Charles Jeffries: Blog

I have to admit I've been in a bit of a creative funk since I finished writing Two Vines. I have a bunch of ideas in my head, including some world building in that universe that I want to do, but it's been hard to get useful words down on paper.

I did manage to unearth An Old Acquaintance from the archives and clean it up for publication here, but to be honest it's not my best work (as the ratings correctly show, I think). I also wrote something for Mat Twassel's flash-fiction event, which I think will get published before the end of the year.

All of that did help shake some of the winter blues, though. Over the last few days I've started writing a new novel(la?) that's sort of vaguely winter-holiday themed, although there's pretty much no chance it'll be done before the end of the year. If you liked Careful What You Wish For, I hope you'll like this one as well. I don't expect to start posting chapters until I'm well into it, though, so look for that probably in the new year, depending on how much writing I'm able to get done while ostensibly "working" these next few weeks.

I've got a first draft of my next story finished. It's a one-off consentacles story based in the same universe as Golems, although there's no overlap in terms of characters or backstory. It will be, in a word, filthy, so if you liked the more explicit content in the Careful short, you might like this as well.

It still needs some work, so I'm not sure if I'll get it done before or after Thanksgiving, but likely by the end of the month.

For your entertainment, here are a few titles that I rejected:
Master of Vine Arts
Dominance and Shrubmission
Shrubmissive Tendrilcies

I've finally hit the breakthrough point on the last few chapters of Careful. I'm hoping to polish them up and get them posted on the site this weekend, and to be honest with you I'm excited to be done with this project and move on to something else.

Hit the 'back' button now if you don't want any spoilers on the structure of the final parts... otherwise, I guess this is your reward for actually reading my blog!

Either way, thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the story when it goes live!

'Chapter Five' will actually be the short story that started it all, also called Careful What You Wish For. The novella will also get an epilogue. Ideally, you'll read chapters 1-4, then the short, then the epilogue, although I don't think the pacing will suffer too badly if you read them in a different order.

With the way SOL allows you to set up series and universes and such, I've decided that the short deserves some room to breathe on its own, so I'm going to publish it as a separate Story in a new Series called Nick's Library. That way, if I ever get around to filling in more of the stories referred to in the novella, I'll have a place to put them. Honestly, several of them seem like really interesting stories to write, so there's some chance this might actually happen some day :)

That one was a real slog. I must have rewritten chunks of Chapter Three at least a dozen times. Getting the tone, the content, and the characters right, especially on the safeword conversation, without painting myself into a corner for future chapters, took a ton of work. Props to my (offline, anonymous) beta reader for their assistance on that front.

Meanwhile, Chapter Four has finally started to take shape. I had almost as much trouble getting started on this one as I did on Chapter Three, but the two chapters are pretty tightly linked so I guess that's not that much of a surprise. Anyway, Chapter Four is ostensibly the climax (hurr hurr) of the story, so I expect I'll spend some extra time with it.

I'm getting the feeling I'll want to work on something lighter (and shorter) once I'm done with CWYWF. Or maybe I'll give myself a break after Chapter Four is done and work on something else instead. It might be fun to do some more worldbuilding in the Golems universe...

Feeling super lucky to have some time off from the day job to focus on writing. Today I cleaned up and submitted Chapter 2 of CWYWF, rearranged the story between Chapters 3 and 4, and put 4k words into Chapter 3.

I do like to have a good start on the following chapter before I post the previous one, just in case I need to make edits for the sake of continuity. Of course, this is only my second time writing a serial like this, so I'm sure I'm gonna mess it up somewhere.