Your Update Links: Darkest Before the Dawn, Part 12 | This Is Me Trying

Happy Monday! Sorry for not posting the episode tag yesterday. I woke up SUPER late because I accidentally stayed up until 3 AM on Saturday night (LISTEN I AM AN ADULT I DO WHAT I WANT). I knew I had to really focus on getting as far as possible in rereading Mad World, so I just put it off and then never got a chance to get back to it.  I still need to add it to the Alphabetical List & Alternate History page. I’ll do that today.

Like Strong Enough, I included an in depth recap. It’s not exactly tied to Strong Enough, but you could see them existing in the same universe. It’s not Jason/Elizabeth — more of an explanation of the Jake shares debacle, LOL, and getting Elizabeth and Sam in a scene together. I hope you enjoy This Is Me Trying. I should have the third tag, If Wishes Came True, tomorrow or Wednesday. (And yes, I’ve been listening to a lot of Taylor Swift’s folklore, why do you ask?)

I’m working on rereading Mad World today, so that’s obviously the priority. I have lots of thoughts, but I want to wait until I’m done rereading to share them. I’ll see you guys tomorrow!

Your Update Links: Whatever It Takes – Part 15 | Strong Enough

That’s right – I have a surprise ficlet (Strong Enough) for you guys and even more interesting news — it’s the first of at least three stories I was inspired to write by watching four episodes of General Hospital this week.

I want to take a moment for you to digest that statement because I am as shocked and appalled by it as you are. I watched FOUR episodes of GH yesterday and was IMMEDIATELY inspired to write episode tags. Just so there’s no misunderstanding — these episodes were not from 1999, 2002, 2006, or even 2012 — They were episodes that aired August 3-6, 2020.

THIS YEAR. I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS YEAR‘S SHOW. I AM VERY CONFUSED.

So today, I have the first episode tag for you. It fits between Wednesday and Thursday’s episodes, after that gorgeous Sonny and Elizabeth scene (wait. did i just say that about something on THIS SHOW??) in the hospital and before Jason’s scenes at the courthouse on Thursday with Chase and Jordan. If you’re not super sure what’s going on with the show these days, I’ve included a recap in the timeline portion of the story. This is the level of detail that I hope my timelines will have going forward. Let me know if it helped.

Tomorrow and Monday, I will update with the next two episode tags. I did a quick Twitter poll last night to choose the order because I honestly had no preference — I WANT TO WRITE THEM ALL. YOU GUYS WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME.  If you want a preview of the next two stories, I already posted their info on the Alternate History page. Just skip to 2017-Present.

Please enjoy. I will see you guys tomorrow with This Is Me Trying.

Your Update Link: Desperate Measures, Part 16

If you’ve visited this page after getting the email update notification, then you get to see the title, and yes, you are not wrong. You’re not hallucinating. Yesterday, I finally FINISHED the first draft of this massive insane mess, lol. After 653 pages, 235k words, and arounf 100 hours of my blood, sweat, and tears — Book 3’s first draft is done and available at Patreon for $3 and up tiers. It is, I repeat, a giant mess but it’s there if you want it.

While I take two days off from Mad World, I’m digging in more deeply to Fool Me Twice discovery and am super excited about the Jason scenes I planned yesterday. I found a REALLY great way to revisit the AJ murder mess that lets me not only revisit Jason’s early history, but Sonny and Carly’s relationship with Michal AS WELL AS Liason history with Jake and their friendship AND MONICA GETS TO SCREAM AT CARLY. LOL. I am freaking pumped to write that section of the story.

Filmed vlogs for Mad World and Fool Me Twice — Mad World will be up tomorrow, I think, and you’ll see today’s episode of FMT in about a week — there are still two more episodes from last Friday that need to be posted.

See you guys tomorrow!

Your Update Link: Darkest Before the Dawn – Part 11

Reminder: I use the little photos to indicate different topics in my update posts, so you can skip to anything you want read more easily.

Good morning! (Can I still call it morning? LOL) This update is late for…reasons.  I had a great day yesterday and stayed up a bit late working on a few things — and that was a mistake. One of my favorite YouTube channels uploaded a 4hr36 minute documentary about the career and downfall of YouTube influencer Nikocado Avocado, and…I started watching it. I did not finish it — but I was up until midnight, then turned off my alarm and rolled over. I have no good defense except I have a shameful secret: I am OBSESSED with YouTube influence drama scandals. I’ve traced it back to the fact that my soap operas are boring and these people are MESSY. I’m not proud of it…but that’s why your flash fiction is late.

ANYWAY.

I had a great day writing yesterday — I wrote two chapters and today, after lunch, I’ll be starting the FINAL chapter in Book 3. That’s right, folks — I am FINALLY at the end of this beast. I have two epilogues planned but because the draft is so crazy messy, I think it might be easier for me to write effective epilogues once I’ve done the first pass at revisions. Either way, we’re finally nearing the end of the journey with this trilogy which feels suuuuper weird, I’m not gonna lie. I’ve been living with this story in one way or another since 2004, and almost full-time for the last four years so I think we’re all going to enjoy moving on to something so different like a 2017 rewrite.

Once the first draft is done, it’ll be posted at Patreon, and then I’m putting it away for two full days. On Sunday, I’ll reread it — this might take me into Monday, too, I won’t lie. I’ll start making notes about revisions. After that, I’ll start structuring the beta draft, figuring out what to edit, what to cut, what to add, etc. I hope that will take me about a week. Then — I’ll start moving through it chapter by chapter. The hope is to be done the beta draft by August 31. I lost about a week of revision time (optimally — I’d be starting that chapter by chapter work next week) so I might be a week off everywhere, We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

In my final bit of news for the day — I’m making more progress on the Alternate History temporary page. The plan for this week is just to finish writing out the new summaries and copy. I’d love if you guys took a quick look at it and let me know if you think it makes sense, if it helps you get a better sense of what you’re reading. I finished updating the copy for 2002 last night, and will finish the rest of it by Satuday, I think.

 

 

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Today’s video is the next video in my FMT vlog series. I’m filming tomorrow for Mad World and Fool Me Twice, so if anyone has anything they want me to talk about, let me know. 

Fool Me Twice – Video 2 – Who’s in this Story Anyway???

• I start with a brief recap of Video 1 — setting out the premise and why I write the story.
• Who should be in this story? Who gets the POV and story?
• Four main POV characters — Jason and Drew as main, Elizabeth and Sam are secondary leads.
• Drew as a blank slate.
• Who are my endgame couples? Do my readers want Jason/Sam? (Spoiler Alert: I’ve met you guys, so no.)
• Brainstorming characters – who should be in Jason and Drew’s story and why?
• Trying to avoid spoilers.
• More Andre and Anna. No Peters allowed. More WSB and Cassadine. Deeper levels of bad guys.
• Jason as Patient 6. My Patients 1-4 will be different. (Drew being 5)
• Using Cassadine and Spencer back story, digging back to Cassadine screwing with memory and brainwashing for long time.
• Bringing in Helena’s hatred of Elizabeth
• Who are the characters? What are their relationships to each other? What is their history? What can they bring to the table separately from their connection to Jason and Drew?
• Mini-rant about Ryan story centering on Ava and how I am NOT rewriting it.
• Summary – connecting Video 1 to 2 and how it fits together in the process.
• What makes me excited to write this one.

Your Update Link: Whatever It Takes – Part 14

Another day, another flash fiction for you. I just sat down to look at my calendar of Flash Fictions, and it looks like Whatever It Takes will wrap up next Wednesday — only two more parts! It’ll go into revisions as well. Then Darkest Before the Dawn and Desperate Measures will wrap up the week after — all four series will be completed on August 22. I’m going to take a vacation, reset, and work through revision ideas. Then I’ll be back with the sequel series to Darkest Before the Dawn in September. I should know the schedule by then as well.

Yesterday, I managed to finish merging the Ficlets onto the temporary Alternate History page, and all that honestly means is I put them all onto the table in chronological order. It’s honestly the easiest part of the whole project, LOL. Next, I have to write all the copy (summaries and details), THEN I have to do the hard work of moving the stories into that category, creating graphics, etc. But hey! This is also an important step.

Today, I’m going to be spending all day writing Mad World. I was having some tiny issues with the end of the story — I knew exactly how it should end, but sometimes it’s hard to put characters into situations without them doing absolutely stupid things, LOL. And I try really hard to keep my characters from being dumb. So I was glaring at my screen yesterday, then Ang came along to help me fix it. So today and tomorrow, I’m finishing up the draft. Then I’m taking Friday and Saturday off from Mad World — and I’ll be reading the draft on Sunday. On Monday, we’ll go into revisions. This should be interesting.

See you guys tomorrow for the next part of Darkest Before the Dawn!

Your Update Link: Desperate Measures, Part 15

Hey! As I said yesterday, today’s Flash Fiction was delayed. I thought it would be due to the doctor’s appointment I had this morning, but the tropical storm decided that I wasn’t leaving the house, heh. The worst of the rain for my area with the flash floods would have been when I was supposed to be driving there and back, so I rescheduled. I still decided to wait until the worst of the rain and wind had cleared in case I had a power outage. We’re all good here now 🙂

Plugging along with Mad World. Can’t believe there are only three chapters left! Some of the early feedback from Patreons is starting to roll in, and I really appreciate all the ways they’re helping me sort out where stories and characters kind of get dropped. That’s one of the interesting things that happens when you write something with so many characters that is so big — you start getting really focused on the big things, and the little stuff gets dropped. Revisions will be weird, lol.

The first video in the Fool Me Twice vlog is dropping today — I’ve embedded it below with text highlights. On Friday, I’m making the next set of videos — a follow up to Mad World to kick off revisions, and a summary of discovery for this week. Let me know in advance if there’s anything you want to me talk about in those videos.

I’ll see you guys tomorrow!

 

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• this title is totally taken from the Sega Lion King video game. Every time you started the game, you’d get Timon’s voice saying “it starts” and, like, I died a lot so it’s embedded in my brain, lol.)
• Also — I filmed a first version of this that ended up being a 16 min rant about how terrible the show did with this story.
• How I start stories — I start with kind of premise. What am I doing? Why am writing this? What makes me want to rewrite this story?
• Talking briefly about last year — I get more into last year’s problems in Video 4.
• Learned a lot about my process that I’m going to apply this year.
• Excited to write a story without a lot of trauma and sexual violence, soooo yay. Except Franco is in this one.
• What is the premise. (I debate the plural of this word briefly).
• I rewrite the show more than creating new universes. What story am I rewriting?
• Two reasons I rewrite:
  • 1. I like the show’s version, but they zigged instead of zagged. What if they’d zagged? (this relates to the story I wrote with Broken Girl. Love the 2006 Liason reconnection, but wanted a different spin centering on Liz not Lucky.
  • 2.  The show’s version was garbage. See: Mad World. And Fool Me Twice is also this. LOL.
• Biggest problem with the show is that they didn’t think through the implications of the memory swap, didn’t use all the history they couldn’t have, Oscar and Kim didn’t work in practice because they had no emotional connection to Drew because he didn’t know them. That would have changed Drew’s story a lot. How to fix Oscar.
• Franco got centered for no reason that made sense – if you want that, let’s do something interesting with it that builds on history.
• My idea is to take advantage of all the ways to deepen the story and create long-term consequences. A big miss was the Ava situation — could have given us a way to deal with AJ and Morgan again and bring up Sonny/Carly’s sins.
• Sam got screwed out of a whole-ass emotional journey and all of those characters deserved more.
• Also want to play with Drew/Liz friendship.
• I want the show to call Sonny/Carly out on their hypocrisy more.
• Using the same beats the show did but changing the bad guy and spending more time with emotional beats and reconnections.
• Mini-rant about GH because none of the stories have consequences. I’m thinking of 90s – Jason’s lost of memories in 1996 like Franco in 2019 — but Franco got his back and nothing changed. Jason didn’t — everything changed. Serial killer story changed nothing.
• Books 1 and 2 mostly plotted out — Book 3 depends on Books 1 and 2.
• this first video rambles a bit because it’s really kind of my thinking through ideas of a story and all the things I’d like to do.
• Really want to focus on Jason/Drew relationship, particularly building a character for Drew.
• Then I have brief recap of everything that we’ve taked about that gets moved into the next step of the process with shade thrown at the useless of Peter.

Your Update Link: Darkest Before the Dawn, Part 10

Happy Monday! Feeling great today — woke up on time and getting everything done on schedule. It’s really satisfying to be on top of things again and resetting realistic expectations. I’m also dipping my toes into the CG Facelist project as well again. I updated the Recent Updates page with news from July 21-through Saturday. Because it’s all Flash Fiction, I didn’t spend a lot of time with links because you can find all the Flash Fiction on the same page. I just linked that at the top. I’m hoping to get back into the habit of updating that more often.

I also continued the Alternate History redesign. I decided the best way forward was to finish planning the reoganization by writing the new copy for the page and merging all relevant stories onto that page. Then, when I start to update the individual stories, I can take my time, work on the graphics, and get it all done faster and more efficiently. You can view progress on the Working AH page I set up to avoid any issues on the current AH page. I’m finished writing the descriptions through 2005, but tomorrow I want to merge Series & Ficlet titles so that it’s all up to date.

In writing news, I spent the weekend working on finishing Mad World’s first draft and dipping into Fool Me Twice’s discovery draft. I have four chapters left to write, putting me on target to finish on Thursday. Chapters 51-82 have been posted on Patreon for $3 and above tiers. The last eight chapters and epilogues should be up by Friday.  Around 600 pages have been made available — honestly not sure how long the last eight chapters will be. This thing is a beast, LOL.

I’m only spending about 20 minutes a day right now on the FMT discovery, but I’m excited to start planning it with the changes I’ve been working on. The first episode of my FMT vlog will be posted tomorrow. I’ll embed it and add text highlights.

The last thing I want to say for today is that tomorrow’s Flash Fiction update will be up in the afternoon. I have a doctor’s appointment at 8:45 AM, and I won’t be back by 10 AM because the office is almost a half hour away and wait time for this place has been known to last almost an hour, lol. So I’ll get the update up when it’s ready.

Your update link: Whatever It Takes, Part 13

Hey! I posted earlier with the monthly Site & Status update so apologizes for double posting today. As I said in that post, I’ve got a few things planned for the channel this month — all the videos for the first two weeks are filmed, edited, uploaded, AND scheduled. I mean, look at that productivity. Basically, I have two videos up today — the Site & Story status, a video about writing Mad World, and on Tues & Thurs over the next two weeks, deep dives into working on Fool Me Twice and its discovery process.

I know I’ve had some people tell me they don’t have time to watch the videos (which I totally understand!) and would love transcriptions. I’d love to be able to get to that point as well, but since I don’t write scripts, it means I’d have to transcribe after the fact. I’m not saying no — I’m saying not right now. What will I try to do is post here at CG with some text highlights to help give you guys more context. The videos are really great for *me* working through my process, and began as a way for me to keep in communication with you guys, so I’m going to try to find a way to make them more useful to my community.

In other news, I released the first chunk of Mad World to my Patreons this morning. They got about 250 pages, which is chapters 51-65. Tomorrow, they’ll get chapters 66-82, and sometime next week, the rest of the story. I finished chapter 84 yesterday and will be working on 85 today. That puts me at about August 6 to finish up (as I had hoped). That draft is available to the $3 and above tiers.

 

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Today’s other video is Writing Mad World. It’s about 19 minutes, and I’m embedding it below with text highlights below. Let me know if the text highlights help!

• Writing Book 3 has been a struggle in a lot of ways but that I’m overall happy with it and I’m learning from this writing process.
• I need to think about why I write a story (what am I actually trying to say, why am I bothering?)
• What draws me to write the characters I write the most.
• Why Mad World has been a unique experience — the creation of a world that I get to continue. By book 3, I’m not rewriting a story anymore, I’m living in the world that I created.
• Brief rant about why I’ve never liked Ric.
• Writing Liason as a public couple is interesting — we never got to see that on the show.
• Books 1 and 2 were just easier to write because of the story in my head.
• Why fanfiction can be just as challenging as writing original fiction. Characters who feel like the ones you watch while living and reacting in a story that I’ve created.
• Mad World: The wrong starting point. The time jump idea was not a good idea, lol, and it’s messing with me. I get into the weeds a bit on why.
• Learning to respect feelings about why something isn’t working: is it the material or is it the energy I’m bringing to it.
• Wrong starting point really wasn’t giving Liz or Carly the space to confront, deal, AND resolve the trauma. It needed to breathe.
• Adding extra 15 chapters to the beginning.
• If I know things need to be added, do I do it now even it means going out of order or waiting for revisions?
• Why adding 15 chapters in the beginning, with a middle 17 chapters that used to be the beginning means some challenges in the revisions.
• Starting it in the wrong place was a huge mistake and it’s definitely a lesson I’m going to be taking into FMT — I get into that in a video I made for that story.
• Building stamina from writing 1k to 3k to 6-8k a day.
• Schedule in July — time lost.
• Getting into again — how I’m taking the lessons in writing Mad World to apply to the next project. I talk for a hot minute about the whole trilogy process and how starting points have always been an issue.
• Plans to check in more during revisions.

Your Update Link: Desperate Measures, Part 14

Back into a normal schedule for our flash fiction! Today is a big day for me as I’m filming a bunch of stuff for the YouTube channel to be posted over the next week, so I’m going to keep this short and sweet. Plus — you guys are getting the monthly Site & Story status video and post which will go up either at midnight tonight or sometime tomorrow depending on my editing schedule and writing.