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All uploaded chapters are linked below, in case you want to find a particular post or read them in order without scrolling back through my blog. Enjoy ✨
ive followed gr8writingtips for awhile and im so curious - what is you draft about? ( i could talk about mine for hours lol i just dont post about it)
I don't really talk about them too much online (other than, well, this one), but I have four projects "on the go" by which I mean one I've basically finished, two that I'm rolling around in my mind until the plots unfuck themselves, and one I haven't touched since 2018.
1. Tilt - finished one. Definitely my favourite (sorry, other projects). A cosmic horror / romance about a wealth management executive having a truly horrible week.
2. Coasterland - some of you might remember I uploaded the first few chapters as a webcomic, before taking it down to convert it back into a novel. It's a romantasy / comedy set in a world with magic rollercoasters. Rotating it in my mind like a cow.
3. THIS ONE: Dying Screams / The Human Spirit / Into The Mist - started out as a fantasy/Narnia rip-off about a girl fighting an army of evil ghosts, but gradually over time became...
I'm not sure I want to "spoil" the direction these are going in too much, so without going into detail: a horror about having to confront your inability to change the past, before it destroys your future.
(Rotating it in my head like a cow as I read through every draft I've ever written of it.)
4. Mayfly - haven't touched it in a while, but it's a horror about a shapeshifter discovering he isn't the only one of his kind.
Reblogged
writing tip #3379:
always finish your drafts, even if they’re awful. if you don’t, six years later you’ll find them half-finished, and you’ll regret that you’ll never get to read the version of your novel where one of your characters brags about no one noticing they have four arms during one-night stands
*Queueing old posts for Bluesky.*
...
WHA-
WHAT DRAFT IS THAT
Reblogged
My fiancée commissioned our friend to draw Birthday Screams! 😭
(Credit to @zevrxns!)
(One week ago)
Fiancée, entering room: What do the Dying Screams actually look like?
Me: The ghost army from LOTR probably.
Fiancée: Okay. But what was the lore again? Were they humans?
Me: I don't really know, I said they were the ghosts of a human army at one point, and at another point said they were 'spirits that came out of the ground' or something. I joked they were vikings in the rewrite post though.
Fiancée: Okay. [Leaves room.]
Me: ????
My fiancée commissioned our friend to draw Birthday Screams! 😭
(Credit to @zevrxns!)
Prologue: Hopefully Their Insurance Will Cover It
It's 20th September 2000, 7:30am. I know this because instead of chapter titles or numbers, I opted to use... timestamps.
So how do you know this is a prologue, El? Simple: I have access to files for many individual chapters' drafts. The file for this one is called 'Prologue 2.0'. There is also a 'Prologue 1.0', which is slightly different, but if I sporked my way through every iteration of each chapter going forwards, we would be here forever.
Draft 3 disclaimer
I will tag the specific posts this applies to, but this draft does include lengthy depictions of alcohol misuse/alcoholism throughout.
If you do not want to read this content (bearing in mind this is as written by me as a dumbass sixteen/seventeen-year-old), I'd understand if you gave this one a miss.
Let me know if you want any further information about the content.
The year is 2010. You are sixteen years old, and you are all grown up. Practically an adult. You have a long-distance boyfriend, who you met on a forum for guitarists even though you don't play guitar. You just liked the memes and figured it would be a good place to meet long-haired boys. You have a job at a supermarket stocking shelves. You have tried alcohol, but you've never got drunk because you're too scared. You spend a lot of time watching Family Guy and Supernatural and whatever terrible horror movie is playing on BBC3 at midnight. You have discovered energy drinks and your favourite is the own-brand Tesco one.
Your family moved, to a slightly bigger house down the road from your old one, and your parents let you choose all new furniture to replace your childhood bedroom set. One of the items you chose was a desk with a drawer underneath it, which you promptly filled with discs and stationary and then forgot about. You didn't take the old computer with you, because your family had a new computer which was much better.
When I came to write draft 3, I tore the whole story up and practically started from scratch. Maybe because I didn't know I still had copies of the previous drafts following the Limewire Incident, but also because I'd outgrown it.
Seeing as the first two drafts are so similar, I thought I'd compare the two, and just for fun, show you how I'd write Dying Screams now, if I wanted to keep the plot roughly as-is but also make it, uh, make sense.
Chapter 43: Layane Is The World's Worst Sister
We're at the last chapter! Can you believe we finally made it?
It hasn't escaped me that this draft is around 34,000 words long, which means the average chapter length is 790 words, so it's been super easy to break the 'novel' down into posts.
The next draft is 90,000 words, which means it's the first one that is actually the length of a novel. I think there are 33 chapters, but it's hard to tell for reasons I won't get into now. That's an average chapter length of over 2,700 words.
I'm probably going to have to rethink the structure of these...
ANYWAY. Time for the final chapter of the last version of this I wrote that was still called Dying Screams!
When my gran died twenty years ago, the grandkids were asked to write a letter which would be cremated alongside her.
I couldn't face writing a letter. But my gran had read Bronze's Diary, and never got to read Dying Screams, so naturally the only sensible thing to do was print out the whole draft, put it in a big envelope, and hand that over to be cremated instead.
True story.
I can't believe my parents allowed that, and to this day I feel like that draft burning was some kind of ritual act with an unknown outcome.
Eh, at least it wasn't draft 2.
Chapter 42: G-slur's Underwater Lair
Weeks passed. Layane still wasn’t awake, her wounds had improved… but when Roan or Clemant looked at her, she looked dead, even though they knew she was alive, she was breathing… she had a pulse… but she was as good as dead. She hadn‘t even moved. Roan had his head on her bed, tired and upset, Clemant was nearly asleep in an armchair at the side of the room.
I really love drawing these things out, don't I?
Chapter 41: She Took Quite A Beating
In a shocking turn of events, Layane is alive!
“Jez, get one of your hammocks, we’ll need some kind of stretcher!”
G-slur can magic a camera out of thin air, but not a stretcher. Got it.
Unless...
Maybe she can magic up a stretcher but is choosing not to, because that's exactly the kind of thing someone would do if they wanted to pretend they were trying to save an injured person, when really they wanted to delay treatment so they'd die.
[Holds microphone into the past.]
"Hey, twelve-year-old me, how's it going, I'm you from twenty years in the future. Yep. Getting married this year, by the way. To a woman, actually, you'll find out about all that later. Anyway, did you intend for G-slur to come off as super fucking suspicious, or was that completely unintentional? Oh, I mean the Lady of Water. I'm calling her that because you named her a slur, don't worry about it. Everything G-slur does suggests she's behind the horrible things that happen in the novel, right? She was the one who let Layane's parents die at the beginning, she was presumably the one who told everyone not to believe Mystic, she asked Jez to look after Layane and Clemant even though she's totally unequipped to do so, and she knew all along how easily the war could be prevented or ended and chose not to act on that, and there's a whole bunch of other stuff throughout that makes it seem like she wanted to start the war for unknown insidious and/or political reasons. I only ask because I remember very little of draft 3, but one thing I do remember is th- what? Yeah, you write a draft 3. I know, I know, draft 2 is perfect as it is, don't get me wrong but - no, I haven't got anything published yet, but I do have this blog that - right. Sorry, I'll try harder. Bye."