Closing Out the Books on 2022 (Well, the Blog Anyway)
It’s time once again for our Blog Year in Review wherein we review what we talked about on the blog all year. It’s such a difficult concept, we’re sure you all appreciate the explanation. We just finished rereading several years’ worth of Chain Story posts, so this fits right in.
Reviewing what was on our minds throughout the year is a really nice way for us to remind ourselves of the progress we’ve made on our various projects, so here we go.
We started off the year trying to prepare ourselves for the dive into a new project that we’d spent the majority of 2021 planning out. January saw us fretting about writing again for the first time in a long time, and putting off the writing a bit longer by drawing maps.
By February we had run out of excuses, and at long last put our fingers to the keyboard (not to brag or anything, but we actually have two keyboards :o ). Between debates about how prevalent we wanted the ghosts to be in our ghost story, we spent our free time watching movies and reading books about the supernatural.
March had us in the thick of writing, but still early enough in the project to still be working out details about the flavor we were going for. How much sex would be on the page, and how graphic would it be? How are we going to handle all the swears? Are our characters potty-mouths, or prim and proper olde timey gentlefolk? How large are our ghosts? So many questions.
April brought our first roadtrip of the year, which of course meant brainstorming, which led us to uncovering a truly appalling event in the backstory of a couple of characters. Even now it makes us shudder. We also gave a quick rundown of our daily work habits, and talked a bit about that old bugbear, continuity
In May we were concerned about pacing, and the agonies of titling. Fun Fact: when you have four books, you need four titles! <<insert The More You Know shooting star>>
Throughout June we were getting to know our characters better, rhapsodizing about our process, and dropping tantalizing hints about our plot through talking about our research topics.
In July we offered some advice about making sure your (non-psychic) characters aren’t precognitive about their fates. Jen had a new batch of stubs in the oven, and we warned of the perils of not sticking to your writing schedule.
It’s really hot in Bermuda in August, but that didn’t stop us from visiting and having a great time. Check out the pictures — they’re real pretty! Kent ran out of stubs before Jen finished the new batch, so he spent some time working on the prose outline for Untitled Ghost Novel #2, but then Jen finished and we both jumped back into writing. Whew!
When you plot out four books at once, you end up with some contradictory notes. In September we talked about dealing with that, as well as our Writing Cave renovations, and gave some advice about critiquing other people’s work.
Every once in a while Kent gets in his feelings about writing advice and how most people do it wrong. We worked through some of that in October.
Exhausted from that, we went in a different direction in November, revising the ancillary materials for our chain story. Jen started writing more new stubs, and then we were attacked by turkeys and pies and all meaningful work stopped for a while.
Which brings us to December, which is Now for those of you keeping track at home. We swept our guests and their pets out the door and have just a few short weeks until they come back again and our productivity plummets. We’ve crept back into the Auxiliary Writing Cave to try to put this time to good use (while basking in the warmth of the fireplace). It’s going slowly, but it is going.
The best writing partner the one you still want to cuddle with after deciding together that your characters did indeed do *that.*