FDAD: A Multi-world Fantasy WIP update 1

If you follow me on Twitter, you might’ve seen me answering writing questions about my WIP and attempting to find gifs that summarize my characters for those get-to-know-you threads that people create.

Well, this WIP’s codename FDAD. I will not tell you what it stands for. It’s a multiverse and, in many ways, my love letter to anime. It’s full of queer women and while there are plenty of intense moments, I do lean into the silliness of the concept from time to time. Because a portal fantasy is silly.

This story has been with me for 10 years now and for many of those years it simmered on the back burner. It began as a silly concept that I just wrote on the fly based on vague writing prompts (write a fantasy story; write a mystery story, etc.) and it definitely became that huge project that you throw every cool idea ever into. The thing was massive and had no clear ending.

Over time, I figured out main plot points, had dozens of starts and stops, and a few long drafts where I got far (kinda) only to realize that there was too much wrong that I had to fix. And according to the original scope I had, I’d barely made a dent in the entire epic story I wanted to tell.

Listen, every SFF writer has one of these concepts. Your epic baby. Your personal Wheel of Time or Song of Ice and Fire. That’s what FDAD became for me and in many ways, it still is. But I had to put it down for a few years because I knew I just wasn’t a good enough writer at the time to pull it off in the way I felt it deserved.

Then, around fall of 2017, I suddenly started thinking about this project again. Next thing I knew, I’d made myself a Google doc where I streamlined the story into three books and sketched out clear plot/character arcs. I had other projects I wanted to focus on at the time, so I kept it at this word vomit planning stage.

At the start of 2018, I wasn’t in the best place mentally and the projects I’d been working on were pretty sad. I needed something lighter–something that, as Marie Kondo has taught us–sparked joy. That was FDAD. Among all the big projects in my head and on my computer, FDAD has the most playfulness to it and that’s what I needed.

Since then, book 1 of this story has been my WIP. Narratively, I’ve just hit a major turning point–I’m thinking of it as the true half-way mark, but I have only about two major arcs until the end, so I might be beyond half-way.

As of the end of February, this is my word count:

86k isn’t my final word count, but I set the word count calculator up on Scrivener so that I have a daily target of 500 words a day for each month. In theory, that’s 15,500 words per month, but of course there are days I miss completely and days where my word count is lower, just as there are days when my word count well exceeds 500.

This is my log for January. It’s sparser because I had a lot going on that month like prepping for Lest I Know Your Weakness to launch. However, at this rate, I will definitely have a completed draft in 2019 and that excites me. After all this time, I finally feel like I’m executing this story the way I see it in my head. Yes, there are SO MANY things I’ve discovery written and will have to retcon in revisions, but I have a good balance between following the big plan and letting the smaller stuff come as it will.

It definitely helps that I have a book/series guide as a living Google doc that I update as things come to me. It has organized sections for worlds, characters, magic systems, histories, outlines, etc. I even have a running list of potential comp titles. I also am much better at giving myself permission to keep moving forward when I discover something about a character or piece of history that I hadn’t accounted for previously. I write from that point on as if that piece of information were true the whole time, knowing that I’ll get the chance to build it in correctly during revisions.

Anyway, I’ll probably post an update at least once a month. Hopefully, you find them interesting and insightful.

Cheers!