kinographer

I'm writing this update rather early in the morning (3am MST), as I drank a nice coffee at the brink of midnight, and I'd rather get this progress update out and written now before the terrors of being-up-all-night invariably grab me by the scalp and absolutely nuke me from doing anything super productive for the rest of the day. This is basically the part of the fic's process reports where most of my updates can be boiled down to "Yeah, I'm making progress, workin' on it, still alive and well". These progress reports kinda act as my motivator to keep on actually working, as I feel like if I don't keep doing it I'll be murdered by gnomes or whatever. But, like, yeah. Sorry there's not anything super interesting to talk about. This week, I got chapters 12-14 done, and I am planning on getting the latter half of 15 done sometime today as well--whether this is done before or after I fall asleep for 10 hours and wake up at 8pm is still up in the air.

I've actually gone ahead and started the process of beta-reading for some of these earlier chapters, though! Nothing super heavy right now: I've sent the first 3 chapters over to a close friend of mine, Luna, and she's working her way through reading it right now. I'm saving the uper heavy editing for later, but after watching a particularly enlightening video I made the sudden realization that "Oh, it's been a little more than a month since I have started actually writing this piece of shit, and I've hardly ever shown anyone the actual content of it other than barely context-less snippets".

So, yeah. I've technically got a beta reader now. If I was really about that I'd get someone who'd really kick me in the teeth on my writing prowess, but that's a situation to save solving for another time. If you'd like to kick me in the teeth in that regard, reach out to me on like, Discord, or Tumblr or something, and maybe we can mutually kick eachother in the teeth about eachother's writing. Is this a job post only fueled by a stupor that could only be obtained at 3 in the morning? Venus knows. Otherwise, life's been good! Save for the next couple of days that will invariably be quote-unquote "fucked" because of this stay-up-for-30-hours sabbatical I am on, I've been getting on a fairly healthy schedule. Been going on afternoon runs and walks, been doing pullups, been drinking water, generally doing a lot of things that are considered "good for your health". I've been doing some more outside-of-longfic, nonfiction writing recently on my Backloggd (light shill, ha-ha) and that's been a pretty fun side-quest to take on. Once my sleep normalizes again, I'm attempting to get into a more consistent, blocked-out schedule that can fit in all of the stuff I want to do in a reasonable enough time-frame. Right now I do perhaps a little too much internet-scrolling for my own good, but I'm trying my best to get past that. Promise. Pinky promise.

Gonna stop the update here before I get too carried away and start incoherently rambling. Thanks for reading once again! Slowly but surely, this fic will come along. And, as a gift, here's some more context-less snippets for your viewing pleasure:

Despite some days feeling a little less productive than others, overall the week has been pretty fruitful! I ended up playing Until Then for like 6 straight hours today, and now it's 8pm and I haven't written today. Oops. Will be doing a little bit of that after this goes live.

Terms of new stuff: Chapters 8-11 have been written and completed! Chapter 11 ended up being a bit of a smaller one, although because of how little was planned for it I am going to leave it until my second-pass after I finish everything.

At my current rate of ~3 chapters a week, I am projected to finish this sometime around July 22nd! That will give me a little less than a month to do as much editing as I can before my semester starts, and hopefully enough time to start publishing. Of course, this is assuming nothing happens (and given how prone I am to getting hopelessly addicted to games at times, things MIGHT happen). Even if I miss a couple of days, however, I am still pretty sure I can get this done on time.

The hardest part of writing is definitely ahead of me for the next couple of weeks. Most of the chapters so far has been stuff I am a little more confident in writing: the parts of the fic about Vi mostly trying to come to terms about her actual feelings, and working through them. A majority of the fic after these next few chapters, though, is about the rest of it--Vi working their way to living in that sort of reality. It's a part of the story I am admittedly a little less confident in writing, although I think if I've already gotten this far without too much issue, it shouldn't be too big of a deal. At worst, it'll just end up being something I can revise later.

Still crazy to think that this is real, and I'm writing this, and it's actually on track to be done. For how many times I've kinda flopped before, I actually have a longfic on its legs with no signs of slowing down! So far, this has surpassed the wordcount of my previous scrapped project, A Life of Possibilities (25543 vs. 28828) and is on track to even beat out Strength Not Found In Numbers (38380)! Some would consider SNFIN a longfic, although 7 chapters w/ 40k words just doesn't quite fit my personal view of it.

Thank you all for following along this far with me! As always, I am incredibly excited to make this real. Maybe this doesn't end up changing the world, but I've been incredibly happy to work on this project nonetheless. As a gift, here's some assorted snippets from the last few chapters: