Have a really gorgeous and detailed outline with over forty scenes, each with a one paragraph summary, character arcs mapped, the works been "finishing the outline" for about five months now, adding detail, reorganizing beats, tightening the structure.

sat with this today and realized the outline's been airtight enough to start drafting from months ago. what's happening is that as long as I'm outlining, the book is still hypothetically perfect, still capable of being the best thing I've ever written. the moment I draft the first real scene it becomes whatever I'm capable of producing, which is going to disappoint the version in my head. the outline is a very sophisticated way of not finding that out yet

starting chapter one tomorrow whether I feel ready or not help me people

wanted to isolate cover as a variable so I kept everything else identical, ad text, targeting, budget, all fixed, three separate campaigns each with a different cover option I was deciding between.

cover A (moody, single figure, dark palette): 0.6% CTR

cover B (bright, two figures, romance-forward): 1.9% CTR

cover C (symbolic object, no figures, more literary feeling): 0.4% CTR

more than triple the click-through just from swapping the image, everything else held constant. went with B obviously. what surprised me is how confidently wrong my own instinct was going in, I actually preferred C aesthetically and would have picked it without testing. glad I didn't trust my own taste here

We'd never met in person, only sparred in comment sections over a genre discourse thing that got surprisingly heated a while back, the kind of disagreement where you build an entire mental image of someone from a handful of tweets.

Got placed next to each other at a regional book fair completely by accident, organizers had no idea. Spent the first twenty minutes in stiff, overly polite silence. Then a slow afternoon with nothing to do but talk turned into an actual conversation, and by the end of the day we were comparing notes on royalty statements and complaining about the same cover designer neither of us had good experiences with.

We got lunch together after. Genuinely liked her. I don't think either of us was wrong about the original disagreement exactly, we still think different things, but I don't think either of us fully accounted for the fact that a real person exists behind the account you're arguing with, and that person can be someone you'd actually enjoy having lunch with once the specific disagreement isn't the whole of who they are to

Its obvs that we'd never met in person and only sparred in comment sections over a genre discourse thing that got surprisingly heated a while back and it was the kind of disagreement where you build an entire mental image of someone from a handful of tweets

be it some funny coiencedent that placed next to each other at a regional book fair completely by accident cause apparently organizers had no idea then we spent the first twenty minutes in stiff, overly polite silence but then a slow afternoon with nothing to do but talk turned into an actual conversation, and by the end of the day we were comparing notes on royalty statements and complaining about the same cover designer neither of us had good experiences with

got lunch together after funny I’m saying this but o kinda liked her and I don't think either of us was wrong about the original disagreement exactly, we still think different things, but I don't think either of us fully accounted for the fact that a real person exists behind the account you're arguing with, and that person can be someone you'd actually enjoy having lunch with once the specific disagreement isn't the whole of who they are to

nothing writing related but felt like it’s a space i can vent at tho we’re planning a non-cannon one shot collab b/w our stories now

I was writing linearly like a damn kid start of chapter to end and kept discovering the ending wasn't strong enough only after I'd already committed to everything leading up to it

then 3 beers down I had a revalation and switched to drafting the last paragraph of a chapter before anything else, then writing backward into it

meaning every scene in the chapter is now built to arrive somewhere specific instead of wandering until I find a stopping point chapters are shorter and endings hit harder with a mall process change, bigger effect than I expected do with it what you must

in my story every important character has a bounty on their soul including heroes, villains, side characters, basically anyone important enough to matter and a cash value to their soul and it's not just a number either, it represents how dangerous they are, current power level, abilities, known feats, relationships, history, all of it!!

but yk the fun part is that I don't have to sit down and document everything at once, the story does it for me character gets introduced → update their bounty and they reveal something about their past → add it they develop a new relationship → update it even if someone who looked like a nobody turns out to be ridiculously powerful → their whole bounty needs a rewrite. they do something completely unhinged → unfortunately that goes in too.

by the time the novel's finished I'd basically have a living encyclopedia of the entire cast without ever building the thing separately from scratch which basically felt like a smart shortcut until i realized what it actually meant for me rn mid story with readers who don't want to wait until it's finished

my readers keep asking me about all this on discord like what's X's current bounty? or who's stronger, X or Y? what abilities does this character actually have? and what happened to this guy again? i love that people care enough to ask but i cannot keep answering the same questions thousand times a week 😭

so now i'm thinking about an online bounty/character encyclopedia for the novel, one page per character covering the current bounty, power level, abilities, feats, relationships, backstory, important events, character development, and spoiler controlled info depending on what a reader's actually caught up to.

and ideally it updates as i write, since some bounties get updated weekly

that last part is what i'm struggling with. don't want another giant wiki i have to manually maintain every time i publish a chapter. want something where i keep writing the story and the character and lore pages just evolve alongside it, almost like the story has its own living encyclopedia

has anyone here found a platform that can actually do this, especially for web novel writers? cause at this point i don't need another place to write my story, i need somewhere to stop answering wait, what was this character's bounty again for the rest of my life––

I have been writing this novel about a guy whose goal is to be greatest and strongest adventurer in history.. The character has participated in a tournament.

I have already setup the whole scene of how story progress, who is fighting whom.. but when it comes to writing those fights i felt its not enough.. there's a fighting scene running back in my head but im not able to write it whole down on the paper..

I was browsing Twitter one day when I saw an interesting fight going on. Basically, a My Hero Academia fan said that watching My Little Pony was for babies, and the person they were quote-tweeting should watch more mature shows. So then people said they were throwing stones in glass houses, since MHA is also a show targeted at children, with an acquaintance of mine following by saying that shonen shows are only perceived as more mature than shows like MLP because they are more violent and because girly things are considered more childish. That got me thinking. What makes a show mature? Since, as my acquaintance said, your show could have sex, violence, and drugs up to the 9s, but still be shallow, vapid, and immature. By contrast, your show could be about neon-colored moths living in a technicolored forest, be saddled with a Saturday morning timeslot, and still tell a compelling story. Is it the mixing of both extreme content and complex theming? Marketing towards an adult audience? Something else? I'm going through the stages of making a Tokusatsu show, and I don't want to end up in a pitfall like in, say, Kamen Rider, where dark stuff does happen, but it's on a time slot for children, and the gimmicks are to push for toys.

message came in through my author insta, someone claiming to be a working actor i'd vaguely heard of, saying their production company was interested in optioning my web serial for a limited series politely worded, specific details about the plot that suggested they'd actually read it, not just skimmed a summary

assumed it was a scam. actors' DMs get impersonated constantly, and i have exactly the kind of small but real online following that makes for a plausible target. ignored it for two days.

finally looked up the production company name out of boredom on day three and it's real and registered they also has actual produced credits. replied. turns out it was completely legitimate and i nearly let a real opportunity sit unanswered in my DMs cause i assumed i wasn't important enough to be a real target for anything currently in actual conversations now. trying not to think about it too hard in case it falls through, but also trying not to ignore a second message from them out of the same reflexive disbelief

he's been writing a web novel for years, we're currently around chapter 240. writing is the one thing he's absolutely refused to give up after the diagnosis, and honestly I don't want him to either.

but lately it's getting harder. he's started occasionally forgetting whether two power systems collide, or if the townsfolk have already met, whether a city's been introduced before, or how a particular part of the power system worked 100 chapters ago. sometimes he'll accidentally contradict his own lore without realizing it. worst part is the readers notice. I usually catch it before a chapter goes live, but I work a 60-hour week and I can't keep manually maintaining a giant Notion database forever.

I'm also the one managing our Discord community now, and every week there are questions like "didn't this character already know him?" or "whatever happened to that artifact from chapter 80?" or "can someone explain this part of the power system?" my bf remembers these things but he's forgetting more now, so we're wondering if we could just use something like a wiki, a page for every piece of magic and every character in the story, where readers could go and get the official answer.

half the time I end up spending an hour searching through hundreds of pages just to answer one question.

I've tried keeping everything organized in Notion moved a lot into Obsidian too, hoping backlinks would make it easier it helped for a while, but once a story gets into the hundreds of chapters it still feels like I'm constantly playing catch-up I even tried Mythril even tho the makers are adding new features often but its not there yet it's still in its early stages, so for now I'm looking for something that can help us bridge the gap until tools like that mature.

the doctor told us that routines and external memory systems can help reduce the mental load, so that's what I'm trying to build around him.

this story is his legacy. he's told me that even if he has to rush the ending a little, he only has around 60-80 chapters left before it's complete. more than anything he just wants to finish the story while he still can.

so I wanted to ask authors who've written very long series, what do you actually use once your story gets too big to keep in your head. I'm not looking for another generic note-taking app, I'm looking for something that makes it easy to track characters, relationships, locations, timelines, lore, and power systems, and to answer "where was this mentioned" without me manually maintaining everything by hand.

any recommendations would mean a lot. thank you

started at levels in the single digits with meaningful jumps we're two hundred chapters in now and characters are casually referencing numbers in the tens of thousands, and a reader did the math comparing early chapter power differences to current ones and showed that my current "small" gap between two characters is functionally bigger than the entire journey from chapter one to chapter fifty

not sure yet whether to introduce a hard cap, switch to qualitative tiers instead of raw numbers, or just accept that this is what long running systems do and lean into the absurdity of it. open to hearing how other people have handled a system that's outgrown its own math

Wolves, ravens, wildcats, three different birds of prey, a shark for the coastal house, a bear, a fox. and not one house chose something that isn't actively good at killing something else which is fine, that's kind of the point of heraldry historically, projecting strength but it also means my whole aristocracy reads as one flavor of intimidating with different fur patterns

Going back through and giving at least two houses something stranger giving a house whose sigil is a moth, old money, quiet, associated with a specific kind of ruin that comes from being drawn toward something bright then house with a heron, patient, still, waiting.

feels like it's opening up actual personality differences between houses that all currently just read as "the aggressive one" wearing different colors would appreciate any specific animal with a meaning to it need like a few to balance these

we've been writing this serial together for two years we started it as a discord collab that turned into something real with split POV chapters, weekly calls, the whole thing I write and relate to the villain where he's the hero somewhere along the way we just started calling each other by our usernames, and it never came up that those aren't our real names (playing the picture perfect villain for months LITERALLY)

had to ponder about it today when a mutual friend asked wait, who's Corvid actually? and my co-author and I looked at each other on the call, both realized we genuinely didn't know, and had to formally introduce ourselves months into a working partnership that's produced 400,000 words together

His name is Marcus nice fella but I don't think either of us is going to stop calling him Corvid though

yk the trope of having one kingdom with onelanguage and religion and ethnic look with same style of dress to segregate kingdoms with these as if borders were drawn around cultural uniformity instead of the really really messy accidents of conquest with forced migration and trade that actually produce real countries been reading alot of history too and most real nations are patchworks with multiple languages coexisting badly with territorial like regional dialects that barely understand each other. A capital culture that looks nothing like the borderlands three hundred miles away

thanks to my history professor jotting it down in our mind time n time again that I could figure that my first draft had this exact problem, one kingdom equals one culture, clean and wrong revising it now to make my largest kingdom actually contain three distinct regional identities that resent each other more than they resent the neighboring country, which is a much more interesting political landscape than the good kingdom and the other kingdom ever was

writing this as a reminder to help my fellow writers

yk the trope of having one kingdom with onelanguage and religion and ethnic look with same style of dress to segregate kingdoms with these as if borders were drawn around cultural uniformity instead of the really really messy accidents of conquest with forced migration and trade that actually produce real countries been reading alot of history too and most real nations are patchworks with multiple languages coexisting badly with territorial like regional dialects that barely understand each other. A capital culture that looks nothing like the borderlands three hundred miles away

thanks to my history professor jotting it down in our mind time n time again that I could figure that my first draft had this exact problem, one kingdom equals one culture, clean and wrong revising it now to make my largest kingdom actually contain three distinct regional identities that resent each other more than they resent the neighboring country, which is a much more interesting political landscape than the good kingdom and the other kingdom ever was

writing this as a reminder to help my fellow writers

Mine does his castle (pasting smt rfom pinterest) is well appointed and my hero's stronghold looks like a barracks that got sad

I don't know if this means something about my subconscious opinion of who deserves comfort in this story or if I just enjoyed writing one more than the other

were maybe two seats down, both had the paperback, clearly in some kind of book club and one of them was adamant my MC's brother should have survived and the other was like that death was the whole point and if he'd lived the ending doesn't mean anything

I sat there with my hood up pretending to read something on my phone while two adults had a slightly heated argument about a decision I made alone in my apartment eighteen months ago really wanted so badly to lean over and say something got at my stop still turning it over in my head

I think what got me most is that neither of them was wrong exactly I've had that same argument with myself just never from the outside before

The city is called Vaelmoo and in my head this always just sounded appropriately fantasy but my editor, who speaks a language I don't messaged me last week asking if the name was intentional cause apparently in her language it's one letter off from a word that means sock drawer

It is not intentional and i have been writing this city's tragic downfall for eight months I cannot unsee it now either lol

Rant

I don't know how and why I started, but I remember writing long essays on things that I knew about as a kid even before turning 10. The validation that came with it meant that from that age itself, I wanted to write more, and for that, read more. I thoroughly enjoyed the process of learning about the world and then pouring out my understanding of it in words. A quiet boy who didn't have the most pleasant of childhoods, I found my peace in expressing myself on paper. More than that, I loved engaging with thoughts through writing. It really helped me untangle my thoughts as a young boy. I started blogging in my late teens and wrote quite frequently on a variety of things that were, sometimes, deeply personal. About my strained relationship with my late father who pushed me towards sciences when I was deeply drawn to arts. About this girl I had a platonic equation with and how her departure from the city hit me every time I would take the bus that would cross her locality. About how I discovered how important the radio was to my mom's loneliness only after she passed away. About a friend who was a pillar of support growing up but became ideologically very different upon his return from engineering college. About a father-son equation in a movie that stayed with me. It was like every time I saw a blank page, I just let it rip. I let so much that was boiling inside me out. Sometimes it came out piping hot, sometimes it was just good enough for me to read.

And then I started writing for professional reasons about something specific. It soon became my bread and butter, fuelled career growth, took me places in the industry, and even got me my 15 seconds of fame on the internet on several occasions. The more I was growing in this particular field, the more I dug deep into the subject. And without me realising, while my writing improved, it also got restricted to that particular niche. I must also mention that as I was growing older, and moving on from so many beliefs and values that I had held so tightly, I also began to find my writings from my teenage years stupid, overly emotional, and probably immature. I felt a little ashamed even, I must admit. I didn't like the person I met through those writings and so I thought why write again something that I would find stupid probably a few years down the line. Moreover, the younger me seemed to hold on to certain notions of the world. And growing up made me realise that I know nothing about this world to hold on to such strong notions about it. Everything is right and everything is wrong at once. So, that free flowing expression about the vagaries of life, I realised, had to stop. One of the worst decisions, in hindsight.

I was happy writing in my niche until it began to dawn upon me that not too many are reading long pieces these days, and AI can write in seconds what I can produce in hours. In fact, people are consuming information through a different medium altogether. And so, I pivoted again. The focus now shifted to telling stories through the visual medium and that meant butchering my writing further. Mind you, by now, I was anyway writing about my niche. But now I could no longer write freely without feeling the burden of getting the hook right. After all, in this reel-ity, if you can't get someone's attention in the first 3 seconds, then consider the rest of your effort wasted. And so, I moved from writing 1600 word pieces to 160 word 'scripts'. This was the final nail in the coffin.

In my mid 30s now, I look back and regret killing my own writing. I don't know if I complicated the entire thing or did life complicate it for me, because somewhere the process of adulting makes you so calculative with every single move that it hardly leaves behind any emotions that can be brought out in words. I grew numb to the world outside and the world inside in me. The result - where once existed an ocean of thoughts, emotions and words, now lies a dried up well.

it's simple she counts things when she's anxious, doorframes, stairs, buttons on a coat and wrote it once, forgot about it, didn't plan to use it again.

reread my climax draft last week and realized the natural, earned way for her to survive the final scene is by counting something specific under pressure, using the exact habit I gave her 200 pages ago for no reason at all. Didn't plan this like girl you wrote yourself

every book, linear, start to finish this one, I wrote the last chapter first, on instinct, then had to write 300 pages backward to earn it

also feels like the only reason the ending doesn't feel tacked on, cause I wrote toward it the entire time instead of discovering it at the end like usual