A few days ago, I posted my Venom novel, The End of Happiness. It's been a pretty wild journey, so I wanted to decant it all from my brain.
The EddieVenom BigBag came across my feed on Tumblr, right at the end of the sign up period in mid-March this year. The minimum word count was 10,000, and that seemed a bit of a stretch goal given all the real life stuff I had on, but doable. I had to make a quick decision, and so I kind of went -- I'm doing Health Stuff and it's getting me down, and I have that idea about the Symbiote Emperor kicking around, and it would be awesome to get some art!
So I signed up, planning to write 10,000 words of silly space opera and get a bit of art, and finally explore the idea of the Symbiotes having names alluding to something other than murder and mayhem. Nice!
I couldn't start writing straight away, as I had another project I needed to finish first -- The Star Trek story I wrote for Space Swap in April: When sorrows come. I'd already been writing that for a while, so I hammered out the end, and was kind of amazed it ended up being 6,000 words long. As soon as I posted it, I started work on Happiness, at last.
The BigBang rule was that 80% of the work had to be completed, with an outline, by the check-in, in order to be assigned an artist. I managed to get around 8,000 words done, I think, and then put together the outline for the rest -- cool, cool, another 4 scenes, so it'll come in at 12,000 words. THAT'S FINE, I hammered out some more words and just squeaked by on the 80% rule. Phew.
And then I put Happiness aside for a bit so I could made my VidUKon premiiere, Mind Fight. I needed a break from writing, and it was so worth it. I cackled the entire time I was making that vid. It still makes me laugh now.
By the time I'd done that, I was put in contact with my artist, and I got so lucky, because ifer put their hand up for my story. Win!!!! That really put a spring in my step!
I wrote another chunk of words off the back of my excitement for art, and realised I STILL had three of the four scenes in my outline to write. Hmmm. Maybe it was going to come in at 14,000 words. The project was starting to be a bit more than I'd planned on, but I could still do it. EVERYTHING WAS FINE.
By this point it was June, and I had promised to run a mid-year Venom fest, so I put together Venom: Let There Be Chocolate, created the Ao3 community, set up the rules, advertised it a bit, etc etc. And then realised - belatedly - that I needed to create something for my own fest - because the first year of a fest never has many entries. I cracked my knuckles and hammered out As the Asteroid Turns in about three weeks, which wasn't bad as it came in at 7,500 words. I'm super pleased with it too - it's another story I'd had in mind for a while and it was fun to get it written. I also used it to try out some of the techniques I wanted to use in Happiness, like Galactic Universal Sign Language, so even though it was a detour, I still felt like I was making progress.
Through all of this, ifer was a trouper! Put up with my shenanigans and half written first draft with holes in it everywhere, and was full of enthusiasm for all the aliens. I hammered out the "turning point" scene so ifer could illustrate it -- the one with Eddie and Venom in the underground pool. I thought... Nearly done! and was so pleased with myself. LOL.
Then I woke up in the middle of the night realising there was a scene missing, and went back and filled it in... and as a consequence realised that there was a whole B plot I needed to make the A plot work. FINE, EVERYTHING IS STILL UNDER CONTROL.
Then I wrote the actual turning point scene -- the one between Eddie and Xan after the pool, which kind of came out of nowhere. My story-brain just does that sometimes and I've learned to go with it. It always makes the story better. ANYWAY, AT LEAST NOW I KNEW WHAT MY OWN STORY WAS ABOUT. Everything was FINE! Don't look at me like that!
I was a little worried, to be fair. The draft was at 20,000 words and I still had 3 of the 4 scenes in my outline to write. But I figured things were properly on track now, and it would be a straight run to the end.
And then. *internally screams* THEN... I realised I needed a C plot, to make the A and B plots work.
Friends, at that point I was NOT FINE.
The fic was officially out of control. It was not a fun little novella coming in at 10,000 words. It was a freaking full-blown novel. I'd be lucky if it came in at 30,000 words. I had birthed a monster, and poor ifer had done all that art, and I had to finish the fucking thing by the deadline because I could not let them down!
I panicked a bit, read a bunch of Witcher fic to take my mind off things for a while, got sidetracked by my actual job and had to do a bunch of marking. And then realised the deadline was HORRIFYINGLY CLOSE. I was at around 28,000 words and still had two of the four scenes in my outline to write.
I knuckled down and wrote 11,000 words in a week. NOTHING WAS FINE, EVERYTHING WAS TERRIBLE. But I had finally, at last, written all the scenes in my outline. Thank fuck for that.
ifer swooped in and did the first pass beta and I submitted the darn thing for final check-in.
For those of you paying attention, you'll realised there is still a pretty big discrepancy in my numbers. The actual word count of the novel is 46,000 words, not the 40,000 submitted for final check-in.
Because, you see, I asked the wonderful maharetr to beta during the gap between submission and the posting deadline. This was a very good decision, as she looked at the final third - written in that whirlwind at the end - and immediately started whipping it into shape, which was sorely needed. The rough bits got smoothed, the jumps in logic were made sensible, the missing emotional beats were added. A few thousand words were added in the process. Great. Good. Things were once again fine.
And then... I said, hey, maharetr, do you think there's a hole in this one place? Yes, maharetr agreed, there really was a hole where I had suspected there was a hole. Bugger fuck shit. I mean, no worries, 300 words would fill that hole. Piece of cake.
LOLOLOLOLOL.
The best part of a chapter and 3,000ish words later, the hole was finally filled, and the novel had gone up a rating from Mature to Explicit.
Also, I had officially written some of the kinkiest sex of my entire fanfic career. A notable achievement to be sure.
With that done, there was only one writing task left -- the epilogue wasn't quite right. The final changes to that were made on 6 October, literally the day before I had to post the fic. Thank you so much, maharetr, for holding my hand through that final terrible writing session. All the hugs in the world.
It took me two days to get the post ready on the Ao3, with all the images, fake links, and other formatting. I was doing that in parallel with making final changes. I finished getting the draft ready at around 3am on the 7th October and pressed post. Then I collapsed into bed and slept like the dead.
And here we are. Seven months later, a lot tireder, having written a 10,000 word novella in 46,000 words. FOR FUN. Don't forget that bit. I did it FOR FUN.
It was a lot of work, but I'm super proud of my kinky romance-in-space novel. I know it's blowing my own trumpet, but my god it is really fricken good. You should definitely go read it. ;)
