Bread and Eggs

(NOT A PR0MPT)

******

It started with the ringing of Villain’s phone. He wasn’t surprised to see Hero’s name pop up. He admired the too-small circle with her picture on it. It was impossible to tell by looking at the emblem, but Villain knew it was a picture from their first date.

To think it had been five years ago...

Villain’s picture on Hero’s phone had been a more recent photo, one from their engagement. An image of him kneeling with the classic black velvety case. It was warm the day of their engagement- Villain didn’t dare propose on a cold day; it would have led to an obvious refusal.

He used to joke that warmth was the only reason Hero even liked him. “You scorn me constantly,” Villain would tease. “You only like me because of the heat I so generously produce.”

“As if you have any control over it! You can’t help that you’re so warm, but it is definitely a plus,” she would ultimately agree.

Now, they were married- and, oh, hadn’t it been a dream? Looking for homes, buying a home, getting groceries, coming home to one another, holding each other at the end of the day. It was all Villain wanted in life, and for so long, it seemed impossible. Yet, here they were; her joyful face was beaming at his under the name ‘Love of my life’.

Answering the phone, Villain jokingly began, “Yes, honey, I remembered to get the bread and eggs.”

The voice that answered wasn’t Hero’s.

***

Started reading your work recently and am impressed. How long do you think your current two projects will be when finished, in terms of word count?

Thank you for the kind words, anon! You're the first anonymous ask I've ever gotten that wasn't either spam or hating on me. :3

This is a good question, and one that I think about myself. My answer is kind of long so I'm putting the bottom line up top, and please take this with an enormous grain of salt because my crystal ball is a muddy one and so many things can change (up or down) in the editing:

The Galaxy Federal Inaugural Novel (working title) will probably be between 300,000 and 3 million words. If I really had to take a wild guess and narrow it down further, probably a little shy of the 1 million mark i.e. the 800,000 – 900,000 range.

Chapter 1 of After The Hero: A Curious Tale is harder to estimate for various reasons but is "probably" going to end up in the 200,000 – 700,000 range.

Okay, so that's the TL;DR. Now for the nitty gritty:

I have no friggin' clue! I have found with past experience that my estimates for this kind of thing are usually bad (and not in a specific direction or way).

A natural pair of questions to ask is: "What word count currently exists?" and "Roughly what percent of completion are these books at?"

The difficulty in my answering the first question is that, with the way my writing process works, I'd have to go and manually look at a bunch of different Word files and add it all up—an attainable chore but definitely a chore, as there are dozens and dozens of these files.

I've been working a lot on Galaxy Federal lately, adding a low tens of thousands of new words to the text just in the past three months. I am noticing lately that I am getting tantalizingly close to being able to stitch together a lot of material into a single manuscript document (or a couple documents), which will give me a much better impression both of my progress this year and much better estimating power as to what the finished book is likely to end up being in terms of length.

I had been holding off on looking at the word count till then, as a milestone reward. However, since I've been curious about this myself, and since someone has asked, I went and did a (very!) rough estimate of the existing manuscript text in the Galaxy Federal Inaugural Novel. This does not include supporting documentation, worldbuilding documents, etc.—just manuscript text.

As of today that number is currently 192,235 words (in 38 different documents). However, this is high, because I know there is some abandoned text in there as well as some other detritus inside the various manuscript documents that would be very time-consuming to factor out. I'm pretty confident in saying that the true number is close to 170,000, albeit with the caveat that not all of that, by any means, is going to make it into the final book.

The difficulty in my answering the second question—about the completion percentage—is that the Galaxy Federal Inaugural Novel still has some pretty fundamental unanswered questions and blank zones. I also don't really have a clue yet just how much cutting of existing text is likely to happen in the main editing phase. Probably quite a fair bit. ATH Chapter 1 has far fewer fundamental unanswered questions, but there are still huge areas of the text that haven't begun to get written. Less of it will be cut in editing than with the Galaxy Federal novel, as I have a much tighter grip on the ATH Chapter 1 story and am not writing many sections that are never likely to see the light of day.

A very wild shot in the dark for the percent completion on the Galaxy Federal Novel is that I am between one-ninth and one-half of the way there in terms of the entire project. The more optimistic "one-half" leans heavily on the extensive progress I have already made in world conceptualization, story construction, and the existing word count. The less optimistic "one-ninth" leans heavily on word count projections alone. But I can't stress enough just how wild of a guess this is. As for ATH Chapter 1, an equally wild guess is that I am about one-fourth of the way there, maybe closer to one-half if I again heavily factor in the existing story development and worldbuilding work that isn't directly reflected in the word count.

The good news is that I don't foresee that these rather anemic completion percentage estimates are going to take correspondingly more time in the future than their respective projects have already taken in the past. This is due to so much of the worldbuilding and story construction already being done, and also due to the fact that I have been writing a lot more frequently in the past couple years. If I truly were only one-ninth of the way through the Galaxy Federal Inaugural Novel, and have been working on it for almost seven years, then at a linear rate it would take me another fifty-five years or so to finish, and that's just not going to be the case. I anticipate finishing both books in this decade, barring personal disaster in my life (which could easily happen), and at least one of these two books is likely to be finished well before the end of the decade.

That's good news for the Galaxy Federal Inaugural Novel, which is a standalone work, but obviously raises questions about my ability to complete ATH in its entirety in my lifetime. =[

Do you have any tips for working with your agent? Thanks!

There are a variety of questions about "working with an agent" in the pinned FAQ. But I guess there isn't one about LITERALLY working with an agent lol. So uh - I'll just give some random tips?

WE ARE ON YOUR TEAM. If authors/illustrators are having some kind of crisis with a deadline or an issue with edits or *something* -- a lot of times they go to ground and hide from their agent because they feel like they need to figure it out for themselves, or they don't want to "get in trouble" or something. Which, like, I feel that instinct in my bones, BUT -- we are on your team. We can solve (or help resolve, at any rate) pretty much any publishing issue, IF WE KNOW ABOUT IT. And the earlier we know about it, the better. If creators are hiding from their agent, their agent can't help them. So, communicate!

DON'T BE AFRAID TO BE A SQUEAKY WHEEL. I'm not saying "be an asshole" or anything, of course -- you can be a NICE squeaky wheel. But if time has passed without hearing from your agent or something, don't be shy about reminding them. Things get lost! We have nine million things going on! We are putting out fires all the time, and sometimes, the "not urgent" gets pushed to the side for later, and then later we're still putting out fires and that thing has been forgotten! But we don't WANT to forget. I, personally, greatly appreciate reminders. (Just as I hope if I send gentle reminders to my clients about something, they would not be annoyed or pissed with ME!)

BOUNDARIES ARE HEALTHY. Some agents are OK with texts, some are probably not into them. Some agents have hard rules around when they are available, some don't. Some have small children and are somewhat working around THEIR schedule and can't just hop on a call at any given moment. Some are on social media all the time, some avoid it. So, you know -- ask how THEY prefer to communicate. The two if you will get into a groove as you work together, but just, you know. Be mindful.

Ultimately, as much as we may want you to FEEL like the most important person in our lives, agents have other clients, and a personal life (hopefully) -- so maybe don't text at 1am or DM them important things on Twitter AND Facebook AND Insta that would be better as an email, or send a constant stream of emails when you know they are on vacation.

(Sidebar: Something about finding out their agent going away for a bit really spurs a lot of people into suddenly NEEDING to correspond with them, like, "I know I haven't said a peep in months and yes this COULD wait a week, but also, I know you are about to go out of town, here's ten manuscripts for you to read on the plane!" -- pls, I beg you, no, I just want to read a real book on the plane, or better yet, sleep, and I already have plenty of work to do if that's what I wanted to do on the plane.)

SCHEDULE EMAILS WHEN POSSIBLE: This might be a personal one, but. One of the joys of email is, you can send whenever you want, and I can reply whenever I am able. So yes, it is totally fine to send an email in the dead of night or on weekends if that's the only time you have, and I do understand well the need to "get this off my plate and onto yours" or "tell you now before I forget!" . . . HOWEVER, I get *hundreds* of emails a day, and personally try hard not to look at email after 7pm or on weekends -- and sometimes things that get sent at 11pm on Friday end up getting totally buried by Monday morning. So IF you are able to schedule emails for normal working hours, can I gently suggest you do that? And if you can't... OK! But you might have to nudge to get it back up in the pile!

(I do this all the time, btw. I often only have time to prep submissions at night or on weekends -- and when that's the case, I simply put everything together and then schedule the email to go out in the morning on the next business day -- or, I have to send something to somebody in a different time zone, and I can schedule it so they aren't getting it after hours -- this technology is a BOON!)

I would further suggest if you have a bunch of small things, maybe gather them into ONE email rather than a half dozen.

That's all I can think of right now!

Hello! I just happened to see a reblog of This Multiplicity of Powers with your add about dealing with covid stuff, and I’m being shy bc that’s how in awe I am of your writing, but I wanted you to know that I’ve been recovering from long covid for the past 9 months and this fic was a literal turning point for me.

Idk how that even makes sense but the way you described Louis’ powers and feelings definitely intersected with the way my nervous system has been on the fritz and and the trauma of the whole experience and yeah. You deserve a more coherent message than this about it but I’m afraid if I wait and try to do that it’ll never get sent so I hope this will do!

And re being sick specifically, at this point I have a list of resources as long as my arm about what has gotten me from being bedridden for 3 mos to 2 Harry concerts - solo! On a train for an hour! - in one week, and daily long walks in the woods again, but I won’t share that unsolicited. however happy to come back/come off anon because the world NEEDS you well and making your art.

Like, I’m a professional writer irl, and have read plenty of literature, and probably tens of thousands of fics in the last 20 years and there’s maybe 5 authors in the whole of them I’d say this too—you have a gift unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The sentences you craft, the characters you create, the worlds you build?! The mythos?! Unfuckingbelievable.

Please stop believing in yourself in all of the levels you need to. Sending all the healing you’ve given me back at you. ❤️‍🔥🙏🏼

I saved this message like....like it was waiting for something that's too hot to pick up, but here I am a few days later and it's still burning my fingertips. I can't even tell you directly how much this meant to me because it's too hot to touch, too hard to look directly at it.

Thank you. I'm in pain and I'm scared and you have helped me so much with this one message. Thank you. I am so profoundly glad that TMOP spoke to you in a way that you could take up and do your own work with -- I fully believe that people read things and bring their own problem-solving genius to things and that when we write things we're mostly just trying to create a stage for someone to have their own process -- it's also just so SHOCKING to me, such a surprise to feel like everything I put in that story about bodies and healing and loving our fragile selves was helpful to real healing.

I would love to hear any of your resources about long covid. No obligation and do not fear or feel pressure, as I have a lot of support around me and a lot of access to information, but I am in the early days of struggling right now and truly having a hard time understanding what is happening and would welcome even just the comfort of other people's journeys (my current long covid experience seems focused on some kind of lung issue, like severe pain & tightness that just seemed to happen overnight even though I have no shortness of breath and all my cardiac health seems good). Feel free to send on anon or off, in any way you like. "long walks in the woods" is all I dream of right now. I am so happy for your progress and so full of warm wishes that it continue.

I've read this message over and over again. You are the reason I opened my novel manuscript file for the first time in a month, this weekend. I feel that healing you are sending back at me. Thank you for giving me this unconditional love and support. In the depths of all the bullshit right now your message feels like a literal gift from the universe.

I'm glad I could help, I appreciate artists so much, they deserve to know how their work affects people ^-^ I know how it is to have a lack of self esteem, so I don't want people to feel like that. I was just being honest, that's all! about the ocs, not everyone who has them is an artist, that's why I asked! i personaly don't have one, but it seems like the dl folks are very interested in your work & i just thought that asking would be nice, since you have your anon asks off & some are too shy!

Thank you! That’s very sweet. Now that I think about it, you’re right, you don’t have to be an artist to have an oc. Also, about drawing oc’s. I meant that as commissions. But I can’t do commissions now. Therefore, I meant it as in “I might take commissions on drawing oc’s in the future.” But that was my fault I didn’t clarify it, so if anyone misunderstood that, I’m sorry. I’m planning on stopping doing requests as well, ‘cuz, as much as I enjoy doing them, I also have a lot of stuff that I have been putting away. So I want to use my time on personal stuff, and put more time into writing my manuscript.