Arcadia: Blog

Just some thinking out loud in this update, and maybe fishing for a little perspective from more seasoned writers who happen to stumble across it.

Since I posted my most recent story, June 29 (which, btw, is definitely the piece I am most proud of, so if you haven’t read it, I would certainly appreciate getting a few more votes to make its score visible! Be sure to check tags first though), I’ve slowed my writing pace somewhat, which isn’t super surprising. But I have still been writing! Unfortunately, my latest project, “Under Construction,” another novel-length tale, is giving me more trouble than anything I’ve written before.

Unlike my first novel, Lupine Dreams, which followed a relatively straightforward story structure, I’ve had trouble structuring Under Construction pretty much from the start, and have already redone the entire outline once to get it to a place where I felt like it was going to work and say what I wanted to say.

I’m about 35k words (not even halfway) into actually writing it, and...whew, I dunno. Each individual scene isn’t bad, and as the story goes along, it definitely gets better. But I feel like it’s more a sequence of things that happen rather than a cohesive story.

Usually what I would do in that situation is to try to get back to the basics of what I’m trying to accomplish. Often that means I’d end up cutting a bunch of stuff to get to the most interesting parts. Unfortunately, I think cutting more out would kind of only exacerbate the problem.

Overall, although I know there’s a story in here that I want to tell, I just don’t have too much confidence I’ve found the best way to tell it. Which probably means I should go back to the drawing board to rework the very basics instead of just bolting on more stuff or chopping stuff off.

When I finished Lupine, I spent the next couple-few months working on outlines for a few different projects to see what caught my attention. The two outlines that rose to the top were the one for Under Construction and a second one. The second one honestly has probably been the one I’m more excited about getting into anyway, which is part of the reason I wanted to try and knock out Under Construction first -- then I could move on to the thing I was excited about!

That logic was probably flawed to begin with, which at least is something valuable I’ve learned about my process! In any case, I’m going to shelve Under Construction for a while to give it some space, even though a part of me definitely feels guilty about it. It’s sort of like telling a friend that I’m gonna go hang out with someone else for a bit.

What I’m most anxious about, though, is that I don’t want to end up story-hopping again and again without ever finishing anything. I don’t want to have like six half-written stories in a folder. I’m still new enough at this that I’m still forming my habits, and I don’t want to get into a bad one like that. So wish me luck!

I’d love to hear from other authors if anyone feels like sharing about their experiences when a story just doesn’t come together how you want -- preferably if it has a happy ending like “oh yeah, I put it out of my mind, wrote a couple other things, came back to it, and suddenly it clicked!” :P

In any case, thanks for reading this whole thing -- guess this blog post was actually my next novel! :P

Arcadia

My latest, June 29, posted this evening! Yes, it's a return to the tearjerking melancholy I usually write and this one is particularly...all of it. Haha. It tells the story of a lifelong love between two women, a final delivery, and a promise kept. And it's got all the stuff everybody just loves the most about my stories: lesbians, no sex, and maybe a few tears! Hey, what else would you wanna read on a porn story site?? :P

It's a different kind of story structure than my usual, told about half-and-half between letters from one of the women and present-day action. The end result is so much more than what I thought I had to say when I began writing, and has become an extremely personal project to me in ways I couldn't have imagined. It will always have a special place in my heart, and I hope it finds one in yours as well (:

My latest, A Night at the County Fair, posted today! This one is just an unabashed good time, bordering on a romp. You know, like all my stories! :P If you have any fond memories of a county fair, I think you’ll really find something to enjoy. It was a lot of fun to write, and be sure to pay attention to the details...never know when they might pay off in unexpected ways! (;

Don’t worry, though, I’ll return to my usual programming soon enough :P I ended up banging out something much more typically Arcadia (no sex at all, just a tear-jerking romance) a couple weekends ago and have been refining it since. I’m looking forward to sharing that with the five or six people who will enjoy it in about a week or so :P

Until then, would love to hear what you think of your time at the fair (:

Thanks for reading!

Arcadia

A little (okay, long) update on what I’ve been up to!

The Missing Piece revision
First, a revised version of The Missing Piece went up this morning! It was the first story I ever wrote -- that naive, young Arcadia of oh those *checks watch* 6 months ago -- so it definitely was raw. I do my best to leave a story alone once I hit “submit,” but I made an exception in this case because it wasn’t just some style or word choice things, it was stuff like inconsistent tenses, and I cringed knowing it was still out there.

There are, however, two additions, both in Chapter 4, that are relatively minor but are more than just tweaking what was already there. Just two sentences: one is a completely new addition, the other I swapped for an existing line of dialogue that I thought maybe was a little more distracting than helpful. Together, they don’t really do much more to give readers a window into what’s going on with Charlie, but they are more consistent with what’s there already and I think do a subtly better job of doing what I was trying to do at the time. If I were to rewrite the whole thing completely, I might do all of that subtext differently now that I have a little more experience. But I didn’t want to change the spirit of what was there, just make it the best version of itself, which I feel good about now.

Lupine ebook
Lupine Dreams is now available for free as an epub on the ZBookstore!

I’ve been slammed with work over the past few weeks, so I didn’t have much time to write, unfortunately. But, in addition to the above revisions, I also decided to take a crack at putting Lupine Dreams into an epub format. Mostly the only wrinkle was properly formatting the texting chapter, but that made for quite the sufficient wrinkle haha.

It was just kind of a fun little experiment that was satisfying to figure out how to do. It's free because...eh I just feel weird about people paying for my work. At the moment, anyway, I really just would like my stories to find their audience and vice versa, and I don’t feel like I’m making a colossal sacrifice considering the size of that audience haha. I just write what I feel like writing, and I’m gratified that it’s connected with some folks so far (: Maybe sometime in the future I’ll feel differently, but I have a hard time imagining ever charging for any ebooks I put up. So if you want a cleaned-up version of Lupine you can download and keep for yourself that's made for your e-reader, welp, it's there! (:

What’s next
I’ve got quite a few irons in the fire at the moment! First, I’ll have a very nostalgic, fun story that runs about 35k words out in about 2-3 weeks. I’ve got it “done,” now it just needs some final revisions and polish. I’m very pleased with how it turned out, though, and suspect that plenty of folks will enjoy it (: Unlike almost all my other stories, it’s an unreservedly good time without the plodding melancholy that is pretty much my hallmark. I look forward to sharing it with everyone soon!

Thank you so much for reading (:

Arcadia

Sunny Afternoons, a new short (very short!) story went up yesterday! It has something to say about putting yourself out there, even if you think nobody might be interested in buying what you're selling.

I would say it's a pretty typical Arcadia story of melancholy and loneliness -- just the way to really settle into your weekend! :P

Be forewarned, though: There is no sex. But! There is a cat. So...how bad could it really be? (;

Bonus points if you can spot the rather glaring cat-related mistake that tendertouch gently pointed out to me, as did others elsewhere. Whoops! Charlie Kelly tried to tell me, but I just didn't listen (;