Amazing! Congrats! 
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Thank you! 
I finished chapter 13 at a whopping 4799 words. I was able to reach over 40K. I am super proud but I wasn’t expecting that I would write that much, yet I had a lot to say.
Three scenes worth…
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Because procrastination and burn out, I decided to take the Word docs where I’ve written all the lore/character descriptions and turn them into something fancy. I’m basically creating a small wiki site where I can tab through the novel titles that are in the same universe, just different point of time, and see my character images/summaries, world lore, etc. It’s really just for fun, so I’m having Claude help throw something together. It does inspire me to create a WordPress theme for writers to actually have something like this though. That sounds fun. 
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Sometimes my story gets so unhinged, I question my sanity.
Just sharing.
The corpse lay in the master bedroom upstairs where it had gone to bed. His head was cracked open like an egg and it looked as if some beast had hastily tried to devour the brain matter with pieces flung around the room—the “scattered husband” on the phone.
Blurred it because there’s a tad bit of gore
My website has kind of a Wiki-like aspect to it for the Elgana world. There’s some main pages with lots of keywords that link to other pages. It’s helpful for me, and hopefully interesting for others 
It would be cool if there was some built-in template though because it’s such a pain to update information and make sure I’ve updated that info everywhere it appears
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Something happened to Churro. Churro has been productive. I think Churro has been replaced by an alien version 
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Is your website straight up HTML or are you using something like WordPress/some other site to manage the content? I’d like to see it. Here’s a preview of mine, it’s full of dummy content. I can’t take credit for the design, Claude did it. 
It’s hardcoded content which will be a pain to update, so thinking of adding fancier functionality for easier maintenance.
I’m using WordPress
And I have no idea about coding
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Ah okay, this is WordPress.com versus a hosted WordPress site. So there’s limitations to customizing it. If you ever have any questions though, feel free to ask. I build WordPress themes and plugins for a living. 
At least until AI takes over everything.
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wait, there’s a difference?
See, idk anything XD I just wanted a website and went to the next thing after Blogger
Oh cool! One of those, huh?
What I want to do is Wikipedia. Make like a Wikipedia. So
This needs to be updated, but this is like the main Wiki page, and then I was going to have multiple keywords go to multiple other pages that dive deeper into the lore. So, if I mention Ancient Elganians, that would be a clickable keyword linking to a page on Ancient Elganians. And then if I mention Guardians in the page on Ancient Elganians, that would also have it’s own page. And so you could do a Wiki dive on my website.
Idk if that would be confusing
I should have planned my website before diving into it, but I didn’t think of that at the time. Now I need to fix everything 
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I’ve been meaning to write something here following something that happened, but I’ve been struggling to string these thoughts together. I think I have a better idea on how to put them down now, though.
Rant
How hard is it, truly, for someone to not give advice or feedback when the author has explicitly stated that she doesn’t want such things in the current stage because she is very, very far from finishing her first draft and anything substantial could wreck her progress before she’s ready?
This isn’t something I expected people to assume. This is something I’ve said over, and over, and over again. I am not looking for critiques or serious feedback right now. What I am looking for are casual reader reactions, theories, and all the other fun things to help motivate me and also give me an idea of what readers notice (and don’t pick up on). You’re talking to someone who’s trying to finish a series that’ll amount to nearly a million words and later edit that behemoth—I can’t afford to have that story be derailed before I finish the first of three books!
And yes, I know that you need feedback to improve. I KNOW. But there’s a difference between submitting short fiction for a workshop as part of a college course and sharing your writing with your friends for fun.
If it’s not something I can fix in five seconds, then I don’t want to hear it now.
Don’t give me your advice now. What’s so hard to understand about it?
And now I’m being filled with doubt, especially regarding the protagonist of my story. It sounds like something out of a mental illness—well, I am not mentally stable—but there was a dark period of time where I was feeling so, so bad about my ability to craft characters that my daydreams were plagued by scenes of my protagonist committing suicide in my head. I felt like a helpless mother seeing him like this.
Ask
Alright, I don’t know if I’m just a prude—doubt it—or if my friend is just being… I don’t know. But my question is, would it be considered weird if a young man and woman who are:
- unrelated by blood
- living together in the same household
- in their early- to mid-twenties
- at least somewhat conventionally attractive
are not romantically interested in each other or anyone else? For context, the woman:
- is a workaholic who has endured a lot of trauma, including loss of all but one of her loved ones
- is also still grieving the past
- has a very reserved (and borderline frosty) personality
- and has the maturity or mental age of someone at least a few years older than her real age
while the man:
- is an amnesiac with no memory of himself or events prior to the day he was rescued by the woman
- has been sheltered with no friends and has had extremely limited social contact
- has a mental age that is about a few years younger than his real age
I don’t know about you, but considering all the above, I just don’t find it weird that the above characters aren’t in a relationship or thinking of pursuing a relationship. The woman is a traumatized and grieving workaholic with an aura as cold as ice; the man is a sheltered amnesiac who’s only recently acquired a friend in the story because he was paired with a very extroverted coworker who went to great lengths to pursue a friendship. The man and woman’s relationship for most of the story to date has been that of mentor and student as well as guardian and ward.
Yet, this friend whom I had my most recent reading exchange with said that he found it weird that they were cohabiting but also not dating each other, or anyone for that matter. His reasoning? They were young adults, and for him, that meant that they should be… I don’t know the right phrasing for this… “hornier” or at least more interested in romance than how I’ve written them thus far.
I just found it unnecessary at the current stage, especially since I’m a young adult myself.
Then he said this: “Well, unlike you, I’ve had romantic experience.”
But I literally have an ex boyfriend, whom I’ve dated for more than a year?
“Yeah, but you didn’t have sex.”
But that doesn’t make our relationship any less real!
“Yeah, but sex changes the way you look at a person. Obviously you’re Catholic and you have your morals, which is fine, but the thing is that people in their twenties want to have sex and be in love, which is why the characters seem weirdly chaste considering their age.”
I got really upset. Before anyone says anything, I don’t care about what you do or what you believe in. One of my closest online friends is a degenerate and our conversations are often rather crude, but he’s never made me feel like my romantic experience was “less valid” just because I chose to remain a virgin.
I won’t lie, this was not what I expected to hear from a thirty-year-old man with a liberal arts degree who says he prefers hanging out with women because he’s not a fan of male humor, which he’s described as… mean-spirited? I can’t quite remember.
@rachelsfloetry I’d love to hear your thoughts on this 
oh and before you type out your response, the friend who said this is the romantically desperate one, not the blond and blue-eyed friend whose apartment I’ve hung out in.
Progress
On the bright side, I’ve managed to complete Chapter LXI of Blood Will Tell. I’d say I’m about halfway through Chapter LXII too.
I also may or may not have added a few dozen words to Chapter Two of The Forgotten Kingdom of Draconyn 
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Yep, there is a difference. In exchange for having WordPress.com host your site, you’re very limited in what you can do with that site feature-wise unless you fork over more money. For example, there’s something called custom post types, basically instead of just having “posts” and “pages”, in your case, maybe you have another post type called, “characters” or something that you might want to edit on an individual level and pull into a page/post. You can do this with WordPress for free, and even if you’re not a developer, you have access to a bunch of plugins to help you customize your site, again, for free: WordPress Plugins | WordPress.org
But WordPress.com is like, okay, we’ll host your site, we’ll handle the code stuff, and if you do want to install things or write a little code, you gotta “update your plan”, aka money. 
In your case, did you know that “Pages” can have a hierarchy? So you can have a parent page called “Sorcerers” and then children pages called, Habitat, Gender (whatever your deeper sections are) and you can link to them from your parent page because they each have their own url. In the browser, it’d look something like my-site.com/sorcerers/habitats which also helps search engines figure out what your content is better.
You can do a lot with CSS too. I have a WordPress.com site for my poetry because it’s just a place to dump my writing so I don’t need anything super custom. But under the “Appearance” option in the sidebar when you’re logged in, depending on your theme, you might have options to customize how your site looks. The “Additional CSS” could make a huge difference along with having access to Google Fonts, but it looks like WP.com charges you to get access, again, regular WordPress out of the box, it’s free. 
At the very least, you have control design-wise on a block level, meaning you’d have to customize your content with colors, fonts etc. per page versus being able to define it at a global level. You might be able to copy/paste these into your content and customize to your liking: Block Pattern Directory – WordPress.org
Anyway, I rambled! Try parent/child pages to help you organize your content. You can even use the Query Loop block on your parent page to pull content or you can just link to them manually, up to you.
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First, I’d like to say that in your fictional world, a world that is not our own (or maybe it is, who knows?) you can make whatever rules you want. People can be purple, the skies can have three suns with winking faces, the ocean can be made of cotton candy. You’re the author, so you define what that world is, and it’s rules, provided that you’re not basing said world on “real life.”
Now, as for this gentleman and his “advice.” He is both right and wrong. If you want to know my perspective as an older adult, one who grew up in a Christian household where women were expected to remain virgins till marriage, and before the age of social media which does play a part in it, then I’ll tell you what I think based on my experience. More below the cut:
Summary
Is it true that “young” people are all obsessed with having sex? One. Depends on the culture and the time period. There was a point in time where a woman’s ankle was scandalous so keep that in mind. Two. Current day, yes. Most people are obsessed. When I was a teen/young adult, yes. They might not outright say it, but for a lot of people, being attracted to and finding someone to date was a major part of their lives.
That’s why I was so wary of the guy you’ve been hanging out with. I’ve been in a lot of situations when I was younger where I thought men were just “nice guys” or “didn’t see me this way” and honey, let me tell you, if given the opportunity to get in your pants, they will shift from “guy best friend” to “interested in you THAT way” VERY quickly.
Childhood friend example. Story time. Grew up with this boy since I was a kid, not sure how old, we always lived across the street. My parents would even let his parents babysit me in emergencies. We played together, but as we grew older, that happened less and less. Fast forward, I end up going to the same high school as him, he’s a year ahead of me. He used to be the, “fat kid with the braces,” and I was the “sickly stick figure who got picked on for being small” but now? Hormones? He’d lost all that weight. Worked out even. So did I. We were decently attractive people. I have completely trusted him with my safety and he has never done anything like touch me inappropriately to make me feel otherwise.
Until one day, I met a new boyfriend, the man who is my husband today. I shit you not, this childhood friend of mine changed real quick. Same guy that would comfort me when I cried over other boyfriends breaking my heart etc. Would walk together home from school sometimes. I’d still go to his house, or hang out in the middle of the night (rebellious teen years lol) and like I said, I never once thought I was in any kind of danger. Didn’t feel weird about leaning on his shoulder or holding onto his arm.
See he had this mattress in his basement. We’d sit on it and play video games and eat ice cream with another friend of his. They’d joke that if we weren’t married by the time we were 30, that I could marry one of them and then they’d “playfully” fight over who’d get to be my husband.
Well, now that I brought this new boyfriend to meet them, suddenly childhood friend was being extra touchy. “Play fighting” in a way where he was constantly picking me up, tickling me, basically any way to have his arms around me in front of new boyfriend. On the same mattress we just played games on. I was kind of oblivious when I was younger due to my sheltered upbringing, so while I sensed he was being weird, it didn’t immediately ring any alarms. My new boyfriend was PISSED. Which was the goal, I assume, by childhood friend.
Anyway, eventually as I grew older, I realized just because I saw my childhood friend as “my brother”, the way he interacted with me, was NOT how a “family” relationship is. I realized that if given the opportunity, if I’d dumped this new boyfriend he was clearly trying to get rid of (and failed), that all those jokes about marrying him/being with him, that’d be 100% serious if I made that offer.
Point is, and not to freak you out, but most people, if there is an attraction, cannot interact purely platonically. This is how affairs happen. Wife gets close to male co-worker at work. She starts confiding in him or behaving in a different way with him than her husband. She and her co-worker look forward to seeing each other, even thinking about each other outside of work. Even if neither of them “make a move” the emotional affair is already there.
So yes, the gentlemen is right. In real life, in western culture and current age, a purely platonic relationship between opposite genders does not exist. Even if no one makes any moves, mentally, the thoughts, they exist. The temptation is there.
HOWEVER, you mentioned the characters have certain circumstances, one traumatized/grieving, the other, missing memories, and so that can change things. If two people are too mentally/physically damaged to even really consider a relationship, I think it can be possible for them to live together, even if it’s just to kind of protect each other/help each other because there’s an understanding between them that no one else understands.
Lastly, yes, sex does make a difference. There’s a reason why so many women fall victim to crappy men. Because if the sex is that good, it can make the man’s transgressions much easier to forgive. Sex can also be mistaken for “love”, especially for women because of the hormones/chemical shift that happens when a woman has sex. Men use sex as a status symbol amongst their peers. I think for a lot of men, once they become older/married, they care less about this stuff, but especially as a teen or twenty-something year old, they’re made to feel “less of a man” if they can’t “secure” someone to sleep with.
Anyway, hope that’s not TMI, but I hope it helped! I also want to add that there is always going to be a small percentage of people who don’t engage in this kind of stuff at all even as teens/young adults. People who were not driven by attraction and the desire to “be with someone” but I’ve found that these people were the minority. (Again, in western society, modern day.)
P.S. I have more “horror” stories involving “guy friends” if you want more, but hopefully that example is enough.
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I think I knew that. I had a hunch I could do that, but the hunch came far too late Thanks to you, now I know I should’ve listened to the hunch. Maybe I should have looked into it.
I really need to sort it all out. Maybe in a Word Doc first
Do you plan out websites before creating them?
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I do, yep.
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Thanks for the long write-up! I just, yeah, sort of needed to vent.
Mhmm. This fictional world is, in fact, not ours. I still try to make it more realistic or “believable,” though. Unfortunately, I’ve been filled with doubt since that one thing /:
That was also what I was thinking. I’m from Southeast Asia, which is very culturally different from the West, and while I’m not saying that young people here don’t feel any horniness, the emphasis on sex and romance is nowhere near as pervasive as it is in Western society.
I can’t say that my fictional world is more like one culture or the other, but I will say that topic (and many other things) are mostly irrelevant to the plot right now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m so sorry to hear about that! 
I’m glad you ended up with your husband. I guess I’m just very lucky that I don’t have any similar stories from my end, though my circles heavily skew male.
That just sounds tragic
Glad you think so too. I thought it would’ve been more obvious by now that the two main characters are in very atypical circumstances /:
Then again, out of all the people I’ve shown this to in real life, that specific thirty-year-old friend is the only one who’s mentioned this. My ex boyfriend didn’t think it was weird that they weren’t dating, and so did my college roommate. That thirty-year-old friend, on the other hand, admitted that he was less interested in fight scenes and worldbuilding, and “more interested in people” and romance (because, he said, he was lonely and liked seeing romance in stories).
…Which also makes me wonder if I should even continue this reading exchange and he was the one who kept on asking to read my story too, knowing that I don’t like romance as a main genre and write a lot of plot-relevant violent scenes in this particular book.
And this is what I find most tragic it was my ex boyfriend who confessed this to me when we finally started dating. He did feel ashamed for being inexperienced, and it was only after he “messed around” did he realize that he… barely got any enjoyment out of it at all. He was the one who kept on reassuring me that he didn’t care if I couldn’t get naked with him because he enjoyed our intimacy way more anyway 
and that I was more than satisfying him physically regardless 
Oh and just to clarify in case I wasn’t clear enough, this guy from the last reading exchange is not the same as the blond guy whose apartment I visited 
in fact, I did talk to blond friend about it just to get a second opinion, especially since he’s read some chapters of the same story I’m working on.
When I told him the things that our thirty-year-old friend said to me, he became visibly disgusted and said the guy was wrong.
There was another (female) friend present at the time and she jumped in to bring up this one incident with the thirty-year-old friend that happened while all of us were there. This happened near the end of a write night, and that day, his lunch date with someone else got canceled. He was understandably in a bad mood, so me, blond friend, and bisexual female friend were all trying to cheer him up. That’s when the thirty-year-old guy asked me and the bisexual female friend this: “How are women able to be so blasé or not care about being in a relationship at all? Like, how do you women want to be single, because I want to learn how to accept being single.”
Neither of us liked that. We still tried to help, and the other female friend gave some genuinely good advice, but he didn’t seem to be in the mood to take it. But we tried 
I guess one of the main things I also didn’t like from the last reading exchange was how it felt like he was… talking down my experience or relationship simply because he was older and had more exes? I mean, I may be more than half a decade younger, and I may have only had one ex, but that relationship was more recent (we broke up 1.5 years ago, whereas his last relationship was more than 7 years ago) and my multiple therapists have agreed that most therapists themselves would be unable to endure the things my ex and I have endured together.
I guess I didn’t like being… infantilized?
Oh, it really was! Thank you again for writing all of this out 
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I’ve been more obsessed with working on this wiki of my novel’s lore and characters than I have writing the darn novel. I guess I feel like by having this cool site with characters, maps, etc. it’ll help encourage my writing too? It’d also be cool to show to other people and maybe the visuals will lead to interest in reading my story.
As far as my e-book goes, not a lot of fanfare yet which I expected, but one of my close friends bought it. She grew up in the same culture/neighborhoods I did so my poetry about those topics really resonated with her, she really liked it. 
That made me really happy.
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I still need to finish chapter 15 for Project Succession and start chapter 1 for Project Red.