Writing projects update… January

So I think I might do these semi-regularly from now on… the first two got a lot of traffic. Hopefully not just from people who are basically not at all interested in Spider-Girl and are looking for other stuff….

Anyway for anyone who’s not read one of these before, here’s what I’m either thinking about, plotting or possibly even writing at the moment that I’m not talking about extensively. Everything gets assigned a letter, just to confuse me. There’s no guarantee anything here will ever see the light of day, but if something catches your imagination… let me know.

Project T hasn’t been worked on for a while (bear in mind before I came back to Spider-Girl recently, I hadn’t worked on anything since September), but just so you know, it’s at just under 50,000 words… and I think could well be double that when it’s done. I basically think it’s a novel, now. I won’t be releasing it until it is done, either – with the exception of serial stuff like Spider-Girl, that has no fixed ending, I’m trying not to release parts of things if they’re not finished. Just FYI.

Anyway, the writing of that has been a lot of fun. I got past a major, major scene a while back which had been in my head forever, and when it was down on paper I felt so close to it I couldn’t even tell if it was any good. I sent it to an ‘independent adjudicator’ and I’m happy to report he gave it a glowing report card. So hey, I know at least one part of it is good.

As I’ve said before, but just for the record, this is a male-to-female story involving bodysuits.

Other stuff I’ve actually written words for; several years ago Victor and I sort-of collaborated on a story I called Housesitting, which we never finished, although I have about 12,500 words of it done. Frankly I was never that happy with the plot that we came up with, and yesterday I finally re-plotted the whole thing (hence my post on plotting).

I’m a lot happier with the potential for it now; it seems a lot sturdier to me, with some interesting interactions I’ve never written before. (For ‘interactions’ you can also read ’sex’ if you like.) I can see myself tapping away at this for a bit and seeing how it goes. This is another male-to-female story, but more traditional – a kid imitating his mother using a mask.

I mentioned Love Hotel before… I will finish this one day, but honestly I’ve got to be in the right mood. What’s written of it was done in 2001 in a hotel on a business trip… perhaps the next time I’m alone in a foreign clime with time on my hands I’ll get it done. (And I do have a potential trip in the first half of this year….) I’d like to tell you what it involves, but it’d spoil the surprises….

Father Knows Best, some of you will remember I’m sure. (Three parts were released a few years ago, but I never finished it – dammit.) I really want to finish this but I still don’t know what the hell the ending is. It might just need a complete re-plotting session, like Housesitting… I’ll try and do that, we’ll see what I come up with.

Moving on to stuff that’s plotted, or semi-plotted, but not written at all… I have a complete outline for what should in theory be a ’short’ but knowing me it won’t be! Lemme see… I guess that would be Project A, but I know that’ll confuse me so let’s just give it a working title – Anita. Believe it or not this is a female-to-male story, with some other stuff I won’t spoil. Any interest?

What else, jeez… I guess there’s Project TNG, which is long, has a very complex plot and would be a huge challenge to write, as previously mentioned. I still don’t have an ending for that damn thing so it’ll probably stay untouched until I figure that out. It’s primarily female-to-female, but has female-to-male stuff in there too.

I mentioned something called Project B before, and just to allow you to connect the dots, that’s actually The Babysitter (a working title) which I talked about the inspiration for a little while back. So re-read that post and imagine if you like. (Or even better, suggest your ‘Holy cow, my babysitter is actually a masked hottie’ fantasies to me and give me some material.)

Project TSL is my serial story, the one inspired by The Black Widow. I do want to do this, but plotting it is actually a lot harder than expected. I will get to it, but the plot needs to be totally done, and I’d be writing it in either 9 or 13 parts, so that’s quite a lot of plot. Wait and see.

And finally… Project AC isn’t dead, but it sure isn’t very alive either. Frankly I can’t see myself working on it until Spider-Girl is done… so that’s a loooong way away. But never say never. Project G… uhh, we should probably forget about that. It’d be huge, and it’s an idea without a story, really, and would need researching and… life’s too short.

That’s it. If you want to see any other post where I talk about these projects, then helpfully, they’re all filed under ‘projects’.

Sunday morning word count

Project T now stands at just over 44,000 words. (I’ll admit, I came to a natural break point just shy of 44K, so I added a few more. Just so I wouldn’t lie to you. I’m like that.)

I have a strong feeling there’s at least 15, maybe 20K more in this thing; the scene I’m writing now is probably several thousand long, and there are several more scenes just like it before it’s done. I guess I’m over half way… maybe. I don’t know, I’ll just keep going and it’ll be done some time.

I know it must be annoying to some of you to read this, but I figure you might prefer to know I am actually writing, as opposed to just jerking off or checking YouTube all day.

Also, Spider-Girl 13 is progressing, slowly. It’s probably likely, all things considered, that I’ll release it before Project T’s completely done. Right now though, Project T has it’s hooks in me, so that seems to be what comes out whenever I sit at the keyboard.

So how’re you guys?

Three lines = three thousand words

In another tab, Project T is sitting at 34,390 words… so about 3,000 more than last night. That’s 3,000 words drawn from three lines in my plot description, and there’s a lot more to go… lots of fun stuff I hope.

In case you’re wondering that 3k took about two and a half hours, with few interruptions (assuming that rating songs in Pandora as I listen to them doesn’t count as an interruption). Not much of a boast by the way. Well alright, a little one. Generally though, I can churn out 1,000 words or so an hour of any kind of writing if I’m ‘in the zone’ and know where I’m going. In this case, I have a pretty good roadmap.

In a comment on my previous post, RJW suggested that I might give out some practical tips to writers. Well, here’s an easy one to start with: just write. Sounds pretty frickin’ obvious I know, but unless you’re willing to devote close to three hours of a weeknight to just sitting at the keyboard and getting the words done, you won’t get much accomplished.

Of course, I only get to issue smug directives like that on nights like this. Come back when I’ve been staring at a blinking cursor for a whole evening – you’ll get a different GW.