It's Critter Time!

Hiya~
Just making this thread as a little topic for fellow authors to chat!

So I guess I can kick off the topic by asking, what are you currently working on?

I'm currently writing a sci-fantasy book about two investigators trying to track down a specific magical signature, only to get progressively more derailed as an adventuring party forms around them.

Hooray! An author/writing thread!

Right now I'm working (very, very slowly) on a storyline I call Transgressions. The short pitch is that it's the story of a Nightclub/Commune and the group of queer gals who run it/live there. They try their hardest to carve out a space where people like them can thrive, and do so in the face of a world that does not want them. It's also intermingled with elements of fantasy, science fiction, self-discovery, gender, and resisting fascism. Oh right, and it's also furry to the core.

I'll confess that a lot of it is sad queer fiction, and it does carry some content warnings. But it's sort of an important story to me. So I keep telling it.

I've found best way to keep myself writing is to publish small chapters periodically. But the creative block hits hard and often, even if I know the story beats I want to hit. Thus, it takes a while. Goodness does it take a while.

(In the unlikely event that anyone is interested, the chapters I've written to date can be found here.)

I am currently game deving a short 2d pixel horror game to practice making a game :3

I am also trying to worldbuild and create a wiki on Obsidian that I hope I can compile into an actual document for people to read! (and for me to reference to).

Have always been really slow and adding some extra hobbies didn't help, but I'm in kinda the base level planning phase for the next set of chapters written on our website! The plan is to broadly block out a draft of everything we wanna hit and then release stuff as its done.

This work was always mainly meant to be about the self, and spirituality and ourself (though we started writing this as a completely different entity essentially) so we don't go for a ton of big external conflicts. The characters are mainly in a living city with its own confused semi-communist personality, and a body of magic allows for people to modify themselves in various ways as they like. I suppose we're interested in how none of that would inherently prevent difficulties and conflicts and just general social inertia, but we get to focus on what we kinda consider more spiritual matters in the setting while also making characters that are fun. For the second """season""" of work we wanted to broaden the scope of the characters focused on so it's a little less about the witches. Currently, we're blocking out a story that requires making up an entire fictional species that people would wanna be which is a ridiculously ambitious undertaking lol. Just make up a new yinglets for a bit sure. I don't think we'll be 100% successful but it's all about trying.

Of course again, since we started this our sona who was a/the main character exploded when we discovered we were multiple people, so we're looking back at how that was reflected in their characterization and how we thought of the character!

I'm 94,000 words into my debut novel, The Wolfskull Standard. I like to pitch it as "steampunk Redwall on the high seas for grownups," but depending on the audience I have to resort to "Pirates of the Caribbean meets Zootopia."

I'm self-publishing. The goal is to get it on store shelves by December. I think I can do it. It's the most significant creative endeavor I've ever undertaken. And I'm a little nervous of how people will react, heh.

I am 3 chapters into a sequel for a novel I finished writing last year.

It's a murder mystery story and features a non-conventional "werewolf", or more accurately a wolf shifter, in the NYPD solving unconventional murders that have supernatural elements to them. The rest of his homicide investigation team are all different mythological creatures and the story navigates living in a world where the supernatural have to live hidden from regular society.

The first story's already done and dusted and is on Wattpad and Inkitt, but I've barely scratched the surface of what I'm writing for the second one.

I have two WIPs, one's a dark gaslamp fantasy and the other's an incredibly self-indulgent litrpg. The LitRPG was because I looked at a lot of other vtubers who do art and make small comics with their sonas and have actual lore, or others are just out here doing music. So I thought "why not just write my lore as a whole story" so its just silli

Both are going to be web serials, I've been working on them both slowly since I am eternally out of energy

I'm kind of just producing scraps and letters and journaling a lot at the moment. I'm ears-deep in therapy and it's unblocked something in me that's resulted in me producing a lot more "raw material" than usual, because I'm trying really hard not to filter or edit myself, giving myself permission to express myself... which is good, but it means a lot of it is just like, not really fit for sharing or needs a lot of editing on down the road to become anything other than a stray thought or feeling or image.

Apart from what I've posted to this forum, the most recent thing I finished was a self-insert fanfic about milk puzzle [18+, check the warnings on the page for more detail]. It's vent art, and the person it's about could conceivably stumble across it, so... I don't know if I'll post it anywhere at all. But it was very cathartic to write, it was something locked up inside me that my therapists encouraged me to let out onto the page, to stop hating myself for having it in my heart.

It's not particularly extreme, but it was more violent and direct than anything I'd ever managed before. A few months ago I felt sure that I could never write anything like it. Even though I was already writing something like it over and over in my head anyway.

But as regards WIPs... I do have some stuff on hiatus. I have notes for a Pokémon fangame/fanfic that leans into what extracurricular life was like out here in Texas: lotta bus trips, killing time at other campuses, the drudgery of practice.

I have a set of 3k-word or so short stories (and notes for more) that are basically just me indulging in experiences I wish I got to have growing up. Likely won't end up posted anywhere but have been nice to write.

I have notes for an isekai manga script that mostly consists of scenes I had from a dream one night. The idea was essentially like, the MC brought a lot of unresolved trauma with them into this other world, so even though they had "defeated the evil", their internal struggles had resulted in very real collateral damage -- cities vaporized, entire species of pets obliterated, forced prohibition of alcohol -- and meanwhile the MC still feels completely unsatisfied having this power and yet unable to return home and exact revenge or right the wrongs in their own world. Anyway, it's intended to be an exploration of feelings I have about times I've failed or been unable to healthily cope with my own struggles. I don't think I'm ready to write it yet.

Longer term WIPs... I have an anthology that sprung up around the question of "could a civilization set about a 1000000-year-long project and bring it to fruition?". A developed, but isolated star system gets a signal that they interpret as "yeah you got about a million years to get the hell out of here, we're coming through and we will destroy you". As more conventional options end up being dead ends, they set about a process of imbuing their planets, moons, stars with a set of souls that they kind of shape and empower over time through rituals, channeling, occasional sacrifice of exemplary individuals... that sort of thing.

So it effectively becomes about a set of civilizations led by a kind of atomic priesthood that has to grapple with extreme-long-term planning, management of resources, a sort of claustrophobia, unexpected side effects of this process, entire projects and goals and basic knowledges fading into myth, obscurity, oblivion. And I want to explore it not solely as like, novellas detailing what happens, but a multimedia project (convenient excuse to branch out into other types of art I want to take on) with some amount of the works being in-universe works resulting from people living through this sort of thing.

But yeah, right now I'm not in a space where I can directly work on most of it. I'm trying to audit some courses in the fall to sharpen my skills in a more formal setting, so if that happens we'll see what it adds to all this.