WHY AM I LIKE THIS

WHY AM I LIKE THIS

Me: So yeah. I've got an outline that covers the first 15,000 words or so. I'm not exactly sure what the rest of the novel looks like, but I know the general shape of it.

Pre-Reader Friend: Looking forward to seeing it.

Pre-Reader Friend: Have you read Romancing the Beat?

Me: No.

Pre-Reader: You should check it out. It's a great resource for structuring romance stories.

Me: Cool thanks. [immediately downloads eBook and devours it in one go]

Me: This is really helpful, but also doesn't completely work for a triad romance. Also there's some straight nonsense baked in.

---

The next day:

Me: Help. I've spent every free moment not parenting or doing family stuff plotting the novel.

Pre-Reader Friend: Maybe take a break?

Me: No, I'm fine now.

Narrator: No they weren't.

[Finishes plotting 80% of the novel in four days]

---

I'm very tired now.

Catching up on previews for the SEKKRIT PRINCESS PROJECT. Details to be announced on Monday!

Art Update:

Well I certainly meant to be posting art more frequently. But toddler-induced plague put our household out of commission for a few days, which put a cramp in my style.

At any rate, this is the first “finished” spread for Princess Kadri. (Obviously it’s important to note that text and image placement might change, colors might change, etc etc.) You’ll notice that this is a different style from the previous in-progress update that I posted. While the painterly style was lovely, it proved too time consuming were I to use that style for all of the illustrations.

Thankfully, I’m still pretty happy with the new cel style shading. It has the added effect of brightening the colors, which will be great for our youngest readers (my own daughter included).

(Art very much not mine - visual inspiration collected from Pinterest, which sucks for attribution. You can find the board I saved them to here.)

I've teased lately that I've been working on a new project that I recently broke 10,000 words on. Thanks to a visit from the Demon of Hyperfocus (I plotted 80% of the project in FOUR DAYS), I'm ready to talk about it in a bit more detail. It's a novel! Genre: uh... trans polycule witch romance? No title yet, since I'm the fucking worst at those. Since coming out as trans nb, I've just been sick to death of the only romance stories in media being the same straight romance stories over and over again. And sometimes if I look REAL HARD I can find stories about queer men, and I can squint and turn my head to the side and sort of pretend they're about me. This has been especially painful this past year, while I've been going no-contact with both my mother and some of my in-laws over their refusal to respect my gender and pronouns. And so, just like with many of my games, I finally decided that I have to make the stories I need in the world since clearly no one else is going to. Writing is going pretty well. This is actually the fourth novel I've written; I got pretty serious about finishing two of the previous ones, but they were set aside because they were tied to deeply terrible people I didn't want to think about. I've even done the scary thing and enlisted a pre-reader willing to yell their enthusiasm at me so I can overcome my depression and keep writing once the Demon of Hyperfocus loosens its grip a bit, which will definitely happen around the midpoint. ...which I'm sort of looking forward to tbh

More updates over on the Princess Charming tumblr.

I haven’t been quite as productive as I’d like lately, but work proceeds apace. Here is a recently finished spread and the finished lines for a spread currently in progress.