Young Writers Society

I'm gonna hate me when I wake up in the morning.

I know this is usually a new year's thing, but this is a "make me finish this project by new years" thing. I'm 35k away from the projected end of the Autumn Door - 22k away from my initial goal of 70k.

Here I'll record: my playlist for the day, scraps of plotting for draft 2, and the last line I write every day. Every single day until I finish this thing, and I might not stop even then.

I don't plan on confining this thread to a single project. Right now when I finish TAD I'm looking at writing a fun little middle grade novella, They Came From Planet Grape!, as a sort of palate cleanser after all this teen angst. Ideally this thread will help keep me accountable for my daily writing.

And @BlueAfrica I owe you a link. Remind future!me when I wake up. And to keep track of all the music I'm listening to...

YOU! CAN! DO!

Honestly I fell suuuuuuuuper far behind on my revisions this month - I only managed to look caught up last month because I got so far ahead in September. I can't wait for Thanksgiving break and I'm just praying I won't have to spend it all doing homework, so that I can write write write and try to do 30k in a week like I did back at the end of June.

22k by New Year's? EASY PEASY YOU SO GOT THIS <333

Playlist of the Day: None, since I'm playing D&D (well, at this point I'm listening to D&D as we've barely done anything at all...).

Song of the Day: Morrigan (Omnia)

Line of the Day: Favorite, instead of last, since I'm still writing:

She felt much less impressive, a cold echo of the world she had stepped into.

Daily Word Count: 47471 and counting!

Playlist of the Day: Ancient Powers -- I've been building it up and adding more songs to it. (See the first post for an updated list of the playlists I'll be listening to! General flavor/feel/theme with the main artists for a hint of what it'll sound like.)

Song of the Day: None; I have a pretty bad headache and can't focus on music right now.

Line of the Day:

“If my glamour failed in the middle of the pilgrimage, we’d be imprisoned before you could say abra kadabra.”

Daily Word Count: 48451 and counting -- but we're going out on a dinner date tonight so that might be my end count for the day. Really happy with it though! c: That's 980 words so far today, let's see what I can get tomorrow!

Playlist of the Day: Homestuck, yo. I've been doing a Homestuck word crawl, so I've got some of the music on in the background for ambiance.

Song of the Day: "Descend" from Homestuck Volume Five.

Line of the Day:

His sister shriveled everything around her into a silent death.

Daily Word Count: 50123! I might get a few more words in, but this is some good progress!

Playlist of the Day: Ancient Powers, because I got to write a Justin scene again and ugh I need to write more from his POV

Song of the Day: "The Elven Lover" by Omnia

Line of the Day:

The younger girl rested one hand on her hips. “We have to move—” The words choked in her throat. “I need to know he’s safe.”

Jupiter had forgotten about Scott.

Daily Word Count: 51072!

Guess who got sick??? Me! I got sick! I've written a little since my last update here, but this is going to be my first official update because ugh. Snot. Everywhere.


Playlist of the Day: Homestuck!

Song of the Day: none rn, just jamming to everything.

Line of the Day:

Zelda wished she had known the truth from the beginning—that they weren’t normal, and never would be—before he made a liar out of her.

Daily Word Count: 52948 and more to come~!

Didn't write Saturday, but did write yesterday...and today I finally broke 55k! 27k more to go to my projected ending...


Playlist of the Day: Songs for Teens Wearing Black, because I'm just that emo today.

Song of the Day: "True Friends" by Bring Me The Horizon. TRUE FRIENDS STAB YOU IN THE FRONT *jams*

Line of the Day:

“Did you think he lied to everyone?” Nerissa whispered in her niece’s ear. “You’re the last to know. Even that Key boy knew before you did—and he’s such a hopeless skeptic.”

Daily Word Count: 55459!

Had a nice talk with some friends today about my page count goal for the end of the book. It made me realize that I'm a lot closer to my end goal than I realized, and it's going to be *so* easy to go over my "ideal" page/word goal in draft 2... Mainly because I have to add so much stuff!

Draft 2 plotting will probably start next week sometime. I'm going to take a bit of a break from TAD once I finish, maybe take a couple weeks to just write some short stories, write that middle grade novella about grapes, and see how I feel when I come back to it for the next draft.

Playlist of the Day: Songs for Teens Wearing Black, because I'm really just emo lately.

Song of the Day: "My Demons" by Starset.

Line of the Day:

“If you could just decide not to be cursed, they wouldn’t really be effective, would they?”

Daily Word Count: 56549! Getting closer day by day to my goal. 25451 left until I hit my projected end point!

Some thoughts and ramblings before I go to bed (I'm getting in the habit of typing this up while I do my breathing treatment to keep my hands busy) -- I really have to figure out my character and plot economy for draft 2. Right now I'm kind of tossing pasta at the wall to see what sticks, but it's going to be difficult to sort through all the dirty spaghetti on the floor when I'm ready to edit.

Draft 2 I'm much less concerned with line edits, because it's probably going to be something close to a complete rewrite. Mainly because I have to add a lot to the beginning, and I'm going to be working out the foreshadowing and Important Plot Points in some different ways. How different? I'll... figure that out when I finish draft 1. I still have to see where this draft takes me and how I really want to end the story.

I do know where I'm going to begin draft 2, and I'm excited to get some planning for that on the table. This weekend I'll probably revise all my index cards on my corkboard that have been up since March and start planning out index cards/important plot points for draft 2, and see what strikes me as cool, what needs to be included, and what can definitely be cut.

Playlist of the Day: Teens Wearing Black. My jams these days.

Song of the Day: "Car Radio" by Twenty One Pilots. It sounds weird, but it kind of sums up Scott's POV right now.

Line of the Day:

“You can trust me for a little bit longer, Grey. We’ve got to stop your friend from doing something very stupid.”

“What’s she going to do?”

Cai opened a door in the wall, shifting it to the side with the sound of rock grating against rock. The smell of salt and seawater rushed in, cold ocean spray misting against Jupiter’s skin as she followed him into a cave etched in the cliff-side. “She’s going to wake up the sorceress.”

Daily Word Count: 58370! I'm hoping to hit 60k before the end of Saturday, so after that I'll be aiming for basically 5000 a week until the end of the year. But if I manage 1000 words a day I'll be able to take the last week off!

Skipping music today because I'm kind of exhausted, it's still early, and I haven't figured out what to listen to yet. I want to listen to Starset (LOVING Transmissions right now) but that'll get me way too in the mood for some scifi.

Line of the Day:

“We will take you.” The corpse of the boy spoke alone now, and he held a cloaked elbow out, not to Nerissa, but to Zelda. “Come. It is a long walk to where we must go. The tide will be out by the time we get there.”

Daily Word Count: 60213 right now -- I'm hoping to get another 500-600 words in today, at least!

I ended up introducing a group of characters that I'm still guessing on. Draft 2 will say if they stay for sure or not; for now I'm not going to mention their names in the text, and for those who actually read it we'll see if you can guess who they are ;D

It's becoming less and less cloaked that TAD is told in a sort of Arthurian faeryland, and I have to figure out if I want to strip the Arthurian myth from it entirely or go all in for the next draft. I think I want to go all in because it adds so much more context and conflict for the main characters -- but that remains to be figured out.

I really want to give this character a name in text, but doing so makes it to where I have to stick closer to the Arthurian legends... I'm debating it, trust me, and it's something that's going to massively inform draft 2, whichever way I go about it.

I'm getting closer to "done" with every day. It's kind of frightening. I've never finished a draft I cared about as much as I care about this one.

I'm at 64304 which is far closer to "done" than I ever thought I'd be on this project. I'm going to start posting some questions/thoughts if anyone wants to give feedback on this awful trash child draft of mine, and I'll probably start posting more snippets (once my characters stop yelling at each other with Awful Words).

A thing I made for Chapter 12.

Questions, if anyone is reading this:

How do you feel about retelling legends and folklore? Do you feel it has a place in urban fantasy, especially YA urban fantasy?

What is your opinion on Arthurian legends?

How do you feel about majority queer and neurodivergent casts of characters? How do you feel about writing that is skewed towards a queer and neurodivergent audience?

I'm very down to answering these questions.

I love, love, love it when people retell legends and folklore - I've very much enjoyed rereading Grimm's Fairytales and watching shows that all play off legends and such. (Merlin was very fun to watch.)

I feel like there has to be a place for it, as urban fantasy seems to be the perfect harbor for something neat like spinning off a legend or folktale.

Arthurian legends are super interesting and any spinning off those are a delight to read - I want to say I recall a modern-setting-ish for a book I read a few years ago, but I could be mistaken. I do enjoy all sorts of re-telling/re-doing things so, yeah.

I think it's awesome having a majority of those characters because it's just fun and nice to be able to read from all different types of people and kind of see what they bring to the table and a situation as compared to a neurotypical (if I'm using that term correctly). I think the beauty of writing books is to get other people realizing what goes into these characters and maybe reflecting on that by thinking - everyone is a person and everyone is unique?

Also, writing skewed toward a queer and neurodivergent audience is a great and wonderful thing and needs to happen more, as we need more diversity as a society, not less.

Uh, I hope that made sense. I just love the little tidbits I've seen of this novel of yours and I really hope that you meet your goals and have a great second draft!