#a wheel inside a wheel

[nonevahed]

referring to a character as having a "Jaime Lannister Moment" before i realize i have to specify I'm referring to the thing Jaime's infamous for in-universe

[natrome]

this is the "what are the projects that are the foremost contenders for me to work on in my break between finishing SMST and starting lightless labyrinth and silent spiral" post. i want to give a general overview of what they are, the pros and cons of working on them, and how likely i am to dump time into them

this post got /disgustingly/ long, so to spare your dashes, under a readmore it goes

Partial rewrite of Life Out of Balance and add significant material to Lighting Out for the Territories

so, It Is Known that by a fairly wide margin, LOOB and LOFTT are the worst parts of WIAW. they're not complete write-offs, but they have foundational, structural issues that are like. breaking the series haha.

LOOB has one strong arc (annerose's story), which is very grounded and has a natural emotional flow to it, and has a strong thematic throughline. unfortunately it also has one weak arc (reinhard's story), where i couldn't really figure out how to pull together a like. strong enough thematic backbone to make it function as a /story/ rather than a disjointed series of events. the writing itself isn't bad, and there's a lot of things i like about the book (and, furthermore, there are a lot of people who like LOOB the best out of all the books), but this lack of coherency has set me up for major problems down the line. the book is also "fanfic-y" in a way that I would like to resolve-- secondary characters drift in and out of the story expecting the reader to already know and care about them, and events happen in a somewhat random way.

LOFTT compounds all of the existing problems-- reinhard's emotional arc continues to be slim-to-none, secondary characters are given even less development in this novel (except, maybe, muller), the narrative continues to be a series of events rather than A Narrative. it also fails to provide enough setup for the next novel, leaving the alliance side feeling completely bereft of the interesting meaning that the empire side has. most people who drop WIAW drop it at LOFTT-- it's an actively bad book that turns away readers.

also my timelines are jacked to hell and back 😩 which needs a fix in general.

so i would like to fix these problems if at all possible lmao

there are a couple thoughts i've had rolling around in my brain, some of which may end up fully happening, some of which might not.

the first option is to get rid of Reinhard's POV in LOOB entirely. i think this would be an interesting but difficult thing to do: rein is the main character, or he should be, but right now he's just sort of wandering around his own story. i think part of my problem is that i find a lot of other people's reactions to rein easier to write about than rein himself. i think it might be possible for him to have more of an impact on the story if, like in canon, people are recognizing him as this strange, maybe more-than-human force of nature, rather than being inside reinhard's "oh my god let me out of high school" head lmfao.

of course, this is actively counter to my intentions for WIAW as a whole-- i want to provide a humanizing story. (but what does it mean for 'nat rome' to humanize the victor? 🤔). but i think if i do this, i can maybe use that inhuman POV to make LOFTT more interesting, by suddenly being inside rein's head where we weren't before.

the second thing that should definitely be done is, as i said, give fredrica /way/ more screentime and chapters. i think building a contrasting narrative between the musel family and the greenhil family would be interesting and a good way to both get a greater worldbuilding depth in the alliance (get up close and personal with the politics earlier) and elevate fredrica from a secondary to a primary character.

similarly, i think caribelle needs chapters-- the story has not yet had an inside POV on the earth church, and having one i think would move it further into the realm of a concrete and vital plot element rather than something that exists and functions only because it exists in canon.

and it wouldn't necessarily happen until LOFTT, but jessica could also use some chapters. she needs to get radicalized i think.

granted, the issue with all of these things is like-- i can say "oh, i'll give these people chapters" but i don't actually have anything for them to do. which was sorta the problem with LOOB and LOFTT both-- there's just. events that happen because I needed An Event to happen to make the plot move forward to fill the book lol. so all of this is something that would need to be workshopped in a pretty severe way.

as you can see from the sheer volume i've written here, i'm fairly serious about this one as a project lol. i think if i'm going to rewrite these books, even in part, now is the time to do it, because it will set me up in a much better position to write lightless labyrinth. it will give me plot threads to work from, it will give me an emotional throughline that i can draw on, and it will stop me from feeling just plain bad about having to write rein's sections lol.

this would be a pretty ambitious project and i estimate it would take no less than 5 months, but it would also i think be worth that time.

the "alternative" to this is to write instead a whole bunch of short stories that attempt to plug all these holes. but this would make the existing reading-order problem much worse, while not meaningfully fixing the "LOFTT is a total turn-off to readers" problem, b/c nobody's going to stop reading LOFTT to go read a short story plunked down in the middle of it.

[TBD Phezzan novella]

this is also a WIAW project. this one i don't want to talk about /too/ much but it would probably be a dominique-POV side story that gives insight into the political situation on phezzan just prior to the alliance's invasion. i think it's necessary to give phezzan a whole lot more development politically, and there's no way to do that without an insider pov. in general i'd like to answer the questions of

where is rubinsky going and what is he planning post alliance invasion

what is the actual relationship of the earth church to the phezzan govt

what do dominique and kesserling hope to accomplish by putting him in the position of the alliance's puppet ruler

what is UP with that particular weird tangle of relationships [tie into the families overall narrative]

i'd want to keep it short, no longer than something like pictures of decency. if i don't decide to write this as a standalone project, it could get looped in to either the LOFTT added-material, or it would get folded into lightless labyrinth. but since it concerns events that happen prior, it probably makes more sense as a standalone. also it being standalone would make it easier to write, and i (and maybe this is silly of me) really like the WIAW novellas haha. i know they do nothing but confuse the timelines but they feel so nice in my brain

"finish" as in a mirror, dimly

what does it mean for my collection of short stories to be "finished" anyway lmao. there's a bunch i want to write that i think would make interesting additions to the collection, and i want to get the thing printed out, but i'm also aware that i could probably keep writing canon-compliant short stories for the next 10 years and not run out of things to say lol. so like where do i call that book done? what do i put in it? idk. but i like writing the stories and i have a vague list of them that i'd like to get through (+ a mental list of edits i'd like to do to the existing ones) so it might be fun to spend a couple months doing nothing but writing short fics

[untitled arle heinessen/book of exodus pastiche fic]

god. ok. while this is of all of these the least readable (i'm sure my audience is like. 10 people.) it is unfortunately the one i'd want to work on the most lol. i really want to write a verse drama......... unfortunately. the gist of it would be to write out the arle heinessen story as like a commentary on the foundational myth/civic religion of the Alliance, through the lens of the exodus narrative. writing it as a play i think would help me keep the scope in check (sitting down to write a novel i think it would get really out of hand lol), and i want to write a play real bad, and i want to write a verse play real bad, and i think it would be fun to give this project to "the real dietrich bronner" (since he's from the alliance, and is a playwright) and then have a frame narrative of Nat Rome's Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Earth Trip to string up around it.

this is ofc the most self indulgent thing ever lol. but it really makes my brain soooo excited to think about writing it. so i really really want to. even if the end product is borderline unreadable 😂 i'm in my flop era i might as well embrace it lol

finish every hateful instrument

i can practically feel the like 4 people who read itsoh yelling and screaming at me through the screen to finish this one lol. i should. i really really should. i've been working on it on and off for the past several years, and it would be good to just sit down and actually devote my full and undivided attention to finishing it. i love it as a project and i think it's really in a solid place, and having an original novel that showcases exactly what my writing is like that i can hand to people has been something that i have wanted to have for a long-ass time.

the trouble is of course that i have like 4 readers for this project, a situation that is unlikely to change for the better in any significant way lol. so that makes it hard for me to justify working on it.

it's also a tricky and difficult project, and i expect it would take me minimum 9 months to finish. which is a huge time commitment, especially when i do have people waiting on WIAW. at least if i'm writing LOGH fic i'm still theoretically entertaining those people-- that is not the case if i jump ship and go to work on itsoh-verse stuff.

but otoh i fucking love working in the itsoh-verse...... so.

itsoh act 2 rewrite

this is a similar situation to EHI, except it's even less urgent b/c it's not a project that i'm currently in the middle of. i am going to rewrite itsoh act 2 eventually, but idk when the best time to do it is.

the plus side of this one is that it would be /way/ easier than EHI, b/c it's a second draft rather than a first one. I have already solved all of the problems, and just need to put it down on paper. so it would probably be a 4-5 month project, and it would be very nice to have the itsoh rewrite essentially current with itsoh itself (i'm ditching the entirety of what i have for act 3 lol)

the machine that builds the machine

this is a standalone fantasy novel that i want to write, that i have an outline for, that i wrote the first really bad chapter of when i was miserable with SMST, but haven't touched since. (the quick descriptor is like lesbian judasxjesus fantasy industrial revolution labor politics novel lmao.) anyway it would be a very fun project i think, and similar to EHI i would like to have An Original Novel to pass around, but this one got shunted to the back burner due to [gestures] everything else in the whole wide world. the brainworms that made me originally start it have also gone into hibernation, but i think i could get them out of their cryofreeze if i decided that i actually am going to sit down and work on it. this would also be a "i am intending to flog this out for traditional publishing" novel, but like, idk. who knows. we'll see where life takes us lol.

tomorrow ye will get your pay

aka the whale novel. if you haven't been following this saga, essentially there's a fellowship available at a local library that put out a call for proposals for Fiction Writing About Whales using research from their historical whaling collection, and i tailored a novel concept to put in an application for that. so if i get the fellowship, i'll 100% be writing this novel (literary fiction, ~80k words, due in the spring), and if i don't get it i'll 0% be writing this novel. i'll find out if i got it mid october, so i guess i'm kinda writing this whole post prematurely lol

since this one is short and more importantly on a deadline, i think i would have it out the door pretty quickly. but i've also never written literary fiction before. it would be a good break from everything else i think, and this, of all the projects, would be a good step in my ~~~writing career~~~ (for whatever that's worth, which, afaict, is nothing lmao)

something extremely random not on this list

it could be that when i finish SMST i'll just start writing the first thing that pops into my head, or i'll get assigned something for yuletide that will break my brain and make me want to write a novella, or whathaveyou. anything could happen. your duty, should you choose to accept it, is to Stop These Things From Happening. etc.

[natrome]

this is the poem that ended up as the SOTP epigraph

“(and I think silently: love is a bow-string pulled back to the point of breaking)”

— Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. by Elaine Feinstein, from Bride of Ice: “Poem of the End” (via roadmotel)

[ink-the-artist]

funky ceramic wizard staff + an update on how fucking LOUD the cicadas have gotten jesus christ

[deathdefyinggarlic]

inside out 2 if it was filmed in my head

[swervesbar]

I keep coming across ABSOLUTE GOLD while thrifting and now I have to choose between two impossibly good options, so I would like to formally ask yalls onion:

[marciaillust]

I added some colours to her :)

[floofle-universe]

This is their dynamic Shion told me

[periflynn]

[thenotoriousscuttlecliff]

Saw someone complain that Elayne only said she was the Daughter-Heir of Andor because the show is bad at world building and is forcing exposition.

Motherfucker this fandom has been joking about Elayne telling everyone she meets she's the Daughter-Heir of Andor for decades. It is the most in-character way she could've introduced herself.

[natrome]

ok now that i for real know what my writing commitments are going to be for the next, like, year, at least the majority of them, here is the actual for real i s2g hold me to this writing schedule

Fic in a Box - due 10/15

1 assignment of 2k words remains, write it this saturday

Five Figure Fanworks Exchange - check in 11/11, due 1/20

i expect this will take about a week to finish, and ideally i'll have it done prior to check-in.

Yuletide - works due 12/18

UNLESS i get an assignment that i want to go hogwild on, which i should be prevented from doing, i should be able to finish this the week of 11/26 and not work on it outside of that.

galactic santas - est. due 12/25

my fave event of the year lol, the logh secret santa exchange. uh anyway this one is usually due around christmas and also is the easiest thing on this list by a mile and a half. i'm 0% worried about this one.

tomorrow ye will get your pay - aka the whale novel. - first draft due 3/1, physical product due for display 4/1

this is an extremely short timeline, and while it's not "drop everything else" level short, it is going to have to be my #1 writing priority for a long time.

my plan is as follows

spend the remainder of october getting situated w/ the research i'm going to have to do, figuring out who i need to talk to, etc. as well as put together a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline

nov/dec i'm assuming will be eaten by SMST and other commitments, but get research done and essentially braindump into document

jan/feb, just write as much as possible, take time off of work/quit job if i need to

if possible confine edits to the first 2 weeks of march, get books printed; deliver final product by last week of march.

god this schedule is miserable. well i signed up for it! i did this entirely to myself! lmfao.

anyway i'm going to bracket in that it's a 20 chapter novel, which seems like a reasonable number of chapters. i essentially have ~10 weeks to write this book. this is totally normal and fine, i have written longer books with less of a solid outline in shorter amounts of time. if i can just sit my ass in a chair and hammer out 2.5k words/day i will EASILY make this deadline and have time for editing. the issue will be making myself do that. but having a deadline and like professional accountability should majorly help. esp if i quit my stupid fucking job lol

serpent's mouth, serpent's teeth - due 12/31

i have four chapters left on SMST. i do not think they will be EASY to write but I do think that I'm CAPABLE of getting them done before the end of the year. at the very least i've sworn until i was blue in the face that i would finish this book by the end of the year. i need this book to stop haunting my waking nightmares lmfao. i estimate ~50-60k words remain, but we'll see what it actually ends up shaking out as. hopefully it's not more than that.

anyway this is another just "ass in chair" moment. though if i could have made myself do that months ago, this book would have been finished sometime this summer lol

every link was freedom's name - aka the fucking. arle heinessen play. no due date.

this is my yay you finished all the obligations you had now you get to do something deeply deeply stupid and entertaining only to a tiny number of people project. lyric play about arle heinessen. book of exodus pastiche. probably not that long. estimate it'll take me as long as POD did, so a month and a half? but i won't stress it. aim to finish it mid may?

new constellations - aka the logh rarepairs exchange i run

I'm planning to run signups in late march, with works due mid may. this is slightly earlier than last year but due to my own personal schedule i don't want it to overlap with...

heart attack exchange - works due 6/2

yeah you literally only get 2 weeks to work on this one so it kinda is what it is lol.

life out of balance rewrite. no particular due date.

i expect this will take me 3-4 months to complete. finish by september?

lighting out for the territories augmentation. no particular due date.

i'd like to think that i can get this done in 2 months but i don't actually have a plan for what i need to do to it. so who tf knows lol. assume it'll take me the rest of the year.

every hateful instrument - no firm date

this will likely take between 6-8 months to finish, but it's another thing that i really want to stop having hanging over me. i'll either work on it before the LOFTT stuff or after

WIAW phezzan novella - ultimate TBD

to be completed immediately before starting LL/SS, probably

other misc nonsense

there are other small exchanges that i like to do (space swap, unsent letters, we die like fen) so as those pop up i probably will sign up for them. i'm not going to look up/prognosticate when they will happen at this moment in time

god i owe so many people gifts for birthdays and holidays and stuff >.> you may or may not get them. lean towards may not b/c what the fuck is this writing schedule. i'm so sorry lmao

i've now gotten back around to "oh this goes up to the end of the year again, so the end of the year exchanges (yuletide, fffx, fiab, galactic santas) should be on this schedule" but down that road lies only pain and horror lol

this list has gotten incredibly vague as things have gone on. the last part of this year and the first part of next year are pretty set in stone though, and i just need to like, get myself to the starting block and then start running

literally so funny that i was like "i should relax and take a break from writing before starting LL/SS" lmfao. lmfao.

obviously some of these things could be deleted from the schedule. i don't have to do a bunch of exchanges (but i liiiiiike them) and i don't have to write a stupid play (but i wannnnnnt to), and i don't have to do any rewrites to the early parts of WIAW (but they're a mess). so it's like. idk. maybe none of this is real and i'm just making lists b/c i like making lists lol

[hyper-coasters]

An up-close reminder of why NOT to have your phone out on roller coasters. This is a whole CHUNK taken out of the lower wheel from Cheetah Hunt, caused by a cellphone that had been dropped on the track. Not only do you destroy your phone, but you can do some serious damage to the coaster itself! Damage like this requires the whole train to come off the track and be at least partially, if not entirely, disassembled. Cheetah Hunts maintenance is done in-house annually and as needed by Busch Gardens mechanics. Super grateful for what they do!

[funzos]

Bird bowl

[dromaeo-sauridae]

happy pride month

[manuinout]

Did anyone miss Fashion Disaster? :3

[strawberrydemonart]

I had been wanting to do the color wheel challenge for a while but just didn’t know which characters to choose so I chose ones that meant a lot to me personally. 🌈

❤️ Traveler ‘Journey’

🧡 Anxiety ‘Inside Out 2’

💛 Kagamine Len ‘ Vocaloid’

💚 Muriel ‘ The Arcana’

💙💚 Jenny/XJ9 ‘ My life as a Teenage Robot’

💙 P ‘ Lies of P’

💜 Prince Bon ‘ To your Eternity’

🩷 Kirby ‘Kirby’