I missed last week’s update because of holidays and birthdays, so this update may be a long one because I have a LOT to share. I’m currently at 39K and need to be at 46K, so I need to write 7K today to be on target. It’s possible…not a healthy goal, but it’s certainly possible, haha. I’d love to meet the 50k and win NaNo, but my real goal is to finish rewriting the scenes I’ve already written in the past seven drafts and enter new territory plotwise. That may mean I meet the 50k or I may fall slightly short, but if I can meet either goal: winning NaNo or reaching new plot territory, I’ll be happy.

Short Stories

I actually took a break from the Demon WIP early last week to write two short stories for a special person. It wrecked my NaNo word count but it was fun to take a break from the main Demon WIP and write a slice of life stories in the same word. I personally don’t really like slice of life stories, but they can be a nice break from the normal doom and gloom I usually put my characters through, haha.

The first story involved characters from my Queer Croc WIP and is a story I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. I hope I can share the story after my special person reads it, but it gave me a chance to explore a surprise friendship that developed during the last draft. This friendship is really sweet, like surprisingly sweet considering the context of the story and how people use each other in that story, and I hope I can develop it further during the next rewrite and the other books.

The second story is a complete AU that probably isn’t possible because certain characters may die before the scene could happen, but we’ll ignore that for now haha. It is a short tale about a father, who is trans, and his trans son who just grew his first beard and wants to go to the barbershop for his first shave. And Demons may be involved (they usually are with my stories)

I hope I can share these stories soon, but I want the permission of my special someone first.

Replotting the Queer Croc WIP

During the holiday break, I went from asking my editor if I could run an idea regarding the Queer Croc WIP by them and while waiting for a reply, just replotted the entire damn book. Oops, haha. I’m still going to run my idea by my editor, but I really hope they like it because I’m committed to this new plot and will be very crushed if it doesn’t work. My only concern is that it will inflate the Queer Croc WIP’s word count from 116K to 132K most likely (potentially 150K but, god, I hope not).

From how I’m reading my editor’s notes, the core of the story isn’t completely clear and I think it’s because Alex’s arc is stunted and not fully developed and so the two main arcs (Alex’s and Kingsley’s) feel like they should be in separate books instead of two different timelines that intertwine and affect each other. So after watching the entire season of 1899 (which is AMAZING) and a lot of videos analyzing Dark (another AMAZING series, my all-time favorite series and maybe the best scifi series of all time), I think I figured out how to intertwine the timelines and arcs without time travel and without complicated an already complicated plot.

It also allows me to pull in characters that Kingsley ices out of his own narrative into Alex’s narrative, allowing them to reclaim this story about their own lives that Kingsley is trying to own in order to save his own life (did you follow that? haha). But it will allow me to flesh out characters that were in the background and hopefully add complications and subtleties to the plot.

AND I’m still keeping my multimedia idea. I want the story to start with Alex’s POV, introduce Kingsley’s POV for three chapters and then introduce Alex again because I want you to initially trust Kingsley and then have Alex interject with his own POV. That being said, I also want to add different media formats, like posters for example, into Kingsley’s chapters that will subtly undermine Kingsley’s narrative that will hopefully formalize in Alex’s POV, but we’ll see if I can pull it off.

We’ll see what my editor thinks.

Demons, Doctors, and Damnation

I finally returned to the Demon book the day after Thanksgiving and that’s when I wrote 11k in four days, haha. Something about having time off and turkey soup inspired my creative juices and I was able to dive deep into the Demon’s relationships with Ecaterina, my assassin turned doctor who is studying the Demon condition, and Emanoil, the mute-deaf trans doctor.

Demon Monarchs

Last update, I talked about my Demon monarchs: Rezan, Danijela, and Yeremi and I’m still trying to work out their relationships with each other. They’re sort of the same characters I created a decade ago but there are also a lot of changes and trying to navigate those subtle changes has been interesting, but also makes them feel unfamiliar. Like old friends I haven’t seen in decades and I’m both surprised by how they haven’t changed and yet have changed in every way that matters.

That being said, I have changed a lot in terms of these character’s arcs and ultimate fates. These changes are organic changes, so I don’t think anything has to be changed in terms of personality or relations to each other, but I think it just changes how I want to contextual these characters and what traits I want to highlight. I also wrote this line, which will prove to be very heartbreaking when the entire series is done and over with:

“I don’t exist without them and they can’t exist without me.”

Ecaterina

This section also introduced Ecaterina, an assassin turned doctor and my most frustrating character. She was one of those characters who was always more of an archetype or person instead of a character. It’s been a real challenge to ground her within this world, figure out her story, and map out her arc, but I think I finally found a way to make her fit within this world and meaningfully contribute to the plot.

In this draft, she used to be a holy assassin who did terrible things (some of those things may be included in book 4) but she’s already fallen from grace and is struggling to survive in a work camp while dealing with a morphine addiction. As an assassin, she not only hunted the enemy of church and state, but Demons as well and she used to collect their remains and study the condition. While this leads her into believing that the Demonic condition is a medical condition instead of a divine punishment sent by God, it also causes friction with the Demon Monarchs. However, she also knows Vasily Karaminov, the man the Demon Monarchs are hunting because they believe he has a weapon that can kill God. So a lot of tension in their relationship which is fun to explore and play around with.

In all honesty, though, Ecaterina would have died a hundred times by now if not for her apprentice Emanoil.

Emanoil

Emanoil is a deaf-mute trans doctor who was sent to the work camp as a child. It’s the only world he knows and somehow find a job as the camp doctor’s assistant. Ecaterina also works for the camp doctor and they become friends of sorts and look out for each other because no one else will. Emanoil is a sweetie, a true cinnamon roll, who finds himself adopted by the Demon monarchs. They adore him and try to clean up any messes they make while eating or hunting because Emanoil is “sensitive about such things”. He defends Ecaterina in front of the Demons and she is spared only because he vouches for her.

In the last draft, this entire section was told completely through Emanoil’s journals and it was interesting to figure out which sections I wanted to tell through Ecaterina’s POV and which sections could remain from Emanoil’s POV and how Ecaterina changed Emanoil’s relationship with the Demons.

That’s how my NaNo’s been going. How about yours? How close are you to reaching your goals?