Tuesday Update 04/02/25

Hellloooo folks,

So, we're only a few days into the month and I haven't finished the FoF chapter yet, which means nothing has changed on the Progress List. Instead of just repeating myself from the Monthly Update, I thought I'd give you all a little peek behind the curtain here.

Font of Fertility, and why I went through a phase of wanting to burn the story to the ground in the last 72 hours.

Let me take you back to 2015, when a young, lonely writer thought to himself "What if horny magic story, but more detailed sex?"

That was how I first started writing Font of Fertility. The plan, when writing the first chapter, was to explore the tropey magic elements in a loosely connected chain. Invisibility, time stopping, etc. etc.

And then I realized very quickly I wasn't that type of writer. Yeah, I could do the horny stuff - and pretty damn well! - but I couldn't do it throw-away. And my characters were 'good people,' whatever that meant, so they kept thinking with morals and ethics.

The issue with that, however, is that I kept adding things. Both during the original writing of the first 7 chapters, and now all the way up to this Chapter 39, I've gone through multiple sets of planning phases to try to adapt to how much STUFF I end up adding. My style has also evolved over time - OFG and AMA have been great in some ways, and awful in others, in how they have influenced my writing style in terms of keeping a Plot (Capital P) moving vs. lots of little plots moving along.

I love what Font of Fertility is, but God sometimes it's a mess that makes me go "What the fuck did I WRITE last month!?" (Beta readers, expect one of those chapters coming up next.)

So when I sat down to start the Alpha draft of Chapter 39, I knew I'd set myself up for a big moment based on Chapter 38. The problem was that I had lots of half-formed options, but I didn't have a clear Plan.

I've gone Full George RR Martin.

(For the uninitiated: George RR Martin, the author of the Song of Ice and Fire, the books behind HBO show Game of Thrones, has taken 13+ years (since 2011) to get the next book done. A big part of the reason for this is that he writes 'like a gardener' - he's an Explorer, or sometimes called a Pantser, as in writing by the seat of his pants. He writes characters and scenes, kinda sees where they go, prunes a bit (aka kills characters) where he likes, but isn't entirely sure where the story is going. This is a great method of writing when you know how to stop and get to the chase. This is NOT a great method of writing when the garden/story gets so big that it's unwieldy and hard to manage and you're tempted to just pour some gas on it and light it on fire because looking at it makes you go cross-eyed.)

I don't WANT to be George RR Martin. Well, at least not in the 'Takes a decade or more to fulfill promises to the readers.'

Font of Fertility has a Plot Problem, and I've known it has that problem for a long time. I've fought with that problem before, battling to figure out what the fuck is going on beyond the next few chapters. I've had vague ideas and plans, I've had scenes in my head since WAY back when I was writing the first few chapters.

Fuck, at one point I even thought I knew what a sequel story would be. And told myself 'Three sets of Seven chapters to finish to story' and then I would take a break before writing the sequel in the same world but with new characters.

Sometimes I have to laugh at myself.

Back to Chapter 39 - I wrote about a thousand words, fairly happy with the scene, but got to the meat of the issue... and I wasn't sure which of the threads, ropes, strings and strands that I've been weaving this story from needed to come next. And I was stumped.

So, for the past two days, I have written a single word of actual story. Instead I've been Plotting.

Scheming, even!

16 Plot lines. That's how many I identified and got back on track for what needs to happen next, and where they are going. To be fair, 5 of them are kind of subcategories of a bigger one, so let's say 11.

FUCKING 11 PLOT LINES. Why am I like this? What did I do in a past life to make me this way? This is an UNNECESSARY number of plot lines, people.

The good news is that, now that I have them sorted - and they aren't complete, there's still a lot of room for the natural ebb and flow of the story to confuse me even more - I have a much smaller number of choices I need to make at any given time. And there's still plenty of room for the random non-plot related event that just brings a spark of horny fun to the story.

So while I haven't written any actual prose today, and very little yesterday, my brain is exhausted and I feel creatively spent tonight. I will return to writing FoF tomorrow, and let me tell you this - there is PLENTY of runway left to go on that leviathan of a story.

Coming Up Next

Just to finish this Tuesday Update off, for anyone who scrolls down this far, FoF Alpha and Beta chapters will release ASAP, followed by QTNW, and then we'll be into AMA week.

Cheers,
~Break.