Teenage Dirtbag 18+19

Okayyy! Two more chapters done, and these are particularly big ones. We're starting to get some important resolutions going on, and I'd appreciate feedback about whether that's working right in this moment.

I've also made a minor change in chapter 9 (both here and on scribble) in order to hint towards something that I do in chapter 19. It's really not a big deal, and probably the majority of my readers who are following as the chapters go on are going to miss it, but I think it will make for a cute detail for people who read the whole thing once I'm finished or such.

A bit more about how the sausage is made: I had mentioned that I'm a person who writes and rewrites a lot, and you can probably see that in the title of the googledoc... This is the 'updated' version because when I first wrote this story, I got seven chapters in or so before I figured out something really important about it. The original was more focused on Josie's story alone, with Noelle and Dustin kind of there to help her come to terms with herself. But as I wrote I really started to want to have the two of them be more dynamic characters in their own right, and I changed earlier chapters to allow them to have more of an arc. For instance, in the first version of this story, Noelle was just extremely upfront about being bi in, like, chapter three. But I think letting that be more complicated and her not having a good handle on her feelings yet makes for a much more interesting story, plus it adds to the feel of this being in the early 2000s where people don't have the societal context or language yet to easily figure things out.

But connected to all that, I'm probably going to take a brief hiatus from posting on scribblehub after I put 17 up today, because I'm approaching a point where I might need to change things as I write again. There's going to be some big identity stuff in the next chapters, as well as the major climax of this story, and I may have to shift those plot elements to make it all fit. In these chapters (18+19) we get a lot of resolution towards some of the relationship side, but I'm also trying to balance that with it not being all figured out yet, too. Ordering the sequence of how these things get resolved is tricky! Anyways, I appreciate your patience (and thoughts) as we move closer and closer towards an end.