What’s Next

As Saida & Autumn wraps up, I’ve been thinking about what to do next—and about what worked and didn’t work for me this time.

This was my first try at a long “slice of life” story. As it turns out, S&A didn’t fit the minimalist-plot definition of true slice of life; while I didn’t know where things were going when I started, arcs for both Saida and Autumn developed by a quarter of the way through. But it was massively seat-of-the-pants stuff. By around chapter six or seven, I found myself writing each one the week before it went up. I’ve rarely been a traditional outliner, but my “brainstorming” document for the serial rarely got more than a chapter or two ahead of the narrative. It became just a set of answers to an ever-present question: Given what happened last chapter, what needs to happen in the next one?

Even so, I’ve enjoyed this! It’s proven to me that I can write this way under pressure. And this is the longest macrophile work I’ve ever produced; by the time it’s finished it’s going to be around 80,000 words. There’s slack in the narrative that I wish wasn’t there (and that I can’t tighten without extensive redrafting, which I’m not likely to do); even though I realized it was much romance as slice-of-life, it only fitfully hits the beats of a true romance novel; there are other structural nits to pick (I started out with the notion that Saida was going to be the only POV character, so the first four chapters—which form one long scene, something else I learned not to do after that—are all hers). But on the whole, I’m happy.

I’ve also learned more about how I personally can—and can't—manage a Patreon. Almost no one posted in the Q&A posts, I suspect because I’m pretty accessible on Twitter. I’ve hovered around the $250/month mark, which means I’m overdue in commissioning art for you folks—which suggests that a reward that commits me to find an artist who’s willing to commit to an ongoing project like this is maybe not a good idea. I’d love art of Autumn and Saida as much anyone else, but scheduling is tough even for people who aren’t disorganized as giant cats.

And speaking of scheduling being tough: scheduling is tough. One of the less welcome things I’ve learned is that it’s difficult for me to write anything else while working on this. I’ve managed the nine “Mouse Vignettes,” but only the last one is longer than a thousand words, and that just barely. They’re also, with the exception of that last one, not pieces that required an awful lot of plotting. (Only eight are up at the time I’m writing this, but the final one will be posted soon. Also, that link is very, very NSFW.)

I beat myself up over this a lot. Why, if I could just manage to consistently write a thousand words a day, seven days a week, I should have not only been able to stay way ahead on the serial, I should have finished another entire novel by now! Yes. But I can’t. I have a full-time job, and I may never be as fast a writer as I want.

So this leaves me at a crossroads.

I want to do more with Patreon, but I have other projects that don’t fit this model I’d like to do, too. (One big one isn’t macrophile at all, and while some of you would still love it, it wouldn’t be an “Arilin story.”) So my options are balancing my time better, structuring the next Patreon differently, or putting the Patreon on indefinite pause.

I’m up for trying the middle one or a mix of the first two, but that’s going to depend on you folks.

If you follow me on Twitter (@gc_arilin), you’ve seen me talking half-seriously about a monster movie screenplay with Red Savina, a kaiju-esque dragon/coyote woman, as the monster. A screenplay is the structural opposite of a slice-of-life story: unless you’re doing experimental art house stuff, it’s a rigid structure. Three acts. A story arc and a thematic arc. Specific character beats. You can write a story by the seat of your pants, and some people can even pants novels. Nobody can pants a (good) movie script.

And I’m thinking about trying that as a Patreon.

The experimental part for me is how the hell to do that as a Patreon. A certain number of pages a week? Maybe. But some weeks might be articles: a discussion of how you go about working on a story like this. It’d almost be an informal class on storytelling, a look into my fractured process through brainstorming and drafting. It’d also be an experiment, because while I’ve studied scriptwriting and I’ve used the formal structure for some of my other works (my short novel Goddess being a prime example), I’ve never written a script!

The big question is whether that’d be interesting to folks. So I’m asking you. Would it?