#i've got a whole powerpoint being drafted out

[unlikelysaintdelele]

Just gonna post a snippet of my lil Amren theory because I'm getting lowkey annoyed by certain parts of the fandom on their theories of who they think the next ACOTAR books are about.

First and foremost, an SJM interview that I've posted before:

Pay attention to the blue.

"based after and before ACOWAR."

and now I'd like to bring your attention to an interview that came with certain versions of ACOFAS (I don't recall which, maybe hardback, but that info isn't relevant to the theory so moving on...):

"through a course of events that I'd love to tell one day"

"I've got an idea for a prequel that takes place a long time before the events of Thorns and Roses."

The fact that she mentions wanting to write Amren's backstory and follows that up with discussion of an ACOTAR prequel (and then follows THAT up with discussing her future novels) makes me suspicious in the best way possible.

On top of that, she's been really vague about the last novel. I know she says she's keeping herself open to ideas... but she's lied to us before in order to steer clear of spoilers. For TaR, she hyped up Tamlin and lied through her teeth about how she felt about him and Feyre. She knew from the beginning that Tamlin wasn't Feyre's endgame and she still didn't gush about Rhys in the early days because SPOILERS. This woman is a planner. She doesn't outline her stories, but she KNOWS what she wants to happen and makes it work.

Back to the ACOFAS interview, there's a portion where she talks specifically about Elain:

"everything I did during those weeks became research for her book."

She has mentioned an Elain spinoff before in this interview:

"[Feyre's] sisters come back in the later books, and I’d love to write their own spin-off books one day."

With only two novels and one novella left, I'm seeing a lot of people map out the books like this: ACOTAR 5 = Gwynriel, ACOTAR 6 = Elucien, and the second novella is Mor x Emerie. Which is understandable considering that, in the interview I first listed, SJM stated "each standalone will follow a different romantic pairing". But she also mentioned that she has five ships to choose from for the sixth novel. FIVE. This makes the mapping I've seen so far hard to believe because Elain is just not involved in five ships.

SJM has wanted to write an Elain spinoff for a while and she knew who the first two novels following ACOWAR/ACOFAS would be about, which leads me to believe Elain's book is next since that is the only character who has been confirmed by SJM as someone who will get a book so far.

I also don't think the second novella will focus on a couple. I think it will be more similar to the first novella in that it will be multiple POV's.

Now I bet you're wondering where Amren fits into all of this...

Well, Elain's story is obviously after ACOWAR, but Amren's backstory is before. And if anything, Amren's backstory could open the door to future connections and stories... Crescent City is an obvious one by now. But let's not forget about SJM's Twilight of the Gods WIP.

Amren arrived to Prythian while it was still forming, which was thousands of years ago... and consistently throughout SJM's novels, the Fae (and other supernatural beings) are settlers that arrived to their respective worlds thousands of years ago. There's also some CC2 spoilers I've vaguely heard about that lead me to believe these are connected in some form.

Based on what I've mentioned above, I think one of the books will focus on Amren, or at least provide more detail on her backstory in relation to the histories of the separate SJM worlds.

This makes my mapping of the future ACOTAR books: Elain, ???, and Amren OR Elain, Amren, and ???.

[ichorblossoms]

honeybee year two recap

it's 4/20. it's easter. it's a friend's birthday. and on top of all that today also marks two years since grimm and yarrow appeared damn near fully formed in my brain, took up residence, and still have not left. and i feel like rambling about what all i've been compelled to do

(year one recap post here btw)

but also before you go under the cut i made a whole entire animatic so look at that too tee hee :3c

okay also before i get into little details and stats and stuff i just wanna give a HUGE thank you to everyone who follows this blog and is cheering me and this story on it genuinely means so much to me that people like what i'm doing and are in some way invested in it! what the hell!! it's such a treat to be able to talk about ocs with friends and all that :,,,>

art

well. i drew them a lot. serena for reference bc she's my oldest oc. also a year ago grimm and yarrow were at 61 and 51 images respectively. art fight stuff and gifts count towards this total so it's not all my own stuff but. it's fucking dire

as for some of my favorites i liked how these in particular turned out hehe

also those short animations but those are gonna copypaste weird

they got proper ref sheets!

i'm currently on my. fifth sketch/artwork file (blank one is the current one i'm just weird abt how i save things)

mailed out prints of them!!!! and internationally!!!! my silly little cowboys are out and about in the world what the hell..........

getting more comfortable drawing Adult stuff of them but i have a lot of other ideas competing for my focus at any given time so it's not a priority dghkldfh

comics! not as fruitful as last year but i've done....eight! whole comic pages of them! tbh i have more in the works either thumbnailed or half-sketched but the animatic took over my last little while so. not as many comics

sorry i'm gonna mention that fucking animatic again bc i have never done anything like that before. dunno if/when i'll do another but ! i made one !!

story/writing

i also made a 50-slide powerpoint about what the fuck is going on in honeybee. just like in general. feel free to look at it btw

also i gave that presentation to friends a total of. three times. they willingly opened that can of worms though idk

i got a physical notebook to tease out plot shit in and that's about....halfway full already? like at least fifty handwritten full pages of thoughts in that fucker. this is where i do most of my hooting and hollering about ideas

the first draft is currently up to 83k words !! which means i wrote nearly ~50k words this past year !

started sharing my writing for occasional wip wednesdays !! i'm still pretty picky about what i share and also just like. very aware i'm still a pretty amateur writer hdgkldf

that being said, writing feels a lot easier now than when i started !!

made some posts sharing details about things! but honestly i still struggle with talking about oc stuff unprompted even when This Is My Blog Where I Do That

some story developments i figured out this past year or so: grimm backstory stuff, yarrow kills at least two people before p3, the beginning of all three parts have been reworked or are in the process of it, p3 has more meat and direction (still fizzles out to disjointed scenes at another point, but that's a matter of writing things out), yarrow actually realizes grimm's humod when they first meet but grimm thinks it's hiding it, rappock's mining union is going to play a larger role in p1/2, grimm's run out of town in p1 bc of money, not the killing, grimm's p1 client is who hunts it down at the end of p2, lucy comes into play later in p3 than i first imagined

other stuff

i've been getting more tags where ppl recognize grimm n yarrow and i'm like?? bewildered by that? people know my fellas?

goals/plans

as it is right now, honeybee is a passion project. i mostly work on it in my free time outside of my work hours and that's probably how it's going to be for the forseeable future

with how large of an undertaking this story is, my sssort of plan is to: write out the first draft (i am here) which is organized chronologically, write the second draft in the actual story order, have people beta read that draft, edit the story accordingly, then begin the process of actually making the final story with illustrations and all. this will take me several years even without getting sidetracked

that being said i would like to get the first draft to 100k words by the end of the year, which seems pretty plausible!! reachign for the stars goal is finish the first draft within the next year but i'm not holding myself to that one

also wanna do more comic stuff this next year. like i said i have a few other ideas but also there's some illustration stuff cooking away too

my plan honestly is just to keep consistently working on things as they interest me. i want to see this story realized how i envision it, but i truly do not know what the next year has in store for me so! i continue to ball

[eissibee]

Fuck me dude... My shitty job asked me to redesign a cartoon mascot and I got SO EXCITED to be able to use my degree and moderate skillsets that I misread the brief and redesigned a whole thing all day even missing lunch bc I was so FOCUSED for once instead of reformatting word docs and being useless, when they actually want to KEEP THE UGLY INCONSISTENT DESIGN and I was only supposed to design a companion in the same style,,,, just take the same fucker and change his palette. The style currently looks like it was drawn by different people every picture (it's a penguin) so I showed my work EOD and felt mortified I'd fucked up my rare chance to be a 'designer' of sorts and wasted a day. I got confused cos they were talking with me about how ugly the current one is and how they might have me making new illustration decks for them which... Made me think they wanted a rehaul Id draft so it can be consistent going forward. I wasn't even happy with my design yet anyway, I was gonna keep pushing it, but nope.

Fuck me man I swear since uni I've spent like 6+ years farting around at corporate jobs where I make PowerPoints pretty until I get sacked 1.5 years in. I'm not a researcher or a designer or even an illustrator. I don't have a career, or marketable skills, I've just been passed around trying to learn but not really advancing anywhere, bored out of my mind and not helpful to anyone. At this point I think I have to go back to school, but I don't know what I could do that would be a good career for me. The only solid idea left is psych, but I'm IN therapy so I'm terrified of BEING a therapist to other people's issues. I'm not a naturally caring enough person for that and I know it. Ugh.