Communication Skill — This story is going to take place over the course of a week or so, and as such will not be terribly long. I don’t have an estimated number of parts yet, but just guessing I’d say around twenty. If we assume part lengths similar to Seeing Red, we’re looking at around 38k words based on that guess. None of this is very important, but I like to have a guess in place so I can look back and see how accurate my own pre-assessments are :D

I don’t have much else to say about my progress on this one other than that it was made. Part summaries are coming along.

Heretic’s Reward — It’s interesting how with some stories I’m not even a little bit comfortable jumping ahead and writing scenes I haven’t gotten to yet, and in other stories I’m totally fine with it. This is one of the latter, possibly because the summary contains most of the dialogue and therefore the feeling of each scene, as well as the evolving feeling of the story as a whole, is pretty clear all the way through to the end.

In any case, this chapter is going nicely, if it hasn’t necessarily developed in linear order. It’s about 2/3-3/4 finished at this point, and I should be able to reach linear completion next weekend.

It’s an interesting chapter, at least to me, and one I’ve been looking forward to getting to for a while (even if it has metamorphosed from my original plan). It would have been an interesting chapter of the comic, too, if I could have conveyed it properly with my poor visual art skills. I couldn’t have, so this is better.

The Test — Have I ever mentioned my conversation checklist? I think I have, but maybe not in great detail, and I’m too lazy to go look and see what-all I’ve said about it. So here’s the thing: sometimes conversations are the most difficult things of all to write, because there’s a million billion points the conversation needs to hit and it’s really freaking hard to get at all of them. For example, a conversation may need to accomplish the following–

* Make point X about character A
* Make point Y about character B
* Reveal information Z to the reader
* Not reveal information Q to the reader
* Not bore the reader (i.e. be interesting in itself)

–all while sticking to at least fairly natural and in-character dialogue and progressing naturally from one point to the next in the flow of a conversation on a believable topic. Other options include not revealing information Q to one of the characters, mirroring some other conversation for dramatic or symbolic or even comedic purposes, highlighting a growing aspect of the relationship between the characters, and Poe knows what else.

The point is that, for all I complain about sex scenes and what a pain in the ass they are to write, conversations are often even more of an effort. And there’s some of that going on in The Test. Some of these scenes just crawl forward as I agonize over each stupid line of dialogue. I’m glad this story doesn’t cover a longer period of time, ’cause I would be in some despair. Even what there is will be difficult XD

TLY — Sometimes I write detailed summaries for stories, often broken up into the chapters I anticipate; and sometimes I write less detailed summaries and come up with the details (and chapter divisions) as I go along. The latter is the case with TLY, and that’s why this current chapter is a little stalled.

I’m considering doing detailed summarizing for the rest of the story before I proceed, because it’ll be better in the long run if I do, but I’m also afraid that would change the feel of the story a bit. That, however, will probably be smoothed away in editing anyway — but there’s likely to be a lot more, and larger-scale, editing required if I don’t do more detailed summarizing. So I haven’t decided yet.

The really concrete point is that I only wrote about 500 words on this one this weekend. I’m about at the halfway point, and it would be nice if I could work more quickly on this project than I have been. More detailed summaries might help. I will continue to think about it.

Cockatiel and Armadillo — If this story ever gets finished, it’s going to have the jump on Confrérie by about two months as the first crossover material in HoH. It has been stalled by the very conversation checklist I mentioned above, but today (somewhat unexpectedly) I made some progress on it. It’s always nice when you start to get a handle on how you’ll transition from one conversational topic to the next. Maybe we really will see this story some time or other!