It’s my 45th birthday today, and thus time to take stock in what I’ve been doing and what I’m working on this year.
Since January of 2016, I have written more than 360,000 words of fiction. This does not include blog posts, lengthy essays or most of what I do here on Tumblr. I passed a lifetime total of 1,000,000 words in early January.
More importantly, since Christmas I have written over 80k, despite my first known massive RA flare. I’ve started chemo for that, and steroids, and so if I seem to have a sense of urgency about writing right now, it’s because I’m not sure how long I’m going to have functional hands. 7 weeks and 80 k, or an average of 1500 words a day, roughly. Keep in mind that on a good day, with my hands flying, I can hit anywhere from 5-10 k. This is me poking at one story or another every night for a few hours. I took 2 months almost completely off from writing fiction last year and still averaged over 1000 words per day on the days I did work.
I like who I am better when I’m writing regularly. So with that, the story roll:
Healing Rules (Check, Please!): Back burner, gestating. Chapters 6-9 are going to be heavily political and intense and I would be ready to start working on them, except the story is at a really good pause point and two other projects are taking more of my attention. Will finish. Eventually. Should you read up to the current point? YES. If it weren’t for the fact that a) I know what happens next and b) the chapter names are too good to put in a different fic, the “next part” would be a separate story. http://archiveofourown.org/series/447310 for the whole series. Word count 146,995. (six stories)
Translations on Ice (Series, Yuri!!! on Ice)
So all stories that are posted are complete, but there are TWO more in progress, neither posted at all. 65k has already been posted in four stories.
Translations: Termination is the story of Yuuri and Victor in Russia. I haven’t decided how far it will stretch, but it’s MOST likely to go from their first night to their wedding. 2700 words written.
The other story I’m working on in the same series but which is NOT in sequence because it focuses on Yuri P, is Transition: Puberty. This is more character study. There may be other Transition stories. 3925 words written
Nitty gritty of this series: I’m playing up the political relative to the series (which the creator flat out states takes place in a world where homophobia does not exist and where clearly Russia and Japan have close enough political ties that someone can go between one and the other without a visa), downplaying it a bit compared to reality (because certain things that happen in the show require a lot of liberties to be taken to handwave, Russia is awful right now for LGBT people and I can’t write how bad it is and still work on my other stuff. YOI is my happy place right now.)
I’m writing Victor as gay, Yuuri as very strongly demi and increasingly nonbinary, and Yurio as aro/ace but also in desperate need of nonsexual physical contact, and agender, with significant body dysphoria in regards to the whole concept of puberty (i.e. he’s not wild about gender in general and is really pissed off at the changes in his body.)
And then there’s A ‘Lon Story
This one is in my own original universe, and you’re going to be hearing about this a lot. I’ve been working on the backstory in theory for 7 years, gestating the ideas and working to understand the science involved. Now I’m actually writing the backstory of the backstory. My ideal would be to get a couple artists working on it intensely and start with “just the backstory”, a webcomic that explains the main characters… but current events and a burning need to get things going have sent me farther into the backstory, and I’m writing that out and have a number of people who are pitching in with asking important questions and even filling in details that I don’t feel a burning need to fill in.
This thing hasn’t been published and already fanfic exists (in the margin notes, I’m not even kidding).
So I’m not exactly sure how this is going to go, but I may start throwing chapters and shorts up on Patreon to build enough funding to hire artists directly so that people can prioritize the art.
It’s an important story about how the world might end and how we might save it. I’ve been calling it “science fiction so hard it crunches”, but it also ends up being really, really political. And it feels urgent, in part because, due to the outcome of the last election, my off-the-cuff prediction for when the world starts to end is in 2020. (well, now, really, but it’s really going to hit the fan in 2020.)
This was supposed to be the AU.
If you’re curious and want to get in on the ground floor of worldbuilding, this thing may be simply too big for me to do alone. Find me on tumblr and pm me, and you, too, can yell at me in margin notes about the last Freshman Class of the last university on Earth, and an autistic woman who saves humanity because she just can’t stand dealing with people.
