#doomsday pivot

Untitled Villainess Otome and Wisteria are the same thing. The first is/was the working title for it, which I'm still using because in my mind it's still in "rough draft" state, with some major editing that I'd like to do before putting it in wide release. It's currently only on Patreon, but the reviews and comments have been kind enough that it might eventually find its way to RoyalRoad or Amazon as-is.

AGARES is currently Patreon-only. You can find the collection here, across six releases. The seventh is imminent, I've just been wrestling with the ending of the first book. Once that happens, it'll be up on RoyalRoad and almost a full book behind what's on Patreon, my fulltime project, though I don't currently think that AGARES will be another million word sprawling webfic, probably.

Doomsday Pivot is currently on the shelf. The first book is written, it needs some editing, and eventually it'll come out, but there's absolutely no way for anyone but me to read it. So, sorry.

So today I spent half an hour looking at my first draft for Doomsday Pivot! and seeing how much work it would be to heighten those elements of it: how to make a protagonist that's underestimated, looked down on, and deprived. I don't really want to do that, but could I, if I had to, for the sake of money?

And the whole time I was thinking of the lyrics from Rockin' the Suburbs:

This has unfortunately made me a bit leery about what was going to be my next project, Doomsday Pivot!, about a small startup company that shifts from saving the world with educational technology to saving the world with shadow monsters and swordplay after the end of the world arrives and demons descend on humanity.

I don't think that I've really ever had someone respond positively to this pitch, or any reframing of it, which is a problem in the sense of ... I would like people to read the stuff I write, and recommend it to other people, and one of the other things I took from Save the Cat is that you don't just need a solid pitch to sell other people on the story, you need a solid pitch so that other people can sell other people on the story. You need to be able to wrap the story up in a pitch in such a way that other people who aren't you can pitch it. Otherwise they're saying "it's good, just trust me bro, ignore all the red flags, the first book is weak".

So I guess I'm staring down the barrel of putting this story on hold to write something else that pitches better, something that does all that Blake Snyder shit, centering the protagonist, putting a promise that's distilled down to a single sentence.

And unlike people who pitch scripts, I'm planning to work on my next project for at least a few years, a pretty significant amount of my life. I want to write what I want to write, but I want to write a lot of things, and maybe it really is just a matter of finding something that I think pitches well and writing that instead, hoping that it has a better chance of finding its audience than something that people just kind of shrug at.

Ideally I'd have worked this all out before writing a book, but better to figure it out now than three books in, when there's feedback on a pitch that I cannot meaningfully change.

I don't go out much, so this is harder for me, and I'm not the kind of person to bother other people in the store, because I wouldn't want to be bothered. But I have been trying to pitch to people I know personally, and I've been slowly wilting as I can tell my pitches are not landing.

The thing that Save the Cat recommends is some "inherent irony", a mash up of things that have some immediate and obvious tension with each other, and I think this works a lot better for a narrow band of high concept, but not as much for anything else.

The key, I think, is to have the idea unfold inside the reader's head, and to do it in such a way as to feel both natural and original. Something like "revenge story" unfolds, but it unfolds into cliché. I think you have to use things with memetic power, which are easily pictured, and then mash them together. It's a horror filmmaker's revenge story. A major league pitcher needs to stop a terrorist plot. A nebbish bookstore clerk finds himself in the center of an international conspiracy. I think these are all terrible, but this gestures in the right direction, at least as far as loglines go.

And my problem is that I don't think I can magic that kind of logline from my plot. You need to have the gimmick more or less from the start. You need to have that straightforward clash of two (or more) things front and center. You need to lean into stereotypes, I guess, protagonists who are easy to picture in two words.

So I am left in a quandry, which is that I have a full book that's already written, but no killer logline, only merely okay loglines.

Inspired by this post by @a-memory-a-distant-echo, this is a list of ongoing works-in-progress, where "in progress" I will define as "I have added at least one sentence in the last year as an indicator of actual mental load being used". This does not include worldbuilding or planning documents, which spring up like weeds. I am also including the ones that I get paid for via Patreon or publication deals or whatever.

Thresholder is my currently ongoing web serial, publishing two chapters a week (in theory ...). It's about a guy who travels between worlds and fights other people who travel between worlds, with each world being a relatively contained book. Currently about 750K words.

Doomsday Pivot! is, in theory, the follow-up to Thresholder, about a start-up that has to make a sudden change in plans when the end of the world gives everyone a character class. First book is rough draft complete but needs some responses to developmental editing, sitting at 104K words. (You can read a noncanonical first chapter here, which I had previously made public on my discord.)

Millennial Scarlet is a webcomic I write about a gig-economy demon hunter. Writing comics is awesome, mostly because I get to see my words come to life. In word count ... I'm not sure right now, but probably not all that much. In the middle of writing the fourth issue right now.

Glimwarden was a web serial that I abandoned, a black mark on my record. I intend to go back to it at some point, because it was my wife's favorite. You can read it up to the point where it was abandoned here. There are currently ~3 unreleased chapters, but most of the effort put into it has been rewriting it and bringing it up to snuff, as well as fixing some problems with it. Will get a relaunch at some point, probably, when I'm ready to commit to that. No idea on the word count.

Untitled Dance Magic story is probably a short story, currently ~5K words. It's based around a magic system where people do ballroom dance to create architecture, and is a somewhat traditional romance and/or coming of age story. I started writing it on a whim after a conversation with @etirabys at LessOnline, and hopefully they haven't started their own story, and hopefully if they have, hopefully their story doesn't overlap mine. I'll check before posting, hoping to get this one finished and out there.

Kensuke Fucks the World is an existentialist horror erotic novel, which I describe as being "like the Erogamer, but sad". Currently 75K words, and might never see the light of day. I think I can wrap it up in another 25K words, but I think it needs a lot of work.

Long Stairs will probably be novella length in its finished form, and will probably not be finished. It's an old story, which predates Worth the Candle by a few months, and is about a military fireteam making a routine delve into an endless shifting dungeon that the US military has already pulled a lot of magic out of. Medics with clerical healing, wands and firearms, high fantasy and military. There's unfortunately some stuff in there that I cannibalized for WtC that needs to be changed so it's not a repeat, but nothing structural, and there are a lot of plot beats that I enjoy in both the 15K words that are already written and what's in the notes. I did not put a bunch of work into this one, but it was one of those cases where I was reading through old stuff and got enough of a head of steam that it latched onto me again. (I also don't know enough about the military or how to write that kind of stuff, which is one of the reasons that this fic never got my full attention.)

The Lot is a story that's basically just "the backrooms, but with cars". It think it was inspired by a tumblr post, but probably won't be finished, since it's probably novella length. Currently 9K words, more a character study than it is about people stuck in an infinite parking lot and scrounging off what they can find in glove compartments.

Kitchen Sink is a bureauporn/bureaupunk novel about the agency created to deal with the rise of mutants circa 1977. Currently a mere 9K words, but the plan was for each successive part of the book to focus on another genre being discovered by the department, so you'd get a book with wizards, with vampires, with aliens, etc., mostly with a focus on how these are handled on an administrative level. No way I would ever be able to sell it, unfortunately.

Robot Team Isekai (not its real title) is about a van full of kids on their way to a robotics team meet that get transported to another world where their individual specialties grant them awesome abilities in a "your hyperfixation makes you perfectly adapted to the fantasy world" kind of way, but for five people with different hyperfixations. 2K words, probably will never see the light of day.

Full Meta vol. 2 is a novel about a group of high school students who get metafiction powers, so like ... one girl gets the ability to read the text of the novel they're in whenever someone is engaging in exposition, one guy can read the flashbacks, someone can read all the romance scenes or whatever, and they have a dysfunctional time dealing with each other through college and into adulthood. I fully recognize that calling it "Full Meta vol. 2" when no first volume exists is a gimmick title and would be confusing enough to immediately turn people away.

Dark Wizard of Donkerk was an old NaNo novel, but got halfway dev edited before my dev editor on that one flaked. I think it's a good story, just a matter of getting into the guts of it and making it great, but that takes time. 173K words, but this is old old. If you like rough, unpolished creative output, you can read it on my website.

Untitled Hermione/Draco fanfic is, uh ... I guess according to the logs was something that I put effort into in late 2023. I have read vanishingly little HP fanfic, and I'm sure there's a ton of this stuff, and that some of it is even good. This one doesn't adhere too much to canon or fanon, and is mostly about trying to write a realistic racist who falls in love with someone he's racist against. 14K words, I cannot believe I added anything to this recently, but apparently I have.

Technically by the criteria set out, I should count all seven of the NaNo test chapters I wrote. Of those, the only ones that have retained any brain space are "The Inevitable Return of Nathaniel Greene" and "Dungeon Core".

There are a few more that are technically outside the arbitrary time limit of one year, but I'm going to include them because I have thought about them in the last year (and will not include the ones that I have not thought about).

Of Witches and Wizards is what I thought was a romance but was told does not fit the apparently pretty exacting mold of a "romance novel". It's about a widowed witch whose two sons have left for college and a wizard who travels the world writing about places for a travel guide. They fall in love. Tons of worldbuilding stuff as they visit different cities and see the breadth and beauty of magic in the world. 15K words right now, was going to be a nice and slender novel.

Eager Readers in Your Area was a short story I wrote a year and a half ago. The WIP is a novel-length version of that about ... art, artists, AI art, dealing with people online, and a bunch of other stuff. I wrote an outline I thought was quite good, but if the short story is the first chapter, then I want an equally good and tight second chapter, and that's hard to do.