Rational Arrangement, I knew that I wanted to write a romance.

Basic romance plot:

Introduce protagonists.
Obstacle(s) exists which prevent protagonists from being happily in love
Protagonists overcome obstacle(s) and live happily ever after, together and in love.

To make it even more generic, the basic formula for any story is:

Character(s) wants thing(s) and doesn’t have it
Obstacle(s) prevents character(s) from getting thing(s)
Either obstacle(s) overcomes character(s), or character(s) overcomes obstacle(s)

There is an enormous variety of “things that are wanted” and the protagonists don’t need to know what they want, and can be wrong about what they want. The thing romance novel protagonists want is “to be happily in love with other protagonist(s)” but romance novel protagonists often don’t realize this until the end. Obstacles are likewise varied; they can be purely internal (“I don’t believe love can last”), or external (“society forbids our love”). They can be personal (“my parents want me to marry this person I hate”) or inanimate (“I don’t have enough money to support a spouse”).

With A Rational Arrangement, I already had plenty of obstacles:

Wisteria and Nik aren’t in love
Nik and Justin are in love but incapable of talking about their feelings
Nik is impoverished and too proud and stubborn to accept help
Justin wants to help Nik but can’t get around Nik’s pride and stubbornness.
Nik and Justin both think marriage has to be horrible and also would end their relationship
Wisteria thinks her neurodiversity renders her too unromantic to be loved
Nik misinterprets Wisteria’s lack of typical body language and expression as a lack of passion and interest, and accordingly finds her unattractive as a partner
Homophobic society forces Nik and Justin’s relationship to be furtive and fraught
Wisteria is incapable of not talking about a topic if it interests her, regardless of whether or not other people think said topic is verboten
Nobody really thinks polyamory is an option
The whole thing around mind-healing is A Mess, with healing at the discretion of the healer and payment at the discretion of the healed, so if a healer says “I can’t fix this” there’s no way to tell if they really can’t or if they just don’t think it would be worth their time. This causes Problems for Nik.

... this is not even an exhaustive list. No wonder this book was so long.

So writing the outline is mostly a matter of figuring out what scenes will showcase my characters’ personalities and flaws, and the obstacles that they face, and what they do to overcome said obstacles.

I already had the Horrible Proposal scene in mind, so I started with that. That leads nicely into “Nik’s parents leave with him in a huff” and “Wisteria has a conversation with her father to establish her mind doesn’t work the same way as the people around them.” Since Nik is intrigued by the Horrible Proposal, he visits Wisteria later. Oh right, Nik has a boyfriend, I need some scenes with the boyfriend to demonstrate how that relationship kind-of-works-but-has-issues. Nik is a mind-healer so I need to show him doing that and also introduce this petitioner that will cause Problems later, which Justin and Wisteria will help solve and that will bring the two of them closer together. Etc.

Some people like sub-points on their outlines, but my outlines are just long lists of bullet points describing each event. Sometimes these have specific details about what happens. This was the bullet point for Nik & Wisteria’s first private conversation:

The next meeting. A chance for Nik & Wisteria to talk in private-ish. Probably with her father present. Possible other talking points: Nik thinking that Wisteria doesn't want to marry him either -- why would she? Some money-hungry titled-and-entitled brat. Not something he'd suggest in front of her father. Nik ends up inviting Wisteria to attend an event with him -- he's still not consciously courting her, but is aware that he likes her. I really want to showcase Wisteria's sense of humor here -- more importantly, that she has one, even though she doesn't laugh or smile. They also start getting into the habit, already, of having these honest, forthright conversations about things You Don't Talk About. Not just sex! Money! Religion! Why Nik doesn't want to get married. Uncomfortable questions.

More often, they’re vague. This bullet point eventually became the Ascension ball scene:

Nik and Wisteria at whatever function. Nik is having a wonderful time, enjoying Wisteria's conversation, her keen but cool eye for observation.

I vary between writing outlines in chronological order and writing them in the order the events will be covered by the book -- so I might outline flashbacks first and then the actual start, and rearrange it later, or I might figure out the flashbacks when they come up instead.

A Rational Arrangement was the second book I wrote where I crafted an outline first, and the actual book diverged wildly from my original outline. It was so far off from the outline that while editing, I made a new outline that followed what I’d actually written. Among other things, Justin was an afterthought in the original outline. The original outline centered on Nikola, with zero scenes between Justin and Wisteria. Since I wanted a triad romance, I added a lot of Justin-and-Wisteria scenes while I was writing.

With ARA, I didn’t go back to revise my outline when I went off-script; I just forged ahead. With later books, I’ve usually revised my outline if I find I want to do something different. I’ll also revise the outline if I feel like it’s not detailed enough. For instance, in The Moon Etherium, my outline had:

Ardent & Miro have to go to a party in Ardent's honor, hosted by the Moon Queen. Moon Host parties are Not Boring Cocktail Things. They are more like thrill rides. Coupled with jump scares. Party games crossed with plays, where the attendees are part of the performance, LARP-style.

When it came time to write this scene, I got stuck, not sure what I was supposed to write. So instead of leaping into writing, I outlined the “LARP-style-party-game-turned-play” in considerable detail, using it to flesh out the history of the setting as well as show the villain at work and the protagonists thwarting her.

Which gets to the reason I outline: it’s much faster to get where I want to go if I have a map. The outline is me writing out the story as briefly as I can, and making sure I know how to get to the end of it. I’ve finished stories without outlining them, including one novel. But I’d get stuck for weeks or months, not writing because I wasn’t sure What Comes Next. Working from an outline means I know what comes next. I do still get stuck sometimes, when I realize the outline doesn’t work after all, or I want to make a major change. But for me, it’s often easier and faster to add to or fix the outline than it is to try writing the next scene without one.

By way of providing examples, here’s a link to the original outlines for A Rational Arrangement and The Mortal Prince and the Moon Etherium. (You can purchase A Rational Arrangement here if you want, and The Mortal Prince and the Moon Etherium is for sale here, or available as a freebie if you subscribe to my newsletter.) I figured I’d provide the novelette outline too, both to show an outline for a short work, and because it’s a freebie so the full story is also easily accessible.

* I took this half of the idea from a Brandon Sanderson novel, The Alloy of Law.
** "Medical applications of mental powers" came from a Bujold novel, Ethan of Athos.
*** "Horses work like bicycles" is from Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. My answer to “where do you get your ideas?” is “mostly from other authors.” Ideas are not subject to copyright. Take as many as you like. I like to isolate my very favorite parts of an idea and then smoosh those together with favorite bits taken from other sources.

I'm trying to get back in the habit of focusing on "draft completion" rather than word count. But my methodology is all about incremental steps: "finish draft" is not a task I can cross off the list every week, while "finish 7% of draft" is. Which means I have to figure out what 7% of the draft is, and I can't do it by saying "the book will be 100,000 words so 7% is 7000 words" because that's just word count by another name.

So what I do is this:

take all the bullet points on the book's outline and dump them into a spreadsheet.
Estimate how many words each bullet point will take to write and put that estimate in the adjoining column
As I finish writing each bullet point, mark it complete. (I do this by putting down how many words it actually took so that I can see how close my outline has been to reality, but this is not a necessary piece.)
Have the spreadsheet total up the estimate for all the bullet points I've written so far, and divide it by the total estimate for the book. That's the percentage I've written so far.

I used to give each bullet point equal weight and not use a spreadsheet with individual estimates, but that is the method that had me thinking I was 50% done with The Twilight Etherium when I was 75% done with it, and I decided I wanted to be a tch more accurate than that.

The individual estimates for bullet points can still be off by quite a bit, though. Today I updated the Angel's Grace outline to account for what I'd written this week, and discovered that I am 67% through with it. That was my target for the month. But I've only written 8800 words so far this month. I thought it would take me, like 15-25,000 words to get here. Uh. Huh.

I mathed at this several times in different ways, because I was sure I had to have done some math wrong somewhere to come up with this. But no, that is the correct current estimate. (My 35% estimate for how complete it was at the end of December did turn out to be low, though -- it should've been 40%.)

There are some scenes not on the outline that I want to add, so I could revise it and expand the outline, and I'll certainly continue to write Angel's Grace this month -- I'm not taking the next three weeks off just because I'm ahead of schedule.

But it does mean I should do some other work too. Like that cover for The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady, which is stubbornly refusing to finish itself. o_o;;;

A week ago, on June 6, I finished writing the first draft of The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady.

My policy has been to always have a new WIP that I'm drafting. I have never been that author who works on a single book until it is completely revised and edited and proofread and only then starts drafting a new book. Once I finish a draft, I usually launch right into work on some new shiny thing. I'll write the new draft alongside revising/editing the previous draft.

The last time I finished a draft and hadn't already decided what book I was going to write next was January, 2018 -- two and a half years ago.

I had thirteen story ideas on that 2018 poll. In the intervening 2.5 years, I've completed two items from the list: The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince, and The Twilight Etherium. I finished drafting three books that weren't on the list: Frost and Desire, Spark of Desire, and The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady. Also, one novelette that also wasn't on the radar, The Mortal Prince and the Moon Etherium.

I spent yesterday combing through Evernote, looking for scraps of ideas, and collecting them together in a new folder named "Schenectady".

Works In Progress
Fellwater: Polyam BDSM fantasy erotica; features two male subs and a handful of doms, mostly female. I wrote about 80% of my original outline. There's another 20% to go, and then I'd want to put a consensual frame story around it, so that the original story becomes the roleplay of consensual participants playing characters who are "not consenting". I am thinking about this again because I already put a lot of words into it. But it doesn't really follow that "therefore the rest wouldn't take long to write." I'd really need to revisit the outline and figure out what ground I needed to and wanted to cover.

Sequels
The Twin Etheriums: A prequel to the Etherium novels, this is a polyamorous FFM fantasy romance between three people who are searching for the secret to immortality. I already have an outline but I still feel a certain ambivalence about the story. Probably the characters need more work on the "what makes you lovable?" front.

Eve and the Fox: This would be another Fey-Touched novel, featuring a fey character but set in one of the mortal worlds. It's a romance involving Miro and Ardent's daughter. I don't think it's going to be next, but I put it here because I already have an outline for it. Fun fact: this story idea predates the first Etherium novel but is set chronologically well after The Twilight Etherium.

Demon's Solution: sequel to Demon's Lure and Angel's Sigil. Mostly I want to write this for the polyamorous romance between Sunrise, Raven, and Mercy, but the main plot is the fallout from the resolution of Angel's Sigil and how the demon hunters/their guild handle it and also handle the increase in demonic activity. I have a bunch of notes but no outline for the book yet.

New Ideas
You Thought You Wanted to Be Level 99 But Really You Wanted to Be a Better Person: a LitRPG polyam romance. One protagonist is trying to reach the level cap in an MMO in order to impress another protag. Shenanigans ensue. The idea was gifted to me by Tuftears and I have most of an outline from brainstorming about it with Maggie and others on her Discord.

Ideas That Aren't Romance So Why Are They Even Here
You Are Not Prepared: LitRPG. A group of players get transported to a fantasy world that they're familiar with from a CRPG. But instead of each event from the CRPG waiting politely until the players have vanquished the current one, new villains and catastrophes Just. Keep. Happening. The players are going to have to get very creative indeed if they are to keep their new world from being destroyed ...

No outline, no notes, this is pretty much all I have on it.

Just Me and All the Demons in My Head: To avoid being destroyed by one demon, Kaden made a deal with several a long time ago, and has been paying the price ever since. But as far worse forces cause global upheaval, Kaden's monsters may be the only hope many people have for any form of safety.

I don't have much on this, either. But I miss Wysteria's "The Restless Dead Want YOU to Fight Necromancy" game from Sufficient Velocity and am tempted to make my own take on "working with one scary supernatural force because it's not as terrifying or evil as a much more threatening one."

The Way the World Ends: Sprawling epic fantasy. I've had this idea for six years now, about a prophet with visions of different catastrophes that will destroy the world, and trying to figure out how to avert all the catastrophes. Every time I stumble over the notes I made about it, I get excited about the ridiculous scope and breadth of the idea all over again. Picture something like Game of Thrones, but with one character running around screaming "NO DON'T DO THAT IT WILL ALL END IN FLAMES" at various other characters, and then somehow convincing them NOT TO.

I have a few thousands words of notes on this, include two completely incompatible versions of the setting and the main conflict.

The Least of All Monsters: Concept is two characters with a strong brother/sister bond trying to survive in a crapsack setting and rescuing a third character who promises to make everything either much better or much, MUCH worse.

I put this in a crapsack setting so that two of my unsympathetic protagonists would look less unsympathetic by contrast. I don't have a plot for it, just characters and their traumatic backstory. I keep coming back to it whenever I think about 'things I could work on next', so I wanted to put it on this list.

~

Of all of these, the most likely candidates are The Twin Etheriums and You Thought You Wanted to Be Level 99 But Really You Wanted to Be a Better Person, because they (a) are polyam romances (b) have mostly-complete outlines and (c) no serious uncertainties about their structure.

Nonetheless, I think what I'll do first is put some more notes into The Way the World Ends. Perhaps at some point I will accumulate enough notes to make a complete outline for this monstrosity.

4thewords.com is a writing-gamification site. As of October 29, I will have been using it for exactly three years. I can track the length of time because it has a daily streak counting every consecutive day you've logged 444+ words. As of this writing, mine is at 1091. Yes, I have an unbroken streak starting the day I began using the site.

That's not as impressive an accomplishment as it sounds: the site allows you to use a consumable -- "stempos" -- to repair broken streaks or to extend your streak into the future, if you plan a vacation. I used a lot of stempos when Lut was in the hospital in 2017, and I've used them on occasion before or since. Most often I use them when I forget to log words rather than when I write; I do most of my writing offline and then log my words later.

4thewords is now, and always has been, a subscription-supported site. Like many games these days, it has two in-game currencies, one of which, core crystals, is mostly purchased with real money. The subscription cost is therefore a little wonky, because 4thewords runs periodic discounts on crystal packages. There's a 25% discount for Nanowrimo participants, for example (current code is wrimo19), and Nanowrimo winners get a larger discount; I think last year's was 40%? Anyway, if you're paying month-to-month and never buying crystals with a discount, it's $4 a month. If you use the Nanowrimo winner discount code and buy a huge package of crystals up front, it'd be more like $60 for three years.

While my favorite business model for a site is something like Dreamwidth's, where the paying customers are sufficient to support free accounts for those who can't afford it, I much prefer a subscription site to one based on advertising, or pay-to-win games. And 4thewords does offer a free 30-day trial, so you know what you're paying for by the time you give them money.

I've written about this site before, I know, but not in a while, and I wanted to post about it again because I really like te game and want it to do well. I don't always love the choices the 4thewords developers make in terms of gameplay, but in terms of company philosophy and the way the developers interact with their customers, I've always been impressed. It's a tiny company making a niche product -- I think there's one coder, one illustrator, and a few part-time writers -- and they are all good people who care about writing and want to make a tool that will be useful and fun for their customers. And they listen to their customers!

One example: when I started playing the game, you created an avatar. You could pick male or female, and there was a bunch of gendered clothing and hair styles. You couldn't make a male avatar with long hair, for instances.

A few months ago, they re-did some of the art and renamed the body types. Now, instead of "male" and "female", there are body types "1" and "2". All the clothing options are available for both body types, and the only changes are to accommodate the different base shapes. (Although body type 2 still has a tube top around the breasts as unremovable underwear, while body type 1 gets to be shirtless. It's a kid-friendly site, my solution to this would be to put both models in a tube top, but I am not gonna fuss at them over it.) You can save up to three different outfits, and you can change all the options between outfits, including the body type.

What I love about this change is not just that they made it, but that they made it without fuss. A lot of times when gaming companies are told "you could be more inclusive about [X]", developers responds with defensiveness. They don't want to be criticized for choices they made without realizing they were choices. "I didn't INTEND to be biased and that means I'm not and everyone does it this way and why should I change?" And 4thewords went "Oh, yeah, it would be better with some changes and that will take some work, but we'll do it."

Over time, they've added some enby NPCs to the game, too. It's nice. I feel seen.

The site did its "official launch" several months ago (it had been in paid beta for most of the time that I've been playing), and they re-did the whole main story line to be more cohesive and interesting. They run a lot of mini-events for various things -- there's a Love Week around Valentine's Day, and a Tico Week for the Costa Rico Independence Day (the company is based in Costa Rica), and they always do an event for Pride. The biggest event is for Nanowrimo in November, with the Camp Nanowrimo events in April and June being also pretty substantial. So now -- right before Nano -- is a good time to get started, especially if you plan to do Nanowrimo.

They've made a lot of gameplay decisions that I really like, too: the game has a much larger variety of monsters to fight, and a lot more of them that are small and unintimidating. I've written this post on the site and have defeated several monsters with word counts of 100, 300, or 600 today. They added a 10-monster queue, so that you can pick everything you want to fight and not have to think about it while you write. You can also toggle "auto-start next battle" on or off, so that if you want to fight the whole queue in on sitting, you can. And if you want to set up the queue all at once but only do one battle in a writing session, you can do that too.

One of my favorite little changes is the "pasting in words" behavior. There's now a setting you can change for whether words you paste in always add to your wordcount, or never add to it, or ask each time if you want to add it. This is great if you want to add a story you wrote a long time ago to the site without having it mess up your stats on the site. Since I paste all of my writing into the site, I have left it on "always add to word count". But I've thought about adding things I wrote years ago, and this will be a nice feature if I decide to do so.

Just so this doesn't read like 4thewords advertising copy, I will mention a gameplay decision I do not love.

Shortly after I started playing in 2016, 4thewords added a "wardrobe", with customization options for your avatar. This was with separate from the "inventory", which included miscellaneous crafting bits as well as weapons and armor that affect your combat stats but not your avatar appearance. As with other games that have a separate "inventory" and "wardrobe", the inventory was gameplay-only and had no impact on appearance, and the wardrobe was appearance-only and had no impact on gameplay.

In April 2019, for the CampNano event, they added monsters that you could only fight if you had particular wardrobe items equipped.

Not inventory items. Wardrobe. The appearance-only stuff that had never before affected gameplay.

Why. Why would you do that. The whole point to having two separate sets of items you have to manage is because they do DIFFERENT THINGS. If you're going to have both of them affect gameplay why are they separate? Just. ARGH.

They have stood by this decision and certain monsters in some areas continue to require you to go to your wardrobe and equip appearance items so that you can play the game. I still don't understand. Bleargh.

However, it's a pretty minor thing; I haven't even gone to the areas with wardrobe requirements in the months I've been playing since they were added. And it only bothers me because it's a nonsensical mechanic to add; it's not that it makes the game harder or easier.

Overall, if you like writing, I definitely recommend 4thewords.com. It gives that little bit of extra incentive to write, and that never hurts. I have a referral code: LBQFV83845. If you use a referral code (anybody's code, doesn't need to be mine) when you sign up, you get 44 core crystals, enough to pay for a month of subscription (in addition to the free trial). Right now, they're running a special where you get an extra 14 days of subscription time, which means it'll carry you through until the end of November so you'll be able to use your Nano winner code to buy more crystals before the free time runs out. :D (I remember being very annoyed that I had to buy $4 worth of crystals without a discount so that I could keep my streak in 2016.) Full disclosure: I get bennies for people using my referral codes, too -- right now, 66 core crystals and 14 extra days of subscription time. But I didn't write a 1500 word post to get freebies. I wrote it because it's a great game and I want other people to enjoy it too. And also for the developers to do well and keep it going. n_n

Oh, and to defeat a bunch of monsters in 4thewords. That too.

I mean, it's called "4thewords" not "4thedeathlessprose". Every word counts!

I have finished initial revisions on The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince! That means I need first readers for it!

Blurb:

After the kingdom of Mireni is conquered by a vicious dragon, Mireni's king-in-exile is willing to do anything to save his kingdom, including promising half of his kingdom and his daughter, Princess Cherish, to whomsoever stops the cruel beast. With luck, he reasons, one or more of the neighboring kingdoms will come to their aid, and some eligible prince will claim his daughter's hand. Perhaps even some palatable individual, like the handsome Prince Eclipse, who is already on friendly terms with Cherish.

It does not occur to Cherish's father that she might have her own ideas about whom she should marry --

-- Or that the best individual to stop a dragon is, of course, another dragon.

~

This is a standalone polyamorous fantasy romance, set in one of the mortal realms through which the fey shard (the setting for the Etherium novels) passes. It's not an Etherium novel and there is no need to have read the Etherium books to follow this one. The titular prince is a transman in a transphobic culture, so content warning for transphobia. Also contains explicit lesbian and straight sex.

If you'd like to be a first reader, send me your email! You can leave a message with it here (comments are screened), or email my gmail account, LadyRowyn. Or DM me on Twitter (also LadyRowyn).

Thanks for reading!

I started reading romance novels in the 80s. I was a voracious reader, and exhausted the little branch library's allotment of the genre quickly. I could only afford to buy so many new books, so I bought a lot of used books. The used book store charged half cover price, which made 60s and 70s romances cheap.

After a couple dozen, I stopped reading 60s and 70s romances because even teenage me was appalled by the rampant misogyny in them. These were books for woman, by women, starring women characters, and YET. The female protagonists were often caricatures: helpless creatures, with no ambitions beyond love, marriage, and children.

I was, in one way, fascinated by this, because I read much older books that portrayed women in a far more attractive light. Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte gave me independent, confident, interesting women. Why were 60s romances so bad at this?

While I recognized the shallowness of the characters early on, it took much, much longer for me to realize how unhealthy many of the relationships were. It wasn't uncommon to read a romance in which the male protagonist outright raped the female protagonist. I don't mean "this is kind of rapey because she's uncomfortable about having sex" but "woman is saying "no" over and over again while ineffectually trying to push him away, and man ignores her protests and rapes her".

The Flame and the Flower was a 1972 romance showcasing this trope on the lame excuse that the man thought she was a prostitute and I guess prostitutes don't get consent? And this was one of the romances I liked as a teen. I read my favorite parts over and over again.

By the 2000s, most romances had gone from "rape is a good way to get the protagonists in bed because it lets you have your pure female character and sex too" to "howabout we portray the kind of healthy relationships we'd like to be in, instead?"

I love healthy romances. I write about characters who are careful with one another, who consider issues of power and consent, who have an unselfish love for one another. They do not seek to gratify their own desires without regard for the object thereof. Even in Frost and Desire, I cling to that overall tone, despite having a scene of mind control and rape. This trend delights me.

But I feel as if romance is now held to a different standard from every other genre. We don't just say "Wow, that relationship in The Flame and the Flower is messed up": we say "This book is objectively bad because the relationship is unhealthy". When teens say they love TWILIGHT, we fret that they plan to get into abusive relationships.

People, I loved The Flame and the Flower and A Woman Without Lies and I've never been in anything close to an abusive relationship, or thought that abusive relationships were a good idea. I loved reading books about these warped relationships that somehow magically turned out for the best because they were fun, not because they were my role model.

We don't wonder if people who love horror are going to become serial killers, or expect that people who read mysteries will become either cops or murderers. We don't watch Game of Thrones because we long for a return to the War of the Roses.

But romances, ah, if they show unhealthy behaviors, it has to be because the author and the readers endorse those behaviors in the real world.

As I built my playlist of dysfunctional love songs for Frost, I found it freeing to realize just how much music glorified terrible relationships. Music is expected to cover the full spectrum of relationships, from happy to broken to dysfunctional. Music is cathartic, not a model of the ideal.

I came up with the plot for Frost in 2015, and I put off writing it for three years in part because "people will assume I think this is a romantic ideal".

And I finally decided to write my messy hurt/comfort problematic romance anyway.

Because yes, it's great that so many romance novels now model strong, healthy relationships.

But fantasies that would make for bad realities have their place, too.

I still consider myself "on break", so I've been doing whatever I feel like doing in my free time instead of pushing myself to be productive. I still do productive things, but I stop once I stop feeling like it. It's been pretty relaxing, and not very productive.

I've written 2500 words on The Twilight Etherium in the last week, which by my current standards is much the same as "not writing at all". I looked up my the old Master Plan(tm) I used while writing Prophecy, and realized that 2500 words a week beats my average for the entire time I was working on that manuscript. For those of you not following me back when I was working on Prophecy, I complained pretty much nonstop about how hard it was to write enough to meet my goals.

Lest you think that this means "well, obviously it's easier to write for fun than it is to meet a goal": my goal last month was 11,700 words per week, and I had no particular difficulty making it. Beyond that, after 2004 I stopped setting any rigid writing goals until 2012. I wrote less from 2005 through 2011 than I had under the Master Plan(tm). I didn't pick up writing speed until I started writing fantasy romance in 2012. (My first foray into fantasy romance was a joint project with LadyPeregrine in 2012, which alas remains unfinished. But it did clarify my love for the subgenre and contributed to my decision to write A Rational Arrangement in 2013.)

Anyway, 2018 Rowyn is much better at working on books than 2003 Rowyn.

~

On Thursday 11/29, I talked to an artist on Twitter about commissioning them for a cover for The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince. They tentatively agreed, and I said I would send character descriptions and a contract and such in the next couple of days. This was one of only two writing-related tasks for the month.

Doing it required looking through the manuscript for The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince, something I had not done -- well, at all. For many years, I used to read my works-in-progress avidly. This has some good effects: it keeps what I've already written fresh in my mind and I get in some preliminary proofreading. But I mostly did it because I like reading my own work. In recent years, I've been more inclined to avoid reading my own works until I start editing them. This also has good effects: it means I am less familiar with the text when I finally edit it, so I am more likely to see errors, and it means I'm not avoiding writing on the pretext that reading the existing book is productive. Princess is one of the books where I didn't go back to read earlier scenes of the book once I finished writing them.

Once I started looking at it to extract info for my artist, I got caught up in reading it. After I got to the end, I decided to start the very early part of the editing process. This is where I make a spreadsheet of all the things I want to change in the text. This part is easy because I make notes as I go along about what I want to change, so I just have to search for square brackets in the master doc and put the items on a spreadsheet.

The list had a total of 39 items. I each item scored based on how annoying it will be to do. Most of them are in the "pretty annoying" range: 25 items with a rating of 6 or higher, on a scale of 1 to 10. I went on to complete the four easiest items on the list. I don't like editing so I generally work the easiest items first so that the list will get shorter and less intimidating. Anyway, I have 35 items left to do. The total number of items on the list generally grows as I edit. It's just as well I don't plan to release this book until March at the earliest.

~

One of the sections on the annual self-evaluation form at work is "what are your long-term career goals?" Back in 2016, I looked at this question and decided to put down the truth: "retirement". I talked to my boss about it: "I would like to drop to reduced full-time -- 4 days a week -- in the next year, and drop to part time -- 3 or 2.5 days a week -- in the next two years."

To my surprise, my boss was supportive of this: "I would love for you to stay full time, but if you need to reduce your hours, we will definitely accommodate you. We value your expertise and want to keep you in whatever capacity."

When Lut was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, this had two opposed effects on my retirement plans. On the one hand, money became much more of a concern, as my expenses went up with car ownership and incidentals. It also became critical that I keep Lut on my health insurance. On the other hand, managing Lut's care was exhausting and I desperately wanted more time in which to do so. In September of 2017, the latter concern triumphed, and I dropped to four days a week. My "day off" was used to take Lut to whatever doctor visits he needed.

For a while, this sufficed. But over the last couple of months, I've felt more and more like four consecutive work days is too many, despite the fact that Lut's doctor visits have dropped to one or two per month. It had reached the point where I used PTO to cover the days when I had to take Lut to the doctor, rather than switching my day off to that day.

Last week, my boss told me that she had applied for a new managerial position in a new department, and so was leaving her current role. The promotion was official on 11/26, but she's still working in our department for a couple of weeks while the department manager searches for her replacement. My boss will officially transition in January, whether or not a replacement has been hired. Our team have all been in our roles for years, we are all pretty well cross-trained, and we can work autopilot for months without an intermediary supervisor between us and the department head, if necessary.

But this news made me think harder about transitioning to part time. My boss and the department manager have been big boosters for me for as long as I've been working for Teenage Bank. The replacement boss will not be someone within my department and I probably won't know them. Would they still support my switch to part time, as my boss had committed to?

So I talked to my boss about it: "Would it be better to switch now, while you're still here, or should I wait and see who your replacement is, or possibly stick the department manager with handling it if she's not able to replace you for some months?"

Boss: "If you want to do it soon, best to do it now, while I'm still here to manage the paperwork,"

So I emailed her a formal request to drop to part time starting January 7. I decided to wait so I could get the 6 hours of holiday pay for Christmas and New Year's that reduced-full-time employees get, instead of the 4 hours that part time employees get. I considered waiting until after MLK Day too, but three more four-day weeks felt like a lot as it was.

My overall feeling is relief at finally pulling the trigger. I have about six months of expenses in my accounts in the bank, and a lot of money in retirement accounts. The cut in my weekly paycheck will be much larger, proportionately, than the 25-33% indicated by dropping from 30-32 hours to 20-24 hours per week. First, my personal insurance premiums go up by a lot: the bank pays 80% of the insurance premium for full time employees and 0% of the premium for part-time. Second, a lot of my paycheck goes to repaying the 401(k) loan for my car, and that amount will remain fixed. I'm not sure how much I will be making, but it will not be much.

My writing income is not going to make up the difference. My net income from writing averages to maybe $200 a month, before taxes.

But Lut will still have his disability stipend from Social Security, and the house is paid for. I am hoping we can manage without resorting to withdrawing money from my retirement accounts, but if I have to withdraw money from my retirement accounts, well, that's why have retirement accounts.

And I am looking forward to spending less time at my day job. Only two 4-day weeks left!

One of my friends (@InspectorCaracal over on tootplanet.space) asked jokingly about the secret of finishing things a few days ago.

There isn't a secret -- that's the joke -- because writers will happily go on at great length about their particular processes. It's been almost two years since the last time I babbled about mine, and I need an excuse to procrastinate on my current WIP, so now looks like a good time to do it again.

I find the process question fascinating, because I have wanted to be an author since I was a smol child. I started writing my first attempt at a book when I was 14 or so. I finished my first draft of a book when I was 35. I finished a final draft of a book for the first time when I was 44.

In the three years since then, I have finished and published six more books, finished editing a seventh, and finished drafting an eighth.

I want to emphasize one thing right here: if you always wanted to be a author but so far you've never been able to finish anything, THAT DOES NOT MEAN YOU NEVER WILL. Yes, eventually you will have to finish things in order to be an effective author. But you need not be discouraged or give up on yourself based on your past failures. You can still become that author who publishes three or four books in a year. I say this because I have, so I know it's happened at least once.

Still, when I hear people say, "I just can't get anything finished", my reaction is "MAN I TOTALLY REMEMBER FEELING THAT WAY. FOR AGES AND AGES." Like the span of time where I wanted to be an author and write books and yet did not work on anything long enough to finish it is WAY LONGER than the tiny fraction of my life where I go "Okay, I'm going to write this book" and then somehow I ACTUALLY DO. In a reasonable period of time.

For my own amusement, a timeline of various milestones in my writing life:

1985: I started my first serious attempt at writing a novel: Draco. I'd made at least one other start, but this was this first time I made it past the first few scenes.

1987: By now, I had written over 100,000 words on five different unrelated novel ideas. I had finished none of them.

1988: I actually finished two things this year! Neither of them were novels. One was a very short story ("The Bribe", <2000 words) and the other a novelette ("Heartseeker", 10,000 words)

1989-1999: During this period, I finished five more short stories, four of them contemporary fiction that I only wrote because a writing class required it. I started and abandoned several different would-be novels.

2000: Jordan Greywolf told me about Sinai, an RP MUCK where he ran games. I joined and started running games there -- and, relevantly, often seeing story arcs through to completion when I was involved in them.

2002: At this point, I had written about 200,000 words of fiction over the course of seventeen years of "I want to be a writer", and had about a dozen abandoned projects. I decided to go back to one of these ideas and finish them. I picked Prophecy, a book I'd started writing in 1991, and embarked upon The Master Plan(tm). I wrote an outline for Prophecy and set a writing schedule. I also sent the parts of Prophecy to Greywolf to read as I wrote them.

2003: I started writing Silver Scales as my fun side project while working on Prophecy. I hated writing Prophecy a lot. Most of the time that I was writing Silver Scales, I enjoyed it. I never wrote an outline for it. Silver Scales was the first of many works that serialized as a work-in-progress for a small group of friends. That "serialize every WIP for a small group of friends" habit persisted through 2014.

2005: I finished the first draft of Prophecy and the first pass of revisions on it.

2006: I finished the first draft of Silver Scales..

2009: I finished twelve short stories this year. I'd begun and abandoned another ten or so different novels since finishing Scales. Three of those abandoned efforts were more than 10,000 words long. I hadn't tried a detailed outline for anything since Prophecy. I decided to try outlining a project again.

2012: I finished another nine short stories. I started and abandoned in short order another couple of novel ideas.

2013: It'd been seven years since I last finished a novel. At this point, I had written almost a million words. I had finished two books (although not complete revisions for either). I had finished a whole lot of short stories. I decided to write a romance because playing through the Sith Warrior arc in Star Wars: the Old Republic a second time was too much work just to see the romance arc with Malavai Quinn. I finished writing the first draft of A Rational Arrangement by the end of the year.

2014: I finished the second draft of A Rational Arrangement. I also revisited one of my abandoned books, Golden Coils, and resumed work on it. I did not do a private serial for Golden Coils. A Rational Arrangement is one of the last works I serialized while I was writing.

2015: I finished the final draft of A Rational Arrangement and serialized and published it. I wrote/finished Further Arrangements, a collection of three follow-on novellas. I felt guilty about writing only ~50,000 words when two years before I'd written ~220,000. I decided that 2013 represented a high water mark of productivity that I would never achieve again.

2016: I finished drafting three books: The Moon Etherium, The Sun Etherium, and Golden Coils. I also started a fourth book, Fellwater. I wrote a total of 347,000 words. I also finished editing The Moon Etherium.

2017: I wrote some more of Fellwater and then abandoned it. I also started and abandoned PollRPG, an experimental work-in-progress serial based on poll responses. I revisited one of my abandoned book ideas from 2009 and started over on it, resulting in the first drafts of Demon's Lure and Angel's Sigil. Total words: about 220,000.

2018 year-to-date: I finished edits on Demon's Lure and Angel's Sigil. I revisited an abandoned outline from 2015, and wrote and then did first-pass revisions of Frost. I've begun work on The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince. Total writing as of 6/21: about 135,000 words.

I can draw a bunch of lessons for myself from this. These may or may not apply to anyone else: all advice is a reflection of the person giving it more than anything else.

Write Books I Want to Read. I spent 3+ years working on Prophecy because I thought it would be cool, not because I wanted to read a book like it. I thought "books like this don't exist" and didn't realize "no, they exist, but I don't read them because I don't like them." I even changed the ending on Prophecy in an effort to make it more to my taste. But I disliked writing this book in part because I didn't particularly want to read it. I like re-reading parts of it, but as a whole it wasn't something I looked forward to with eager anticipation. This is one of the key takeaways for me.

I Still Abandon Projects: I think of 2018-Me as a disciplined, motivated writer who keeps working on things even when she doesn't want to, and who finishes projects even when they're a slog. But I abandoned two projects just last year.

Abandoned Doesn't Mean Forever: My self-image is "once I start, if I don't see it through to the end via steady work, then I'm never going to finish it." But of my ten complete drafts, over half (Prophecy, Silver Scales, Golden Coils, Demon's Lure, Angel's Sigil, and Frost) were completed after three or more years of being ignored. Even if I wrote 350,000 words in every year, I'd still come up with new ideas faster than I can finish them. That I decide "now isn't the right time for this" doesn't mean I will never come back to it.

Finishing Things is the Best Way to Learn to Finish Things: Two things helped me a lot in Learning to Finish Things. The first was running RPGs alongside Greywolf. Greywolf was very keen on wrapping up story arcs and campaigns. I'd been roleplaying for over twenty years by the time I started gaming with Greywolf, but "finishing campaigns" wasn't a thing that ever really happened in my experience. GMs burned out, or players did, or the GM didn't know how to wrap up the story, or hadn't really had a story in mind to start with, just "stuff happens", or all of the above. Greywolf visualized games in terms of narrative arcs, and encouraged me to do the same. He also promoted the idea that "even a mediocre ending is better than leaving it in limbo". Players had a lot of influence on the outcome of an RPG, and a GM might not be able to arrange a dramatic finish to the plot. The GM could always arrange some conclusion, however. I sometimes whined and balked at finishing an arc, but he gently coaxed me through and offered lots of encouragement and assistance. I finished a handful of major and minor arcs with characters in Sinai, and brought three different long-term campaigns to a conclusion. After I managed to pull off endings when I literally couldn't control or predict what most of the major characters would do, writing endings where all of the characters were under my control felt a lot less intimidating. I learned so much from Greywolf, y'all. He was both an inspiration and one of the first people to encourage me and offer constructive, targeted advice on solving specific problems.

The second thing was writing a lot of short fiction. Writing the tarot stories was particularly useful in this regard, because I discovered I could take three random cards and build a little narrative around them. In addition, since these were short, they took much less time and dedication to finish. So they were quick and satisfying and gave me confidence.

Portable Writing Devices Are Magic: I got my first phone with a keyboard in 2007 and even though it didn't improve my ability to actually finish things back then, it improved my word count immediately: I won my first Nano in 2007 and wrote half of it on my phone. In 2016, I got a laptop and that vastly improved my editing speed. The ability to write and edit while not sitting at my desktop with all of my desktop distractions is way more useful than I realized before I had devices that let me do it.

I Don't Revise Until I Reach the End: When I first started writing, I would re-read and fiddle with existing text constantly. I still re-read to a degree, but I've cut back on it. I feel like re-reading before I've finished writing is an indulgence that lowers my willingness to edit once I am done. Further, any edits I make before I finish the initial draft are unlikely to be substantive, and if they are substantive they might just be things I change my mind about AGAIN before the end.

"Don't revise until you're done writing" is a common piece of writing advice that I have followed without much thinking about it for the last 15 years or so, however. I'm not entirely sure it's a good idea, given how much I dislike editing. On the other hand, I don't dislike editing now as much as I did even two years ago, so writing and editing are much closer to at a balance point with one another.

Outlines Work for Me: I waffled on this one for a long time, because I wrote Prophecy with an outline and wrote Scales without one. I thought my success with Scales meant that I could figure things out on the fly and I didn't need an outline. This is arguably true, but an outline makes things easier.

I prefer to Write Events in Order: Even though I outline my books now, I don't adhere to my outlines that closely. The benefits of writing out of order are mostly that I can work on the scenes I'm motivated to write at the moment. For me, these are outweighed by the drawbacks: mostly that I will need to do more revisons/rewrites because once I get the earlier scenes done, I will find ways in which the later ones don't fit after all. But also that I will find it more tempting to contort earlier scenes to fit the narrative I already made for the later ones. Eg, I might realized in writing scene 5 that the setup for the already-written scenes 7-10 doesn't make sense for my characters after all. If I force the characters to follow my original script, the whole book can come across with that "characters being dumb or acting out of character for narrative purposes". The Demon/Angel books went way off script because of this: the things that seemed reasonable in the overview stopped making sense when I was in the details. But since I was writing in order, I could just adjust the script.

Serializing Works-in-Progress Is a Localized Peak of Excellence: A "localized peak of excellence" is from a mountain-climbing analogy. If you climb to the highest point of the mountain that you are on, you will find that to climb a higher mountain, you have to first climb down. Hence, a "localized peak": you are not as high as you can possibly go, but you can't keep climbing up from where you are.

When I first started sharing my works-in-progress in 2002, I found it a huge boost in my morale. I loved having instant feedback and friends cheering me on. I was motivated to write more because I had an audience waiting to read the next scene and speculating about the direction of the story. Comments were my incentive to write.

But there were drawbacks, too:

~ I was using my most enthusiastic readers as cheerleaders. That meant they weren't offering critical feedback on my work, and were less likely to want to re-read the story in order to offer advice for revisions or corrections.

~ Once I posted a scene, I often stopped writing until I heard back from a few readers.

~ I became a lot more reliant on feedback; if I didn't get a few comments on the latest post, I'd become dispirited.

~ It made me feel like a flake who couldn't finish things. This one is more complicated, because I did finish several things that I serialized. But I wrote in spurts, and I posted things as I wrote them. The experience of my readers was "she was posting every day for three weeks but she hasn't posted anything in the last month." Every time I stopped writing for a week or more, I felt as if that slowdown was magnified by the existence of an audience to watch it. I abandoned a book at 80% finished in 2017, and that doesn't bother me at all. Every serial I left unfinished feels like a failure. Taking three years to finish drafting Scales felt like forever. Taking 8 years to finish drafting Demon's Lure and Angel's Sigil felt irrelevant, because no one else saw that abortive initial start in 2009.

~ I was more likely to incorporate authorial mistakes into the narrative. Sometimes I did go back and revise scenes when I forgot to put something in, but I also lampshaded continuity mistakes or added explanations in to cover for them. This isn't always bad, but it's something I could so without an audience if I thought it would benefit the story, and something I am more likely to do when it doesn't, if I have an audience.

~ It encouraged me to write longer: I wanted to have "something to show", so I'd write something, even if it didn't further the narrative. If readers asked questions about something, I'd write about that, even if it wasn't important to the story. This is another "sometimes it works out for the better" case, but still.

~ Negative feedback when I was in the middle of writing a book was a major deterrent to writing more. I can use constructive feedback on outlines and on finished drafts, but criticism in the middle of the draft is generally counterproductive for me. I have too many voices in my head telling me "this is terrible and not worth finishing" to afford to give them any encouragement.

Ultimately, I decided I didn't need the cheerleading badly enough anymore, and I gave up serializing works-in-progress. I gave it another try with PollRPG, and ran into the same problems all over again.

Amazon Is Better at Selling My Books Than I Am At Giving Them Away: when I ran serials, my peak for commenters was, I dunno, ten or maybe twenty different people over the entire course of the serial. The reader numbers per LJ stats and the website were considerably higher, but it still peaked at maybe a few hundred unique visitors per post, IIRC. The Moon Etherium was much less successful, with no more than a couple dozen readers. Whereas all of my books have sold over a hundred copies through Amazon, and A Rational Arrangement has sold over a thousand. I feel like I'm doing a much better job of reaching my audience by selling books than I was by running free serials of them.

I Work Better with a Lot of Scheduling Flexibility: Writing 200,000+ words on a few different books per year is a thing I can do without too much effort. Writing 500 words every day of a specific project turns out to be so much harder. PollRPG really emphasized this for me, because I couldn't write a buffer for it (since the polls influenced what happened next.) I would much rather have the latitude to write 3000 words one day and none the next, or to write on unrelated projects, or edit instead of writing, or whatever.

Goals Are Useful: In particular, slightly-underachieving goals. I want goals that require some effort to beat, but not enough effort to be daunting. I love blasting past my goalposts, whereas not reaching them at all is dispiriting.

I Never Do the Right Kind of World-Building Beforehand: These days, I try to do somewhat more world-building before I start writing. This consists of things like "general history of the setting, relevant nations, relevant languages spoken, type of government, kinds of technology/magic available". I make character notes beforehand and set out some guidelines on how the major ones speak.

I am afraid of world-builder's disease so I rarely make more than 10,000 words of notes, including the outline.

I inevitably get to the end and realize that I have basic continuity problems stemming from "I didn't know X when I started out so I made it up when I came to it only that would have affected twelve other things but I didn't think of them at the time and now it's all a mess and I need to fix it."

One of the problems is that some times I did determine X beforehand, but in the process of writing I changed my mind about it.

Anyway, world-building for me kind of comes down to:

~ make up what seems like enough of the world

~ write the first book

~ do all the other world-building it turns out you needed after all

~ edit the first book

~ be glad at least that's all settled for the next book

~ write the second book

~ crap this is in a new part of the setting I don't know enough about

~ dangit

I Like to Have Multiple Works in Progress. I am not a "start Book A, write until finished, revise, wait for first reader feedback, complete final draft of Book A, and ONLY THEN may I begin Book B" kind of author. Yes, I do struggle with the compulsion to Write Shiny New Thing Instead of Boring Old Thing. But it really stopped feeling like a problem in the last two years. Now I'm more like "well, it'll be good to have a head start on the next thing and also I will still go back to Boring Old Thing and finish it." I don't know how to explain the difference except that it seems to pan out? I don't expect to finish every abandoned project I've ever started; Fellwater, to use a recent example, may never be finished even though I have the rest of it planned out. (A big disadvantage many of my abandoned works have is that I have no clear idea of where I was going with them, because they were begun before I started consistently making complete outlines first.)

Also, I do less "I'm not going to write anything for weeks/months and then when I decide to go back to writing it will be Shiny New Thing" than I used to. I switch tracks quickly now.

Last, I think it's useful to give my first readers a month or more to finish reading and for me to be less immersed in the book before I do my final revisions. Working on a different project lets me make use of that mandatory stop-futzing-with-this-book period.

Congratulations to those of you who made it to the end! \o/ Tell me, what are your favorite parts of the writing process? What parts of mine would you avoid, and why?

Frost, master sorcerer, only wanted an apprentice so he would have someone to pass the tedium of his work onto while he enjoyed the more sophisticated and varied parts. Sorcery-bound individuals are vanishingly rare, so when he stumbled upon one who'd been overlooked by testers, he counted himself lucky indeed. No matter if the boy was old to begin an apprenticeship; he would learn.

After growing up a bastard and a whipping boy, the promise of a future as a rare powerful sorcerer seemed impossible to Thistle. He tried to brace himself for failure and disappointment.

But nothing could prepare him for his growing attraction to his master. And it turns out there is one thing worse than an unrequited infatuation with one's mentor:

Having it reciprocated.

~

Frost is, fundamentally, an M/M hurt/comfort romance. It has some kink elements, but it's a 241 page manuscript with maybe 15 pages of sexually explicit material. The side plot of characters researching new aspects and applications for sorcery is a lot more substantial than the erotica.

Most of the hurt/comfort aspect involves the main characters, somewhat inadvertently, doing really awful things to each other. And then they feel terrible about it and struggle to cope with the consequences, to do better, to forgive one another, and perhaps even to forgive themselves.

This is a fantasy novel not merely in the sense that there's magic, but also in the sense that "in the real world, if you have a relationship that turned abusive and toxic, it is almost impossible that this relationship will later have a happily-ever-after." I enjoy this kind of fantasy, but I don't want anyone to confuse it for a role model.

I'm looking for first readers for Frost, so if this sort of story sounds like fun to you and you're interested in providing feedback, let me know your email address! You will need an address that is linked to Google docs in some way. Comments are screened and your email address will not be shared with anyone or purpose but to give you access to the doc.

You can also send to my gmail account, ladyrowyn, or message me on Twitter or Mastodon.

If this story does not sound like fun to you, that's also fine! This one is fairly niche even by my standards.

One of the things I wrestle with as an author is "giving my characters distinctive speech patterns". I can usually manage to make a few main characters sound unique. But if I have a large cast, everyone starts to sound like me, or like one of a few defaults.

A couple of my beta-readers for Demon's Lure pointed out that Lure had this problem. I would ignore this criticism -- it wasn't every reader -- except that I agree with it (dangit). So I really wanted to fix it, or to be more accurate, I wanted it to be fixed. I actually have zero interest in doing the fixing.

Hence, instead of fixing it, I've spent the last three weeks writing Frost. Which is now at 70,500 words. Yes, I wrote 53,000 words in three weeks. Some authors clean to avoid a deadline. I write a different book. Uh. Go go avoidance habits? \o_

Anyway, today is the first weekday I've had off in a long time where I didn't have to take Lut to a medical appointment, so I celebrated by going to the coffee shop for breakfast. I asked a few friends whether I should work on Frost or Lure, and Lure won. So I am Actually Editing this morning, albeit slowly.

To help me with this task, I started building a list of specific speech quirks. Because I tried Googling for one a while ago and didn't find an existing one that was useful to me.

A few of these are stolen directly from Bard Bloom (or maybe Vicki Bloom; I don't know which of them invented the "Sleeth" one, but I named it for the World Tree species). "Using 'the' for emphasis" is also stolen from Bard. Hopefully they will forgive me. I am sharing the list here, so that future authors can find it and maybe be slightly less frustrated than I am. Also so that I can solicit y'all for further suggestions. c_c

~

A couple of notes: I write pretty much exclusively secondary-world fantasy. So my books all have the conceit of being "in translation": none of my characters speak English, I'm just writing their dialogue in English because it is what I and my readers speak. So when I say "ESL", what I mean is "in this dialogue, the character is speaking a language that is not their native language." For bonus points, you can show them speaking their native language and take away the 'accent'. Since all the underlying languages in my stories are fictitious, I can do whatever I like with it. I still try to use language quirks that (a) I can tie back in a sensible way and (b) are not similar to common real-world stereotypes.

If you are writing an actual English-as-a-second-language speaker whose native language is, say, Mandarin or German, I strongly recommend you do research to figure out what kind of missteps they are most likely to make in English and do not just pick one because it sounds cool. You know that, right? Of course you do.

Unusual tenses: Speaker uses a tense that's a little bit off, like "always uses 'shall' instead of 'will'", or uses past tense instead of past perfect, or never uses imperfect tenses. This kind of quirk can be grammatically correct by careful choice of words; in fact, the whole quirk may be "they phrase things in an odd way that avoids these tenses". Tends to give the impression of an ESL speaker.
Improper conjugation: Also an ESL quirk. Character might conjugate all verbs in the third-person, say, or might not conjugate verbs at all. Another option is to try to use declensions on nouns or otherwise do things that aren't done in modern English. Declensions would suggest the speaker's native language is very similar to the language they're speaking now, close enough that declining nouns feels natural.

Uses names often instead of pronouns: not all of the time, just more often than most people.

Uses nicknames instead of pronouns: again, do sparingly

Nicknames everyone

Endearments: 'she calls me baby/ she calls everybody baby'.

Terse: short sentences.

Long-winded: run-on sentences

Breathless: insufficient punctuation, or avoids needing punctuation: "we went to the store and then to the bank and after that came home!"

Sleeth: always speaks in the present tense.

Brevity: Leaves out normal words if they're not needed for clarity: "Went to store" instead of "I went to the store". Or even "Store."

Shatner: pauses mid-sentence for emphasis

Articles for emphasis: speaker uses "the" instead of "a", to call attention to a noun. "He bought the beautiful rug" even though "rug" had not been mentioned earlier.

Avoids possessive pronouns: "he has a thoughtful expression" instead of "his expression was thoughtful". This kind of phrasing works better than "the expression of him was thoughtful", which is unwieldy.

Favorite word: uses a common word more often normal, or in not-quite-appropriate ways. Modern use of "like" for emphasis, for example. Patrick O'Brien had characters use "which" in this fashion. 'And he asked a third time, which he's not gonna like the answer, you mind me.' A "favorite word" doesn't have to be grammatically correct by normal English rules but whatever meaning or purpose they serve for the character, it should do so consistently.

Formal: elegant, grammatically-correct sentences.

No contractions: goes well with formal. Also can be ESL.

Casual: chatty, uses sentence fragments, uses filler words, lots of contractions, colloquialisms.

Erudite: uses big words. Also goes well with formal.

Plain-spoken: uses small words

Bless your heart: avoids hostile/angry language. Patronizingly kind when annoyed, if not deliberately using kind-sounding phrasing while meaning the opposite.

Negativity: Frames things using negative language, in terms of no/not/un-/in-/won't/don't. Eg, might answer "How are you today?" with "nothing's gone wrong so far" instead of "fine". This doesn't necessarily mean the character is negative or unpleasant. For instance, "no problem" is the negative-language version of "you're welcome." Tends to come across as blunt or a downer, however.

Positivity: Avoids using negative language. Eg, instead of saying "No" to an invitation, explains that they have a prior commitment.

Rising tone: when uncertain, ends statements with a rising tone (question mark) even if they aren't phrased as questions.

Flat tone: Makes statements out of things that are phrased like questions.

Brusque: leaves out normal courtesies, like hello/please/thank you/you're welcome/goodbye

Alternate courtesies: eg, "you have my thanks" instead of "thank you" or "no problem" or "my pleasure" instead of "you're welcome".

Polite: uses courtesies frequently. Or uses elaborate ones, or to excess. "A great and wide apology, noble sir, from this humble servant."

New colloquialisms: turns of phrase appropriate to the setting/character religion (or dominant religion: characters may swear by a god they don't believe in)

Swears like a: Uses frequent inventive imprecations. Or uses curse words casually/constantly

Code-switching: Changes speech patterns depending on who they are with (most people do this to one degree or another, but it is more or less marked depending one circumstances.)

Respectful: addresses people by title & surname,

Rude: avoids calling people by name, may not know names. "Hey, you."

Poetic: likes using alliteration and/or rhymes and/or particular rhythms in their speech.

The latest attempt at mobilization (the process of getting Lut's body to make enough stem cells in the blood stream that they can collect enough for a transplant) started 13 days ago. It had been going reasonably well, though not great. We are at the point where "if things went great, we would've been able to collect stem cells from you today". Things had not gone great, and his white blood cell count was still at the "too low to be detected" point. Since the chemo (cytoxin), he'd been given fluids once and platelets twice, but hadn't needed hemoglobin yet. He was feeling about as well as he had before the chemo.

Yesterday evening, at 6:30, I went in to talk to him about dinner and he felt hot to me when I touched his forehead. So I took his temperature: 100.4, which is 1/10th of a degree below the "call 911, you are going to the hospital" threshold. I made him dinner and we sat down to watch Blade Runner 2049. An hour later, I took his temperature again: 100.9.

So I called 911 and we waited for the paramedics. They arrived and said "oh hey uh we've both been sick lately so maybe you should just take him to the ER yourself."

I took him to the ER, then called the BMT 24-hour line. I am still confused as to what the exact order of operations is supposed to be with various symptoms. It seems like "just take him to the ER" is the quickest, to be honest. Anyway, the ER saw him pretty quickly and started him on a course of general antibiotics at once, because with immune-suppressed patients they do not fool around. I hung around the ER until 10:30, then went home to get some sleep.

Not very much sleep: about 5.5 hours. Then back to the hospital this morning to see how he's doing. His fever at the hospital had gone down, and some of the readings have been normal, although it had spiked just before I left him this morning. He doesn't have any other symptoms (this is as expected, because when you have no white blood cells they can't cause any of the fighting-off-infections symptoms). They haven't found any signs of infection yet. So possibly it is just an allergen-caused fever, or "fever because that sometimes happens when you have no white blood cells."

There is at least a chance he'll be able to proceed with mobilization despite the hospitalization. I am not sure what happens next if we abort mobilization again. Lut thinks there are more options for collection. I kind of thought there was a point where they go "this isn't going to work, just go back to normal chemo and how for the best." But I don't know if we're there yet.

Anyway, since Lut's in the hospital, I do not need to be at home taking care of him. So I went to work today.

The enforced staycation for the last twelve days was not too bad up until the hospital stay. Daily doctor appointments, sometimes for several hours, but mostly pretty quick. Lut hasn't been able to do much for himself and he can't have restaurant food, so I was doing a lot of cooking and cleaning. But I had a lot of free time too. I finished editing Demon's Lure on Saturday night, so that put me ahead of my writing schedule for the month. I should have gone straight to editing Demon's Sigil, or possibly to working on The Princess, Her Dragon their Prince. Instead I went haring off after the outline for Frost, which is full of problematic material and was originally started in 2015. I'd forgotten all about it until something reminded me of it on Thursday. I doubt I will make this thing my next WIP. But I will let myself noodle at it until the end of the month, because cancer is the worst and my brain deserves some candy.

Next month has to be more editing or work on planned next book, though. Assuming cancer doesn't take another turn into AHHH NUUU land.

Prayers for Lut's recovery appreciated thank you.

I am on my final read-through of Demon's Lure before I send it to first readers, and hope to finish in the next few days. This is my call for volunteer first readers! Here's the blurb:

In the fight against the demons of the skylands, Sunrise has one of the rarest powers: that of a lure. Where demons normally feed by tormenting their victims, Sunrise draws them with her happiness.

She doesn't want to hunt demons, but when a hunter team arrives at her village to ask for her help, she agrees. It should be easy: they just need her as bait for a pain demon that is too fast for them to capture otherwise. And a typical pain demon is no match for an experienced team of demon hunters.

But this is no typical demon. And it has its own plans. It has no intention of being trapped, and is not worried about the hunter team. No, its main concern is: what does a demon who's spent millennia torturing and tormenting humans know about making one happy?

Demon's Lure is the first book in a new setting. There will be at least one sequel. The lead character is bisexual and she lives in a queer- and polyamorous-friendly society, but neither this book nor the sequel is a romance! There are no central conflicts or sub-plots that are resolved by the power of romantic love.

You needn't have read any of my other books in order to volunteer for this one. First-time volunteers are appreciated! General feedback I am looking for from first readers:

General commentary on what works/doesn't work in the story
Spelling/grammar/editing artifact errors
Continuity errors
Overused words
Confusing text (eg, if you find yourself confused about what's going on, or what this word the characters keep using means in the context of the story, or things of that nature)

I figure on sending the book to first readers somewhere around Feb 20 (Tuesday). I'd like readers to be done reading & providing feedback within a month, so by 3/20 or so.

Please comment with your email address (or direct-message me on Twitter or Dreamwidth) if you'd like to volunteer. All comments are screened so your email address will not be made public. Reading will be done through Google Docs, so email accounts with a Google account associated are preferred.

Thank you!

I finished the draft of Demon's Sigil on Wednesday and sent Alinsa the backmatter for Golden Coils yesterday and my final proofreading notes last weekend. So Coils is awaiting final layout and I have drafts for two more books complete, Demon's Lure and Demon's Sigil. Both of the Demon books need significant amounts of editing.

The obvious thing for me to Do Next is edit the Demon books, but I am not ready to dive into editing and even if I was, I'd still want to be writing new material at the same time.

I am not sure how long the Demon books will take to edit. Scales and Coils combined took a year, total, including time for first reader comments and accompanying revisions. The Sun Etherium took two months. My guesstimate is three to four months per book for the Demon books. They are about half the length of Scales and Coils so I expect them to be quicker to edit, but the draft is rougher than TSE.

In any case: I get to pick a new project to write! For the first time in about ten months! SO EXCITE.

I have a bunch off ideas but I haven't settled on one yet.

Old Boring Ideas

Fellwater: my ridiculous BDSM fantasy novel. It's about 80% done but I have so very little interest in the last 20%. Even though I'm fond enough of about half of it that I reread it for fun sometimes.

Poll RPG: I love some of these characters still and I know generally how the plot goes. But I don't want to commit to a serial, and the long hiatus means the people who were reading it have probably forgotten it by now. And the audience for it is smaller than for a book. It is so weird to me that I am less good at giving away my stories than Amazon is at selling them.

New Exciting Ideas

The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince: a polyamorous fantasy romance, set on one of the mortal worlds that the fey shard from the Etherium setting passes through. It would have cameos from some of the Etherium book characters, but mostly be set in the mortal world. The dragon is a shapeshifter and the prince is trans, either a man or a masculine-leaning enby.

Amaryllis and the Demigoddesses: polyamorous fantasy romance about a trans woman from Newlant (the setting for A Rational Arrangement) and two Blessed women from Southern Vandu (where Blessed are considered to have two parts, one

human and the other divine.)

Demon's Solution: third Demon book, which I am mostly interested because I could finally get to the polyamorous romance between the three human protagonists. It'd have a main plot about demon-hunting, though.

Wisteria's Daughter: an f/f romance between Astraia Striker and Sharone Whittaker, with an epic fantasy subplot or possibly main plot.

Pyrite Chains: third book in the Warlock, the Hare, and the Dragon series. This would be about Lilith and Hell and escape therefrom, and probably involve Madden prominently.

A Fey in Exile: One of the fey folk from the Etherium setting accidentally gets stuck in a mortal world when the fey shard moves on, and hijinks ensue as he ways for it to come back. I have no plot, I just did a few cartoons of him and he amuses me. Also, he's a sympathetic figure, in contrast to the fey in the idea below.

To Kill a God: A couple of fey trapped in a mortal world use their power to conquer a human nation and terrorize the population. Mortals struggle to find a weapon that can stop immortal, invulnerable people who can walk through walls to escape traps.

The Twilight Etherium: about the creation of a new Etherium, with bonus polyamorous subplot involving Miro/Ardent/Whisper.

Bowracer: Callie (Anthser's love interest from ARA) finds a bowracing partner of her own. I wrote an outline for this novella when I was writing FA, and then decided I needed to write "A Regular Hero" first. I'm thinking of writing this and giving it away as a freebie for people who sign up for my mailing list.

Real: An itinerant writer on modern Earth. A former space marine with PTSD trying to recover on a peaceful world while the war rages on. A princess in dangered of a political coup. They have nothing in common, other than that they are all the same person. Kind of a psychological action-fantasy story.

The Future Unbounded: a small-town seer has a vision of the end of the universe, and struggles with how to best use her gifts in response. If she can save one world, or risk that world for the remote chance of saving them all -- which should she chose? Epic fantasy.

Of all of these, the princess/dragon/prince one interests me the most. Only one of these -- "Bowracer" --has a complete outline, but the princess one has a significant chunk of development.

Also, I really want to do a female-centric romance, and also another poly romance. It's been so long since I wrote a poly romance. SO LONG.

Anyway, poll because polls are fun:

Poll #19306 What Next

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 17

View Respondents

Which projects would you most like to read?

View Answers

Fellwater
2 (11.8%)

Poll RPG
3 (17.6%)

The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince:
9 (52.9%)

Amaryllis and the Demigoddesses
7 (41.2%)

Demon's Solution
0 (0.0%)

Wisteria's Daughter
9 (52.9%)

Pyrite Chains
5 (29.4%)

A Fey in Exile
5 (29.4%)

To Kill a God
1 (5.9%)

The Twilight Etherium
7 (41.2%)

Bowracer
7 (41.2%)

Real
1 (5.9%)

The Future Unbounded
2 (11.8%)

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Entries tagged with writing about writing

December 5-8: New tablet, walking in the cold, writing, and LawnGuy

Dictation

Works-in-Progress, Ideas, and Incomplete Stories

Doing Your Best, and The Parable of the Pottery Class

The Things You Want

The Shirt Cut Meme

The Dunning-Kruger Effect, But It’s Me

How Do I Outline?

Outlines and Measuring Progress

New WIP Time!

4thewords!

Call for First Readers!

Bad Romance

Writing, Editing, and Day Job

My Writing Process: the Complete Burbling, 2018 edition

Call for First Readers for Frost!

A Goofy List of Speech Quirks

Yet More Hospital

Demon's Lure: Call for First Readers!

What Next?