Accountability and Inspiration - Lets finish a book together *new questions 9/2*

All Things Writing
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Okay, awesome! As for the questions:

I plan to get at least one more beta reader to give me feedback, and then by the beginning of next year I want to start my third draft. I’m hoping to complete it by the end of 2025.

It’s the first book in a science fiction series, focusing mainly on synthetic humans created through genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, space travel, and aliens as themes throughout the overarching story. If you’d like, I can give you the synopsis for the first book.

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Is the third your last go through? That’s super cool! I’ve never gotten through the first draft phase so i’m not really sure what comes next lol.

This sounds super cool, i’d be totally down to check it out when I get some time.

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I’m hoping it will be the last rewrite draft, and then I can get an editor to take a look. They might want me to make some changes but hopefully nothing that requires me to start from scratch on a new draft. But I’m willing to do as many drafts as it takes. I just hope it only takes three.

Honestly, I’ve never published before, so I’m not sure how the full proccess works either. I have only ever finished a first and second draft. If you have any questions about writing a first draft, I can probably answer them though, since I have made it through that proccess before!

Here’s the synopsis!

Synthetic: Genesis

In a future where war runs rampant across the globe, climate change has decimated the earth, and resources are rapidly dwindling, science has become mankind’s last hope at salvaging life on earth. Time is running out as scientists scramble for solutions to the fear of extinction that is gradually becoming a reality. While some scientists focus on trying to salvage what they can of the planet Earth, the Horizon project looks to the stars for salvation. Still in the building stages, they plan to send a ship out into space to journey to and terraform a new world for humans to colonize. If the mission is a success, more ships will be sent out to more worlds to spread humanity across the universe so they can thrive off of the home world, and perhaps give it time to recover from the damage that has been done.

Meanwhile, the androids that have been used to try and ease the burden on humanity are very limited. Dr. Gayle Chen and Dr. Evander graves offer a new advancement in artificial intelligence technology in the form of synthetic humans. Sythetics are A.I. with both cybernetic and biological components married together in the form of genetically engineered bodies integrated with computer technology. They are meant to be the next step up from androids in service to humans.

Alma is the first prototype to come online, but displays signs of technological singularity. This sentience is not something his creators planned on when they designed him. Now Alma must figure out what he is and cope with his creator’s attempts to “fix” him while also trying to produce more synthetics that do not have his “defect”. He simply wishes to be allowed to exist as he is, while the world is falling apart around him.

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Dang, I feel that lol. Very cool. I haven’t read a ton of Sci-Fi (I’m limited to Dune, How to Lose the Time War, 1984 and the first half of Brave New World) but this seems pretty interesting. And I’m all for a good dystopian-esque future setting. It kind of gives me a little bit of Harlock Space Pirate vibes meets Ergo Proxy. Which I am all for. Hope your drafting and editor stuff goes well. I’d be all for seeing the final product and actually have a friend who is all for that kind of thing. He’s a big sci-fi guy.

Ig my big question is how rough would you say your first draft was? Like how much did you end up changing? I always get so caught up in how things sound that I feel like I never make progress.

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Thanks!
As for how rough my first draft was, I’d say very. I changed a lot in the second draft because the first draft was mainly just me experimenting with and developing the characters. I barely had the most basic of plot ideas and they weren’t developed very well at all in the first draft. The second draft is where I actually turned it into a story with a cohesive plot and series of events.

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I just did the math for Project Succesion and there are far more noble branch members than dynasty members of Aeris’s family. Like there are 118 family members of the Thornwood Dyansy, these family members are split into three branches called upper, middle, and lower too. Yet in each of the eight branches the overall total is 1,276 members. Add that and the numbers of people in the Thornwood Dynasty is 1,394 people.

That is a lot more subbranch members than actual Thornwood family members. I honestly was expecting myself to do more people, but whatever it’s fine.

Also, I decided to change the characters name to new names from Project Succession.

This is going to be for the second draft, though I only changed some names, the others fit perfectly.

The names were either too on the nose or too Earth-ish.

Alagossia is an alien planet with humanoid magical people, commonly found names on Earth don’t work here, it shouldn’t at all.

I did the same with a few countries too.
Honestly, I still need to come up with a title for Project Succession, seriously got to do that.

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i’d like to finish a story, Enigma, that i’ve been working on for quite a while. currently in the editing stage, i’d like to finish that and then go back and write and polish the ending.

i’d also like to finish outlining Artifice Ethereal.

ok so I have 2.
(SPOILER-FREE)

Enigma

How to love yourself is an enigma.

Lara is different. Very different. As a reclusive florist living in the woods with only her servants, it’s safe to say that she’s different from ninety-nine percent of the population: she has no friends and no life except the flowers she sculpts into bouquets.

She likes her little cabin in the woods: it’s safe, isolated, and protected by the tiny Tolono. But when she finds a half-drowned runaway girl in the woods, her love for the life she knows starts falling apart.

What’s that feeling in her chest? A longing for … companionship?

***

Princess Sona Ivini of Anachronata is not cut out for marriage. She couldn’t care less about the laws of high society, or the balls, or the dresses, or the money. However, according to Sona’s insufferable mother, Queen Ether, that’s what the rest of her life is meant to be.

At her eighteenth birthday celebration, Sona once again must don the mask that she is forced to wear on the daily. However, she can’t take it for long and runs off into the night, leaving an enraged mother and confused nobility behind.

With nowhere else to go, she stumbles towards the Daer river, almost drowning after she falls into it. She loses consciousness on the bank but is soon found by a certain paranoid florist who vows to do anything in her power to keep the girl safe… and to teach her about what love actually looks like in the process.

In this fantasy comedy romance, chaos and darkness are ultimately triumphed by the light of self-love and affection between two people who discover what it means to be human.

Artifice, Ethereal

Don’t you find all of this artifice, ethereal?

As a diagnosed sociopath, Heliox finds emotions repulsive. Above everything, he prizes logic and rationality. Emotions never got him anywhere. Emotions got him beaten, abused, and abandoned. Emotions made him weak and vulnerable.

His girlfriend, on the other hand… Lupina is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. She is the definition of emotional. Heliox doesn’t understand her, and she’s hurt by his hard repulsion towards feeling.

However, despite how much they fight, neither of them cannot live without the other. When Lupina decides to start a social media account to bring them closer together to why they originally paired up — fighting stigma around mental illness — of course Heliox agrees. However, neither party ever expects life to have surprises and sorrow in store for them. Soon after, Heliox and Lupina both die in a car crash and are forced apart by Judgement.

Thrust into the world of angels and demons and trapped in different levels of Hell, they must each find a way back to each other before time Satan and God find out their plans… and they are torn apart forever.

In this dark and comedic romance, good and evil battle it out. Chaos and depressing moments mingle with fluff to demonstrate how exactly love and honesty make a winner take it all.

There’s also the poetry but that’s not the point of this ig.

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Man those both sound great!

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Getting started after a long break is always painful but I got in a solid 1000 words for the day. Not sure how useable anything I’ve worked on so far is but working on something is still a start. Something really sucks about getting up and trying to hammer out words in the morning before work. Thinking about the story all day ot only come home too tired to put together all the ideas from the day. I’m really trying to not get discouraged but dang.

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Do you do writing sprints when you are writing or just write without a timer and until you are tired or done?

Meaning you write a full chapter in one sitting, regardless if it is “long” or short?

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Yeah, I do lo. Mostly as a hobby and it makes sense yeah.

I’m so out of the story, I am thinking of switching to my second or third choice :joy: but then I’m not being very consistent or held accountable, am I? The third choice has a lot more ideas going for it now. Maybe I need to switch between them?

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I used to a do a bit of all of them depending on the mood. Though, now it’s really just been fitting it in when i have time and just going until i feel like its stopped being productive. I’ve been trying to get up at 5 to get some writing in before I have to get ready for work at 6. Then I don’t really get to see my laptop again until 5pm and its just using whatever I have left in the tank at that point. Sprints are good when I’m lucid and inspired but I’m normally pretty dead after work lol.
And honestly, I’ve completely lost my endurance. I did 2021 NaNoWriMo and sat down and did the last 10k of the 50k on the last two days. Now it feels like i can hardly make it 45 minutes before I get antsy.

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What software do you do it on? I used to be in orchestra and a friend and I would play around on some free software…i think musescore? and band lab and just make random stuff lol.

I feel that. I kind of am. But I don’t know I get excited about an idea and it feels like as soon as i try hashing it out on a page it just feels impossible. So moving onto something else probably wouldn’t be any more successful. I think it’s a lot of being out of practice and unrealistically high expectations. It takes a lot of the fun out of it.

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I am a garageband graduate who uses Reason 12, and also FL Studio 21 because I can’t be bothered upgrading both of them.

Yeah, well I guess I could try and get back into the spirit of the Jose story by finding songs that are in his style. I picked him doing music sorta like this because his record label want to market him as a romantic ladies’ man:

And he’s like “No, I wanna do music like this”:

(Kinda weird video warning, lol)

But yeah, I understand the expectations part. I think that Jose is my passion project that I’ve been looking to do for a long time. But the ideas for it past the basic idea and the music, I’m struggling with. I don’t want this to be boring at all. I’ve thought about having Jose die too, and be trapped in musical purgatory, lmao.

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Ah, I’ve heard of this one before.

So, Jose is more into the edgier vibe. Very cool. Musical purgatory, I’m not sure if that sounds great or like some real weird form of torture. I know the feeling though. I get so attached to characters and then it comes time to work on it and its just like…welp…

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It’s not hard to use. It’s just a bit intensive at the start lol.

Yes, he always has been. He made a song when he was 14 about hitting his choir conductor with a chain and making him bleed out so he didn’t have to sing Ave Maria one more time. (Yeah, he’s weird, I know).

Yeah, I was thinking that but I think that would be more a dream sequence than anything. I was thinking of adding flashbacks too, but I’m not sure? :thinking: The muscial pugatory idea could also be another character, no idea. I think having Jose alive is the best course of action for the moment.

Yeah, same here lol. I have scattered ideas and I roleplay with Jose, and idk anymore. I can’t make a fully coherent plot and stick to it? :confused:

I’m also working on the ex-best friend-turned-forced-love-interest-turned-kinda-enemy, the two best friends, the love interest and the crazy rival. Maybe I need more characters, like the manager? lol. Or the record producer/engineer who helps him? :thinking:

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Is it wrong this made me laugh? I have a soft spot for weird lol.

I’m not going to lie, I don’t know a lot about him but I think I value him being alive at the moment as well .

So, I actually almost exclusively come up with stories around a character idea and some random bits and pieces of things I want to happen. I watched a video series a few years back and it was all about the importance of forming strong protagonists and about how to make a character driven story. It really stuck with me and I use a version of her story formula. If you’d like I could share it with you. That and have you tried just make list of just random things you’d like to have happen in your story? What i’m working on currently came out of the concept of “necromancer” “picking on romantasy tropes” “chaotic hot man” “Ballroom scene” and somehow between the two things came up with a main vague plot and just narrowed it down to plot points. I have the videos saved somewhere if you’d be interest in those either.

Though back onto the character thing in specific. I have these two projects that i planned so well and loved the characters so much. But i’m just not currently at the kill level or the state of mind to write for either of them. The blessing and curse about what i’m working on is its still fresh enough that I wont have that crippling fear or doing my characters wrong but unfortunately don’t have the same level of excitement.

Maybe, I always end up not putting enough lasting characters in. I get really sucked into that main few sometimes.

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Nah, lol. I have a soft spot for weird, too.

Jose is like “at least someone does, Churro” to me lol.

Yeah, sorta same here.

Yes, that sounds good please show me it. I want to form a good, character driven story. A lot of mine tend to be that way but have no really good formula/structure tbh.

I sorta am doing that, but I think I don’t have enough ideas per-se and that’s kinda annoying. Yes, I’d also like that video as well.

I planned Igorteo well (Igor and Juan they’re this older couple) and I still haven’t written them past 8k but I like them as characters a lot. I use them for rokleplaing and would never kill them off. Yeah, that happens a lot. A shiny new idea, then meh not excited when you start writing on it.

I am working out the perfect amount if you get me?

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Yeah, I was real frustrated with this one too because of that. The first half wasn’t bad because it’s all really a joke. I more or less just tried to cram as many cliches in as possible and noted how my protagonist can respond as incorrectly as possible. The second half was a lot harder considering it’s serious and more about actual character development and building relationships.

until you sit frustrated long enough and realize you really like the characters and end up in the same spot you were before the new idea lol. I’m fast approaching that for the 3rd time now.

Yes though I’ll never get there myself lol.

Alright I’ll try to throw that into a shareable doc

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Yeah, I get that too. The first part is always the easiest and then the middle and second act is painful. It always is that way for me, at least. And the ending is slightly easier, but the build up to the end is hard.

:smiley: yes lmao. It’s like okay great you got all these ideas, but what happens next? TELL ME

Yay! I can’t wait! I will have a lot at that asap thanks.

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