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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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/strong> saw us fretting about writing again<\/a>\u00a0for the first time in a long time, and putting off the writing a bit longer by drawing maps.<\/p>\n By February<\/strong>\u00a0we had run out of excuses, and at long last put our fingers to the keyboard<\/a> (not to brag or anything, but we actually have two<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n March<\/strong> 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<\/a>\u00a0would be on the page, and how graphic would it be? \u00a0How are we going to handle all the swears?<\/a>\u00a0Are our characters potty-mouths, or prim and proper olde timey gentlefolk? How large are our ghosts? So many questions.<\/p>\n April<\/strong>\u00a0brought our first roadtrip of the year, which of course meant brainstorming<\/a>, 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<\/p>\n In May<\/strong> we were concerned about pacing, and the agonies of titling<\/a>. Fun Fact: when you have four books, you need four titles! <<insert The More You Know shooting star>><\/p>\n Throughout June<\/strong>\u00a0we were getting to know our characters better, rhapsodizing about our process<\/a>, and dropping tantalizing hints about our plot through talking about our\u00a0research<\/a> topics.<\/p>\n In July<\/strong>\u00a0we 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.<\/a><\/p>\n It’s really hot in Bermuda<\/a>\u00a0in August<\/strong>, 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!<\/p>\n When you plot out four books at once, you end up with some contradictory notes. In September <\/strong>we talked about dealing with that, as well as our Writing Cave renovations, and gave some advice about\u00a0critiquing other people’s work<\/a>.<\/p>\n Every once in a while Kent gets in his feelings about writing\u00a0advice<\/a>\u00a0and how most people do it\u00a0wrong<\/a>. We worked through some of that in October<\/strong>.<\/p>\n