Mm-hmm

... social events, stuff like that.

And then in November it's all about drafting, but the point of First Draft Fall is not necessarily to write 50,000 words.

It is to complete a first draft.

You get to decide what that's a first draft of.

It can be a first draft of the book you've already been writing for three years and need a push to finish.

It can be the first draft of a new book.

So I wanted to ask you, what have you learned about the kinds of accountability that actually help people keep going rather than making them feel guilty when they fall behind or they're not good enough, that sort of thing?

Yeah, the slow, the burn of the relationship building, right?

Yeah.

Um, there's very specific logistical reasons why- You know, the amount that they interact is kind of limited, but also, like, it's such a small setting so that I don't really have a lot of opportunity to make the scenes different.

So I needed to find a way to add more scenes without them getting dull, even though they were all, you know, in a couple of very specific spaces, which is Selena's room and the hot springs is where, like, 90% of their romance takes place.

So I needed to find ways to have more scenes that happened in one of these two settings that still, that didn't feel repetitive despite being in the same two settings.

[clears throat] Um, and yeah, that, that was the, the biggest challenge is pacing that as something that is, like, integral to the story rather than kind of a, a side note.

Like, I've had romance in other stories, but it's never been a significant part of the story.

Of course.