the feminine urge to write a trashy lesbian romance fantasy webnovel instead of working on your other side projects
11 chapters in and this novel is at severe risk of turning into Old Woman Yuri. I've also discovered that I HATE writing sword fights
and it needs like two editing passes but here's the second half of chapter 18. have fun maybe?
so far over half the key details have changed once I started writing a chapter. it's normal. the latest revision is that I realized I didn't want to write dialogue for a duke so he's a duchess now. it's fine
I think in the business they call this 'editing'
i'm done writing chapters!!!! now i just have to spend the next year editing it and realize that i actually need to write more chapters
and the first couple results you find are incorrect, so you go through and reformat your whole draft. then you go 'this looks wrong, though' and determine that the first couple results were wrong, and you need to recapitalize all your titles and substitution nouns a second time
why do the files keep getting bigger? it's fine i just started writing a second one
then discovering that you used it wrong and deciding not to fix it because really, English is all about vibes.
but that's pretty normal considering I sort of ran out of steam near the end of writing the first volume of this thing.
Character designs for the leads are almost done, which means it won't be long until I actually have to start publishing chapters (it's basically just waiting on having good cover art that will stand out in a list). It should be fun to discover just how bad organic discovery is on web novel publishing platforms these days (I already know better than to try and do traditional publishing, since I don't have a social media following + this format is poorly suited for ebooks).
Since I started editing the first volume I incrementally cobbled together another 20k words or so, which is still good progress by my standard. Can't really force it because the quality will really suffer if I do. Having already written a happy ending for the first volume means the second one is a fun opportunity to traumatize both of the leads further, so I can rub my hands together with glee and go "people are going to HATE this cliffhanger"
Trying to make text legible at small sizes is so annoying. At least the artist is doing a fantastic job on the illustration itself, as usual Koyorin basically nails what I ask for on the first try
now all that's left is to wait for the editor to clean up all my overwrought prose and delete all my extra commas. chapters soon(tm)
koyorin is a lifesaver, they cleaned up the text and redid the sunflower element for me. this is why i like being able to work with artists instead of doing everything myself
I swear chapters will come out though. It's fantastic having an editor that actually knows how to write because before we even get to the point of making line-level edits, she's been figuring out the right places to punch things up, make clarifications, add more interiority, etc. It's always worth it to find someone who understands what you're trying to do and what's good or bad about your work.
In the interim I've been struggling through writing a second volume (and trying not to think about how hard to edit it will be) and it's fun how during that process my understanding of the characters I wrote has deepened.
Even if writing after the story is "finished" is a challenge, it's enjoyable to try and figure out what kind of unresolved traumas or disagreements are bubbling beneath the surface of their relationship, or think of something absolutely horrible I can do to them to make the plot interesting. š
Unfortunately that also means all of my favorite parts of what I've written are impossible to excerpt because they require context and are also massive spoilers. I'll settle for this question I got from the editor while they were reading it:
"Are the earrings demonic?"
It's a fantastic question.
