April Writing and May Goals

[osprey_archer]

The Honeytrap gravy train, which chugged along steadily for seven months, has finally slowed down, so I guess I gotta release more books now. Fortuitously, I’ve finished the fangirl novelette, Enemies to Lovers! I need to give it a final copyedit, confer with my cover artist, and hammer out a blurb…

“Fanfic writer Megan is falling in love with fellow writing club member Sarah… until she realizes that on Tumblr, Sarah is her fandom nemesis! But when they get handcuffed together for a writing club exercise, they have no choice but to try to work out their differences. Can true love overcome their wildly divergent characterization preferences for their favorite brainwashed Soviet assassin?”

Like that, except I think it needs a bit more room to breathe, and also I’d like to find a way to mention that it’s a time capsule/nostalgia trip for fandom in 2015. (I wrote about three-quarters of this book in winter of 2015/16, then abandoned it. I hadn’t realized that fandom had changed SO MUCH till I dug into revisions.) It’s on the Kalikoi schedule for July, anyway, so I’ve got some time to figure it out.

In the meantime, in May I’m planning to put out my m/m magical pet story “Care and Feeding” (now expanded! with a sex scene!), possibly under a different and less generic title, if I can think of one. I’ll be curious to compare the sales figures to “The Mating Call of the Teleporting Warbler.”

I’ve been noodling away a bit on Sleeping Beauty, but that’s more of a long term project, not something I expect to have ready for release anytime soon. I’d like to release another novelette or novella to put out in the meantime, and conveniently I think I’ve finally figured out how to fix the “Goblin Market” college roommates retelling I abandoned in disgust two years ago! Have decided it needs to be set in the early twentieth century (perhaps 1910s?) instead of the modern day, and a structure more like Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, although the magic won’t show up quite as late in this book as it does in that one.

Comments

[asakiyume]

I simply cannot wait (though I must) for Enemies to Lovers to be out in the world.

[osprey_archer]

I'm excited to get this one out there! I really think people will love it.

[evelyn_b]

I think I’ve finally figured out how to fix the “Goblin Market” college roommates retelling I abandoned in disgust two years ago! Have decided it needs to be set in the early twentieth century (perhaps 1910s?) instead of the modern day,

YESSSSSSSSSSSSS fill a basket with this and give it to me

Also intrigued by this fandom nemesis story (out of curiousity, how has fandom changed since 2015? I keep forgetting to check back in).

[osprey_archer]

I've gone from "perhaps 1910s" to "almost certainly 1910s," because then the heroines can get their hands on a movie camera and make a short filmed (fairy themed, of course!) with their college classmates. (Before the big Hollywood studios took over in the 1920s, there were lots of little regional studios, so I'm thinking maybe someone's older sister owns the camera. May be forced to do some research on regional cinema oh noooo.)

The biggest change is that fandom seems to have splintered to different platforms after Tumblr's porn ban. There are definitely still people on Tumblr (just as there were still people on LJ long after LJ was "dead," and are still people on DW etc), but now apparently fandom is most active on Twitter and Discord... I'm not really involved with fandom on either platform, so updating the story to a 2021 setting was really a no-go, even before you factor in the pandemic.

Terminology has also changed a lot, apparently. The one that really slayed me was that people don't use the word woobie anymore. WHAT??? I hadn't realized this AT ALL, which just shows how out of the loop I've fallen.