Story/Series Planning Part 2! (ft. HOGBOS) (Patreon)

For my series: Hearts of Gold and Blades of Steel, I have a slightly different approach to how I plan and plot the story. This is because it is intended to be a much longer work (at least 50 chapters) with lots of story and character arcs. So, one word doc won't cut it!

The HOGBOS plan is split in two:

One doc for OUTLINE & STORY (9K words currently)

One doc for CHARACTER NOTES & SETTING NOTES (3K words currently)

These are some images to show just part of these docs (with lots of spoilers redacted haha) and again you can see where I highlight the parts of the outline in yellow that I have used in a chapter 💛

You can definitely see the difference between the Beta Bully character notes and the ones for HOGBOS just in length and depth alone. I also have sections where I rank the main group of women from tallest to shortest, oldest to youngest, etc. so that I have an easy reference to jump back to.

For the main character notes I have these categories that I fill in for all characters:

- Name & age

- General information (The paragraph at the top, usually their history and personality)

- Religion

- Goal

- Horse

- Appearance

- Nicknames

- Weapons & armour

- Magic divisions (if applicable)

I also keep a table to track of all of the relationships between the women because I tend to jump around to different points in the story as I write. This can cause chaos but I find it's the best way to keep myself interested in what I'm writing. And that's why I need all these notes! It doesn't help that everyone ends up either in love with, or having sex with, everyone at some point or another in this story.

One thing I do think I should get around to adding is proper headers on the docs so that I can search more easily 😅

More importantly, I should get around to posting more chapters of HOGBOS because we are coming up to a year since the last chapter! I am still writing this story in bits and pieces (with 3 half-finished chapters), but I haven't got a solid chapter to put out at the moment. Which is a shame, because who doesn't love lesbian mercenaries learning about life and love and also having a lot of sex in tents?