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Is Trimmer in the new book much? Love that little sharp guy, can't get enough of him

Trimmer does appear several times, but he's less prevalent in this book than the one coming up after this one!

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new book pov not rich??

Nope! That's what was meant a few posts back, when I was giving a few points of interest about the next book and I mentioned "another external narrative view of our big weird Fleet boy". One of the POVs is a familiar Fleet character, and the other one is a whole different flavor.

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Is the new book going to answer the mystery on how and why the worst handjob in fleet history went down or must we speculate forever?

Unfortunately not! :,D Neither of the POVs featured in this one were present for the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Handjob. But in terms of details, the "how" of it going down is included in the title (BAD) and the "why" is a pretty straightforward grim comedy of errors situation

two guys stuck in a place where the expected currency for Big Favors was sexual gratification

Rich wades into a genuinely dangerous situation to scare a couple of real bad guys off Trimmer's back and ends up with a knife wound out of the deal, and has a very messy and not at all stoic response once he manages to get back to safety

Trimmer ends up with a lot of guilt and relief in the aftermatch, which he has no tools to process and no idea what to do about. Because neither of them has had time to get comfortable with the idea that they're Actually Friends

Trimmer makes a grim offer, and Rich (very shaken up and kind of just wanting a a hug but not a guy to question physical contact) awkwardly goes "uh I guess? <:/"

it quickly becomes apparent that both of them are wildly uncomfortable and furthermore that neither of them can go thirty seconds without shit-talking the other one.

Eventually Rich manages to excruciatingly express the sentiment "you have my back and keep me from starving and that's plenty, PLEASE stop doing a bad job of wrangling my dick" and the little Sims (relationship plus!) indicator appears over both their heads lol.

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aw yeah next book ! can you share any details about it?

I can certainly try! A list of things about this novel.

Something of an answer to the common Ravishment Fantasy romance novel trope of "yeah I'm a prisoner but the sex is so sexy it turns out I'm fine with it!*"

Secondary to that, there are going to be some warnings on this one for sure! Flipping the lens on the aforementioned tropes makes for high stakes and drama but also. Content warnings.

Basil and Thena buddy roadtrip of necessity, feat. Liam's terrible landside grandma and several members of her Hastings security garrison.

Quite a few Hastings actually, as well as one of Sol's elfy European cousins, and more of a look at the lykoi soldier mod. Here there be wolves...

Another external narrative view of our big weird Fleet boy, but a very different POV from Sol's Irritable New Yorker vibe.

Old faces, and new ones! We've really come to love the new little squad of absolute weirdos, and also enjoyed getting to put old favorites into new drama and seeing how they handle it!

An actor, a patrician, a vet, a sad puppy, a witch and a nerd the size of a fridge walk into a bar--

The free elephant herds of North America, and the sign languages thereof

Rich has feelings and opinions about the lawns and decorating habits of the landside wealthy**

Well-deserved comeuppances

Heist :)

*No shade honestly, it's a romance novel classic for a reason! But not a mode Rich is capable of operating in, haha. **Feelings: IRRITATED. Opinions: STUPID, WASTEFUL, INEFFICIENT AND BAD.

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Ohoho I'm excited by book 2, but that's a monster length. How many words is book 1 again? For comparison. Also, separate thought, where do the short stories fit on the timeline between books 1 and 2?

Shit, I had not actually checked until now! But it looks like AtS was about 185.5K. So at the current length of 395K, the next one is more than twice as long. I need to lie down!!! How and why do we do this to ourselves, haha.

RE: timeline, all the little novellas so far (with the obvious exception of Midnight Chicken) will fall between the two! The next one (working title Run Aground) takes place approximately a year and change after Taste of New York.

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are you telling me book 2 is 400k and DONE???

"Done" is a strong word! and it may end up shorter (or. longer QuQ) with further editing! But in terms of "the prose are all written and are ready for us to start pruning and refining": yup!

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speaking of writing we're getting done: 395,000 words of rough draft are officially done as of last night. 👍

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How does doing the books together work? I'm guessing or it looks like maybe roachpatrol writes them and splicketylit does most of the drawing and then rollerskatinglizard does the sales and posts and stuff? I want to write books some day and it seems like working with friends would make it easier, but how did you get some friends interested to help?? Did you think of a book and then go hey actually OOMF could help with that? Or was it something else? Thanks in advance!

Hm! I'll take this one point at a time I think, because there's a lot here.

RE: our roles, I think you're misapprehending the concept of "cowriters"! Which one of us has the energy and inspiration at any given time varies, but all three of us plot/brainstorm, write, and edit on all the books! We have strong points we tend to lean into--Skates is really great at the minutiae of publishing sites and advertising posts and compiling our rambling discussions into roadmaps, Roach comes up with world embroidery/texture/setbuilding details like it's his job, and on a good day I can turn outline into prose and check off edits at a pretty breakneck pace--but these books are our shared babies, and they wouldn't be the same books if any one of us hadn't been intimately involved in every step!

RE: establishing a cowriter situation, I can only speak for how we ended up cowriting; we were fandom friends first, playing with each other's OCs and ideas. Eventually someone broached the topic of "hey do you want to write an actual freestanding story about some of these goobers we've been making up?" and ever since we've been in a three-way discord chat, brainstorming our way forward as a group. :D

Addendum: Just to temper your expectations, I don't know that I would say that cowriting is "easier" than writing by yourself! It's easier in some ways--having other people to bounce ideas off of, being able to lean on your cowriters' strengths, etc--but it requires a LOT of trust both in your friendship and in your cowriters' skills, and even with both of those things there will still be friction! Multiple people all trying to create the perfect image of the pie-in-the-sky novel they're imagining are going to conflict sometimes, and resolving those moments can be hard on both the level of friendship AND of collaborating artists.

Roach compared it to gem fusion when I posted this in the group chat to discuss our thoughts, and I do have to corroborate that. Last time I started working on the next novel near one of my cowriters in person, we did glow and mesh into a huge sexy hottie with four arms. So you may want to be prepared for that, also. UoU

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Merry Christmas to meeeee from an irl friend.... son boy...

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In honor of the sale: Did Trimmer start climbing Rich or did Rich start picking up Trimmer first? Who started the dynamic?

roach — lol they both insist it was the other guy

Splickedylit, RN, BSN — Trimmer's climbing impulse was probably more in-born than Rich's picking-people-up impulse? I'm inclined to say they both insist it was the other guy but Trimmer is the guy who like, climbed up Rich either out of panic or complaining the whole way needing to fix a light in their shitty hallway

roach — i feel like they did the Scared Primate Clutch the first time and grabbed each other and then given their relative masses it ended up with rich holding trimmer like a kitty

Splickedylit, RN, BSN — and Rich was like. I can steady him with one hand....... he's so light and small............... and trimmer's brain was like "oh this man is climbable, add him to the climbable list"

roach — haha adorable

Splickedylit, RN, BSN — And then the NEXT time something went to shit, Trimmer's brain went CLIMB!!!!!!!

roach — aww

rollerskatinglizard — I want to say the first time Trimmer dived for Rich and climbed onto his shoulder without it being partly Rich's idea, afterwards Trimmer would've been like.... Huh. he let me climb him instead of throwing me down the hallway, even tho I took him by surprise and felt a Way about it before quickly shoving that to the back of his brain to ignore forever

roach — yes neither of them said anything or Thought anything ever!!!

rollerskatinglizard — indeed

Splickedylit, RN, BSN — Trimmer panic-climbed and then realized afterward that Rich deftly and tenderly balanced and supported him even though Trimmer was definitely clawing his way up the guy for the first few seconds and was like I AM NOT REPLAYING THE SENSATION OF BEING HELD I AM NOT RE

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How does the Rich/Trimmer Fusion handle for them emotionally while they are still on the Sympatico? It's gotta be harder to play the "I don't even like you that much this is just for mutual protection" game of platonic-murderboat-gay-chicken when there's also a guy who is the literal embodiment of your mutual love and trust.

Fortunately for them, they're both good at 1. ignoring feelings while they happen, and 2. pretending they didn't happen after the fact lolololol. But also, it helps that the feeling of "I want to protect him and keep him safe", coming from the other half of a being that you're now part of, can be pretty easily explained away as self-preservation! Of course they both feel safer and more comfortable and held and protected and loved they're fuck-off huge and they've got Merrill's muscles//Trimmer's knife and they're safe. And it's normal to feel relieved about being safe. So they're just going to stay fused for a while lmao.

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Out of curiosity, have you ever drawn either Admiral Clearwater?

I drew Beatrix at one point and I thought I scanned the sketch but can't actually find it anywhere! So (appropriately enough) take two lol.

Both admirals have a societal role somewhere between president-mayor and godqueen; Harriet was ex-navy and had a lot of authority and gravitas going for her even before she personally trained most of her next generation of administrators, but Beatrix is young enough (and trying to fill big enough shoes) she has to lean a little harder on the queenliness of it all while she's trying to establish herself, so her outfits and presentation are usually more dramatic than her predecessor's.

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...................................ANYWAY.

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A whole variety of things that have not managed to get posted, of varying significance, completion, symbolism and and canon...nicity. Canonness. Canonitude.

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actually on the topic of old drawings; the first-ever drawings I did of Rich, Liam, and Sol turned up on my deep-dive of old discord messages and I was compelled to redraw/compare!

Rich very much predates the worldbuilding of the Michigan Fleet universe, as one of Key/rollerskatinglizard's oldest OCs, and was originally just a normal amount of un-tweaked big and buff dude, although I also sucked at drawing people with body mass back when I drew these lol. It does make me laugh that the huge crooked nose and sad, downturned eyes have been a constant from sketch one!

Liam predates the Michigan Fleet as well and was originally mine! He..... hasn't changed much actually haha. Although his size/prettiness/temper being a genetic modification is new, from the first lengthy discussion of mods where fourhands and hastings both got established (although not by those names). It looks like I coined the mod name "Babydoll", which I do NOT remember doing.

Sol was the most Group Effort of these three, looking back at the messages: Key invented a salty little gorgeous asshole with modded hearing for a snatch of interaction in a wildly different context than his new introduction; roach was the one who suggested the elf ears and iridescent hair to go along with it, I was the one who suggested he was from New York and threw several large pinches of "a big tsundere about Rich" into the mix, and a lot of the much later patrician worldbuilding was roach.

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In honor of me trolling through a billion pages of discord messages sorted only by "has:image" for unrelated reasons; some roach!Riches from the long-ago that I somehow never ended up posting when I first started this blog. Feat. Rich's cute little mouse cuff tattoo

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in a very old post roach mentioned that a daemon au exists. what would everyone's daemon be?

Oh hey sure! There's lots of little snippets of AUs that include daemons, and lots of scattered chat convos, some of which contradict each other; here's the list as far as I could gather up.

Richard/Rich and Erin Merrill (giant white hero rat)

Joseph/Joey and Maria Trimmer (grasshopper mouse, although at one point in the musings she was a raccoon!)

Basil and Sasha Wright (brown bat)

Liam and Lisabetta/Lisa Beaker (river otter)

Michigan/Mitch and Alaska Ford (lab retriever)

Solace/Sol and Charity King (raven)

Benedict/Ben and Beatrice/Bea Jones (we've thrown around bullfrog vs american badger)

Athena/Thena and Odysseus/Odd/Oddball Merrill (white/cinnamon tiger and yes it's wildly out of place and inconvenient on the fleet. CAN'T BE TAMED!!!!)

Angela/Angie and Theophilius/Theo Merrill (anatolian shepherd)

Belladonna/Bella and Narcissus Beaker (peacock)

Finnegan/Finn and Saoirse Merrill (red setter)

Helen and Troy Bane (leukistic/albino jaguar)

Rich's tech coworker Phil Green has a mole

We didn't determine Nitrogen "Nate" Chau's daemon's species but roach says she should be named Free Radical and that's great.

Liam's PRT sex friend Jordan Levi has a corgi

People with Hastings coloration genes also end up with white or leukistic/albino daemons! Also, while I'm compiling things: some characters that y'all have not met yet, for our own reference.

Rafael and Calliope Caro (mockingbird)

Connor and Delilah Campbell (fox)

Android/Andy and Yaga Strega (black rooster)

Dylan and "Wolf" Ulfric (wolf)

Nitro and Beartrap Goresmith (albino spotted hyena)

Arthur and Morgaine Carraway (black timber wolf)

William/Will and Lavinia/Lav Sandgren (coyote)

Samuel/Sam and Abigail/Bugs Washington (hare)

Gabriel/Gabe and Thalia Caro (barn swallow)

Sofia/Sofie and Virgil Caro (swan)

Phoenix and Stonewall Jett (rottweiler)