August Writing and September Goals

[osprey_archer]

Obviously the MOST important writing news from August is that Honeytrap is available for preorder! It releases THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW. (Or simply tomorrow, depending on your time zone and how Amazon is feeling.)

In terms of actual things that I got written this month…. eeeeehhhh. The thing I really need to finish is the short story for the m/m magical pets anthology, and it has not been finished. It has been started, though! That’s an improvement!

I got a few thousand more words on the 1920s bohemian New York m/m novella before deciding that I needed to do more research and also visit New York City, so that one has been set aside until such time as visiting places is possible. (This may or may not be a cunning plan to count a trip to NYC as a business expense on my taxes. The part about more research is definitely true, though.)

I also wrote about 20,000 words on the post-World War I story about the boarding school friends who reconnect after losing various limbs during the war (corporately they are down to five by the time the story begins). But this one ALSO needs more research, as “Lord Chatterley has a motorized wheelchair in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was published in 1928!” is perhaps not a good enough reason to give a protagonist a motorized wheelchair in 1918, even if I specify that it is an extremely expensive prototype model that breaks at the drop of hat.

In fact, most of the story ideas floating around in my head suffer from this “needs more research” problem. The one outlier (which therefore probably ought to be my next project) is Harriet Peabody, an m/f romance set after the Civil War (it occurs to me that it might be easier to write blurbs if I wrote books that were actually set during wars). I have a draft of this from 2018, which I have a suspicion is execrable, but there’s really no way to know except opening the document and rereading it.

Comments

[asakiyume]

I HIGHLY doubt that it is execrable. HIGHLY. Which isn't to say that with your powerful pumped-up writing muscles you can't make it better [man, doesn't that phrase strike you as the kind of thing that must drive English language learners nuts?], but the fact that you can improve something doesn't mean it's dross to begin with.

Hopefully travel will become possible within the next 400 days....

[osprey_archer]

I think you underestimate just how bad my drafts can be! VERY BAD. Don't worry, poor characters, the next draft will be better.

Hopefully travel will become possible within the next 400 days....

THE DREAM TBH. I'm so glad that I visited Massachusetts last fall (can you believe that was really less than a year ago?); I had thought about putting off the trip till spring, and well, we know how THAT would have worked out.

[sovay]

“Lord Chatterley has a motorized wheelchair in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was published in 1928!” is perhaps not a good enough reason to give a protagonist a motorized wheelchair in 1918, even if I specify that it is an extremely expensive prototype model that breaks at the drop of hat.

I did not know a character in Lady Chatterley's Lover had a motorized wheelchair. I am also skeptical about the existence of such in 1918, but that's really cool.

In fact, most of the story ideas floating around in my head suffer from this “needs more research” problem.

+1.

[osprey_archer]

Lord Chatterley ends up destroying his motorized wheelchair in a fit of pique! Lord Chatterley, I am not sure how expensive a motorized wheelchair would be in 1928, but I'm assuming the answer is VERY, why can't you just throw teacups at the wall like the other cranky rich aristocrats?

[kore]

Ah but it's Lawrence so you see Clifford angrily destroying the Mechanized Symbol of Mechanism that lets him propel his impotent body around in a Mechanical way is Symbolic. VERY.

I remember looking up what bath-chairs (or rather Bath chairs) were after reading Austen and being surprised they were sort of like proto-wheelchairs! I don't know how expensive they were tho. Since they were invented at a resort and used for wealthy invalids, probably they were pricey.

[osprey_archer]

Bath chairs were def still in use in the 1920s, because there's a scene in Brideshead Revisited where Charles pushes Sebastian around in one (Sebastian has lightly twisted his ankle and is being Extra about it), buuuut I'm not sure if that's something that they just happened to have lying around Brideshead from an invalid great-aunt or something, or if Bath chairs were still the state of the art in wheelchair technology. Were mechanized wheelchairs already bopping around for the very rich, or did Lawrence just make it up to make a Point about Mechanization? Needs more research etc etc.

[kore]

Google used to be good for research, but now it mainly throws two pages of ads about modern wheelchairs for sale at me. Bah.