Scheduling for May (and writing process): (Patreon)

First: 

The chapter’s headed your way right after this message. In fact, by the time you read this, there’s a good chance it’s already posted. (It would have been up even earlier, but Patreon ate this giant post and I had to retype it. Curses.)

If you don’t want to read about writing process/my thoughts and you just want the scheduling update it’s at the bottom!

Outlines and Backlog:

Over the past year, I’ve developed a multi-phase outline process for Super Supportive that helps me maintain quality as I move forward.

I have my big, big picture outline that tells me the major things that will happen in the story—in some fashion, at some point—with plot elements that are very nearly unchangeable because they’re born of the deep secrets in the world building or because they’re things that will inevitably occur when important characters (that Alden guy) clash with flaws or challenges established in the universe. 

If this outline burned up in a fire, it wouldn’t really matter because I know it and the story will naturally keep leading us back to it eventually.

It’s possible for things to be added to the big, big outline, but so far nothing has really been subtracted and only a few things have been tweaked or downgraded in importance as I understood characters or the world better. 

Then, I have my less big outline, which are all the arcs I think will happen along the way to lead us to the moments in the big, big one. It’s subject to a surprising amount of change as I realize something is calling for exploration or as characters interact in ways I didn’t anticipate. 

(Letting characters really be themselves sometimes leads to fascinating outcomes. Ask me about Hazel and Manon sometime, which is one of my favorite story writing moments I haven’t spoken on yet.) 

Next is a fairly detailed bullet point outline of the next 10-25 chapters I’m writing. This is usually what I’m referring to when I say “my outline” and it can be tweaked as often as twice a week, every time I write a chapter, just to make sure it’s always as fresh as I can manage and taking everything into account.

And finally there’s the outline of the individual chapter I’m currently writing, which I almost always make these days before I sit down to start the first page. This is the one that becomes a very different creature depending on whether or not I have a backlog. 

For those who didn’t notice because they’re coming from recent binges (Hi! Welcome to our Patreon community, and thank you so much for supporting me and the story. The people here are absolutely wonderful, and the discussions can be glorious): Super Supportive chapters used to be shorter. 

To start with, I was writing chapters that ranged from around 2k words to around 6k, and I thought I would continue like that for an average of 4-5k words per chapter/2 chapters a week.

And that would have been quite sustainable with maybe a day off every once in awhile, because I had a healthy backlog. 10 full chapters at one point! 

But then…I had a lot of fun with intake and Celena North, and with the slower pace of the chapters, they naturally grew much longer for a while. It seems that with my writing style, slower pace/heavy worldbuilding = fewer breaking points for chapters. And I do have a policy about not just chopping chapters in half to make them count as two or three, since I want the endings to all feel satisfying.

So I was writing back-to-back 7k-10k chapters for a long time. And thus, the backlog met its death. (RIP.)

I’ve managed to keep posting 2 chapters per week since that happened with, I think (?), only two actual days off in total since I started the Patreon. 

I attribute this miracle to three things: my pure obsession with the story, you guys here cheering me on and making me feel like people are eager and waiting to read the next page (I can’t convey how purely encouraging having the community is),and my multi-outline process, which has been letting me navigate forward without any big mishaps throwing a wrench into the works. 

But even though the outline system makes maintaining quality possible, missing the backlog really changes how I have to approach each chapter. My individual chapter outlines used to be more like guidelines I’d sketch out over the course of an hour, and then I’d just write the chapter more organically, following rabbit trails through the grass if I wanted to see where they led. 

I could do that because with a large backlog, I was always so far ahead of you all that if a mistake happened, there was time to realize it and correct it before it ever saw the light.

Since the backlog vanished, I’ve often been spending an entire day writing and revising the individual outline for each chapter and trying to figure out how it affects things farther down the line. I do all of that before I even make the chapter’s first draft because without a backlog, I have to be extremely cautious about introducing important characters, making plot reveals, and triggering future events. 

Done poorly, those things can destabilize the story for hundreds of thousands of words. And since I no longer have a big lead and you guys get the chapters hot and fresh off the press, I can’t trust the more “organic” minimal chapter outline, write-what-feels-good-and-explore process. It rarely leads to serious mistakes, but rarely isn’t good enough in this case. 

Super Supportive will be here for many more arcs. That means that I can’t build even one floor of the tower out of sand because we’ll have plot collapses in the distant future. So I’ve been spending all of that extra time thinking and outlining to ensure I’m installing stone building blocks, which has contributed to quite a lot of stress and the recent time crunches. 

The Sunday break was honestly amazing this week.

I managed to write three of those really detailed outlines (for this chapter and the next two), so I won’t have to do that step while I write this week, which is time and peace of mind gained. I finished this chapter early yesterday afternoon, set it aside while I spent the evening tweaking the arc outline, and was able to return to it this morning with fresh eyes.

 It was very stabilizing to be able to look at it with the calmness I had in the golden days of backlog and say to myself, “Yes. That is stone. You have not made any major missteps, and the quality of the writing looks really good for your readers.”

Scheduling:

So, after talking to other authors, thinking about it, and reading all of your comments, I would like to try taking two posting days “off” per month. I think I’ll be using May and maybe June as trial runs to see what happens with just that little bit of extra writing time built in. I think there would normally be 9 chapters posted next month. I’d like to shift that down to 7. 

(Obviously if I find a fun spot for a 1,000 word mini-chapter or something, I would just slip that in without counting it as a posting day. I so often have ideas for those, but they never come to anything.)

My thought at the moment is that it would be good to leave the exact dates of the two days off flexible, so I can land them either when I need a pause to think or after long or dense chapters that will foster discussion. I would warn at least one post in advance.

I envision a future where I take my time off ahead of jumbo chapters to prepare them or after them to recover. But if you guys would prefer me to name specific days in advance, I really don’t mind doing that…should I put up a poll? 

Related business:

The supporter benefit for the Patreon is listed as a minimum of 10 chapters ahead of Royal Road, and that will be staying the same. You’re currently 14 ahead because I like to make sure we’ve always got the wiggle room and everything is fair.

I’m trying to provide them with an excellent reading experience during the Waves arc, so they might get three or four chapters one week and then none the next. But if the shift to 2 chapters off per month works well, they’ll be set to the same schedule as the Patreon.

Since I’m giving late warning on the schedule adjustment for the next month, if you’ve recently started or renewed a subscription, and you think 7 chapters in May isn’t going to be worth it to you, I don’t mind issuing a refund. You can even take a few days to decide if you need to. Just send me a message. I’ll be checking my DM’s on Sunday afternoon (so after the next post just to make sure everyone has had time to read this) and issuing any refund requests then.


Thank you all! 

Let’s see what happens with a fresh May schedule.

And I’m super excited to give you today’s chapter. :)