WIP – 72 seasons

I’m so excited to start this project today. I think a lot of it is being nervous as I have no idea how it’s going to work out or if I’m going to be able to pull it off. But also, I’ve never tried writing anything in quite this way before, so it’s going to be interesting for me to see how the story is going to develop.

Anyway, I thought I’d leave some info here about my plans and what you’ll be getting this year…and why.

The 72 Seasons is a Japanese calendar based on the natural micro-seasons of their climate. It’s kinda poetical and seems to come with no direct literal translation, so I’ve seen—and will pick and choose titles from—various versions, depending on what I think sounds best for the project. You can read more about it here.

Each season changes around every five days or so, starting at the beginning of February.

My plan—such as it is—is to use each of the micro-seasons as a prompt to create a story over the course of the year, posting a short passage/chapter/encounter every five days to a week.

Easy, right? Update – It wasn’t. I had to take a break for a while but from now on I’ll be posting Wednesdays and Fridays.

I have vague story arc I want to follow but mostly I’ll be pantsing it.

What you’ll be getting will be unedited. It won’t quite be a first draft but I won’t be sending it to be beta’d or anything. I also won’t be doing much research—I usually try to make my stories a bit more realistic once they’re written and, besides, my fiction is always more “daytime TV” escapism than “documentary” gritty fact even at the best of times—so I will undoubtedly get stuff wrong and make mistakes. Feel free to point them out in the comments. If I manage to get to the end of this thing, I will tidy it up and publish it with all the proper processes necessary. The version you’re reading right now is just for fun.

Being that I don’t really have a plan and I’m simply going to be sitting down and seeing what comes out of my brain, I’m not sure how long each “encounter” will end up or what the content might be. I’m thinking about a thousand words but it might be more, might be less. Some will be mainly dialogue, some will be distinctly NC-17 but I’ll make sure to mark the explicit ones just in case you have someone reading over your shoulder. But on the other hand, if you’re looking for erotica, you’re going to be disappointed.

I’m going to notify the members of my Facebook Readers group whenever I post an “encounter”, and you can get an email notification if you’d like, but I won’t be sharing outside of that [Update – I’m actually doing a delayed fandom version for my AO3 subscribers but you’ll be getting the story first]. I hope other people won’t share it either. I’d like to keep this exclusive to my readers for now. Apart from anything else, I hope they’ll be a bit more forgiving about the unpolished nature of the thing.

As far as the story itself goes, the tagline I’m working with is Two men. Neither is exactly as they seem. It takes a year for both of them to realize who they really are and what they really want. More or less. So, don’t be surprised if the premise I set up at the beginning turns out to be not quite as it first appears. That shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to my regular readers who know I like to drip feed plot points and twist things about. But also don’t feel you have to worry about getting hit with any of the Big Four—no major character death, no sexual violence, no cheating, no cliffhanger—and there will be a HEA. There will also be angst up the wazoo but I have a funny feeling it will all work out.

Anyway. I can’t think of anything else, but if you have any questions, just let me know!

Happy Reading!