March Writing and April Plans

[osprey_archer]

This month in writing, I accomplished many small things!

1. Wrote kore’s Natasha/Yelena story, Tea for Two.

2. Made covers & wrote descriptions for standalone releases of my two magical pet short stories, “The Mating Call of the Teleporting Warbler” and “Care and Feeding.”

3. Also wrote and collected short descriptions of all my books so that in the future when I need to put together back matter I can just copy and paste from a single document. Why did I not do this years ago? A mystery.

4. Released The Mating Call of the Teleporting Warbler as a standalone short story. This was worth doing because I’d already written the story and I knocked together the cover very cheaply, but the sales figures suggest that writing short stories specifically for release on Amazon would not be profitable.

Having said that, this story is f/f, which generally has pretty low sales figures. The picture might look different with a different genre.

5. In the interest of exploring this question, I expanded “Care and Feeding,” from the m/m magical pet anthology. It now ends with a sex scene instead of “If I make this any longer I’m going to have to write a sex scene, so the story is ending… NOW.” Planning to release this in May, perhaps.

6. I am dragging sloooowly forward on the novelette about two fangirls who hit it off in real life… only to realize they are fandom nemeses! Just hit 15,000 words, have written absolutely everything except the sex scene, so I guess I gotta bite the bullet and write that.

Thinking about calling the story Enemies to Lovers, although the title might be too generic? The working title is “Fangirl Foeyay,” but I don’t think people use the word foeyay anymore. It may not even have been in common use when I wrote the first three-quarters of a draft back in 2016. (I pondered whether I should update the fandom references, but that would require major surgery, and it would 10,000 times easier to slide in a mention that the story takes place in December 2015.)

***

My goals for April is to finish a draft of Enemies to Lovers, polish “Care and Feeding,” and write evelyn_b’s She-Ra fic (Scorpia + Kyle = unexpected friendship). (Still doing fics for ACLU donations of $25+ if anyone is interested! Should probably make a new post about this.)

I would also like to decide on my next project. I started some projects in 2020 that I hope to complete eventually, but right there’s a lot of accumulated frustration bound up in them, so I’ve set them aside to give that time to dissipate.

However, when I dug up Enemies to Lovers, I found two older possibilities in my archives.

1. There’s a partially complete m/m “contemporary but everyone knows about vampires and magic generally so it’s not exactly our world” story. Soon after moving to the big city, Chris falls in with charming, obnoxious, mysterious Josh… whose secret turns out to be NOT that he is a cheating bastard, but that he is a vampire’s blood thrall. (Yes, there is emphatically a scene where the vampire drinks just a little too much blood and Josh faints from blood loss).

The main problem with this one - the reason why I abandoned it in the first place, lo these many years ago - is that I couldn’t figure out workable answers to a couple of basic questions. How did Josh end up in thralldom? The best answer I came up with was “Josh killed another vampire, and thralldom is his legal punishment,” but if that’s the case, how can Josh escape? It’s not really a happy ending if Josh is still in thrall to the vampire who might any day “accidentally” drink so much blood that he dies.

2. The other option is to take Iced Coffee Dreams off Amazon, rewrite it as f/f, and release it for Kalikoi. When I released it under the Jennifer Montgomery pen name it sold ten copies (actually, it may have been less than ten…) and it would be nice to actually make some money off it.

Comments

[missroserose]

Personally, my answer to the vampire thralldom question would be some kind of psychological hold the vampire has on Josh—perhaps with some sort of flimsy logistical pretext (blackmail? debt?) but where clearly that's just an excuse for Josh to go back. So perhaps Josh's attraction to Chris gives him a much-needed boost of motivation to break free, except that the only relationship form he's really familiar with is the twisted controlling type, which he tries to recreate with Chris. Which of course leads to a scene where Chris, faced with the possibility of having Josh utterly devoted to him, which maybe is what he wanted more than anything when in the first obsessive stages of attraction, has the opportunity to be the Hero and say "...no. I want your devotion, but I want your devotion, because you want to be with me." And Josh, for whom playing the thrall has been a convenient way to have intimacy (of a sort) without actually being Seen, has to decide if he can really be that vulnerable with Chris...

(But then, I'm a sucker for the "vampire as the ultimate codependent relationship" analogy/trope. :)

[osprey_archer]

I think a psychological hold is probably the way to go - it just needs to feel compelling to the readers, so they're not sitting there going "What the hell, Josh, why is this even hard, just leave the vampire who is sucking your literal life blood."

Maybe there's a family connection - one of the threads that I dropped in the first draft is that the vampire is Josh's great-great-many-greats uncle. Maybe Josh hit a rough patch in his life (flunked out of college? Deaths in the family?) and the uncle offered to take him in for the low, low price of being an on-tap snack... so there's gratitude that Vampire Uncle was there for him when the rest of the family let him down, and also a certain feeling of responsibility for Vampire Uncle's continued well-being, not just in terms of having a blood source but also, like, having companionship etc.

And ofc Josh has no employment history, which complicates getting out.

[missroserose]

Oooo, I love the quasi-incestuous vibe there, it makes the codependence all the tastier. Especially if, say, Josh was rejected by his family in part for his queerness? Filial piety combined with logistical difficulty combined with a history of rejection, plus whatever dark attraction Great-Uncle Vampire holds over Josh...I feel like that combination has a lot of legs.

[osprey_archer]

I don't think they reject him exactly for his queerness, but it probably contributes to the general feeling that he is the Family Fuck-Up. He doesn't have a degree, he doesn't have a high-powered career or even any career ambitions - he likes to play the piano, but he's not, like, a concert pianist, so what is even the point - and he keeps falling in love with entirely unsuitable candidates, like (voice drops to a whisper) poor people.

If he were a lawyer (or rather a law student, he's not old enough to be a lawyer) and part of a gay power couple they would accept it, but as it is they are pained and confused.

[missroserose]

Okay now you have to write this because I am 100% on board (and feeling a little called out, but that's neither here nor there XD).

[asakiyume]

Since I really love Iced Coffee Dreams just as it is, I would be very sad if it disappeared. What if Aster Glenn Gray promoted it--then might it pick up attention? Or do you think Aster Glenn Gray's audience is committed to queer-only content? ... I can understand the appeal of a book that can be ready quickly, though, and when I think about it, I suppose the transfiguration of Iced Coffee Dreams could well be something I'd love equally well.

I love evelyn_b's fanfic request! I can't wait to see what you do with it.

[osprey_archer]

I believe that if I unpublish the book, the people who bought it will still have their copies, so it won't disappear totally.

I've mentioned Jennifer Montgomery as my other penname on my Aster Glenn Gray accounts - particularly Holiday Blend, which I think has the most crossover appeal - but it's never seemed to sell anything. I think het contemporary is just too different from queer sometimes-magical historicals. Ashlin & Olivia is contemporary f/f and it's my lowest-selling AGG book (aside from The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball, but that is an outlier and should not be counted), which I suppose is also an argument against revamping Iced Coffee Dreams. It's also contemporary, so it probably also won't sell well. (Although it would certainly sell better than it did as a Jennifer Montgomery book!)

Would probably sell better if I made it m/m instead of f/f, but Wynne simply won't be made into a boy.

I need to rewatch a few Scorpia-centric episodes! (I don't think there are any really Kyle-centric episodes, but hopefully he'll show up in the Scorpia ones.) I'm thinking maybe they'll get stuck on some kind of mission together and be surprised how pleasant it is when someone is actually nice to them. (Does Scorpia feel a little disloyal to Catra for thinking this? Hmm.)

[asakiyume]

Kyle scenes! The one where he goes out to repair the travel thing even though burn-y stuff is falling from the air--I loved him so much in that. The one where they made the cake for Catra (in, I think, her fake memories at the end of S1?) out of his rations bars. The one where he's guarding Bow.

Scorpia would totally appreciate Kyle's gung-ho-ness, I'm thinking.

[osprey_archer]

I super thought that Bow was going to Friendship Kyle into letting him out (if anyone could do it, Bow could!) and then possibly they would take Kyle along when they escaped, but apparently there are limits to the power of friendship, and Bow found Kyle just as annoying as Lonnie and Rogelio seem to. Poor Kyle!

But you're right, Scorpia WOULD appreciate his gung-ho-ness.

For Scorpia, I definitely want to rewatch the episode where Scorpia and Sea Hawk bond about the pain of unrequited love. The one where Scorpia tells Catra "You're a bad friend" is iconic, but I think later in the timeline than I want - the fic will be set when Scorpia is still enthralled with Catra, although maybe just beginning to see that perhaps Catra will never love her back, and also treats her badly.

[silverusagi]

but the sales figures suggest that writing short stories specifically for release on Amazon would not be profitable

Would you ever make a post about what you've learned about publishing on Amazon? Or maybe you have and I've missed it.

[osprey_archer]

I don't think I ever have. Maybe I should? Possibly that would be of general interest.

[missroserose]

I would definitely be interested!