#ignore that I've been stuck on a section from witd for six months or whatever

[baejax-the-great]

Hello, new follower here 🌟 I was wondering if you have an idea of what the final chapter count for Broken Oaths will be? Whats your writing process like? Do you already have an outline of how you want the story to go? Love your work 💕

I've had the basic outline for the final chapter written since the start. This fic, when I started writing, was meant to be like two chapters. So the final chapter is... the original second chapter. 🤡 I have scenes written that will need to be changed now due to the 70k words I wrote between then and now, but the basic order of events remains unchanged.

I also just realized I read your question wrong and you asked about chapter count. Given that my original estimate was two chapters and we are now on chapter 16, uh, I truly cannot say with any certainty. But I'm guessing 20. Probably fewer than 34. We are definitely in the latter half of this fic.

Usually I have things planned out a little better than this. I write scenes as they come to me, often the dialogue first and then the rest of it, make descriptive chapter headings (the last one was 'Arguments and Horses', though one of the arguments is going to take place next chapter now. Par for the course with this fic 😔), and then figure out how to get from point A to B to C. I conceptualize these points both as events in the story AND where the characters need to be emotionally for the events to have the correct impact.

Sometimes the path I've outlined is too short for pacing reasons, so I have to go back to brainstorming. Sometimes I didn't get them emotionally where I thought they would be when I outlined, and the characters make different choices (honestly was planning on having them bone in chapter 15 but Achilles was absolutely not feeling it). That's when things can start to get a bit chaotic.

Oaths has been chaotic from the start. Let's hope I stick the landing (and that I do it in fewer than 34 chapters)! And thank you!

these are the headings I have in my doc for Oaths. As you can see at the start, I truly didn't know this was going to be multiple chapters and didn't bother with an outline.

Here's Water in the Dawn for comparison:

Maybe they don't seem all that different, but I had a much firmer idea in WitD of where I was going from the start.