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Greetings and salutations. It is I, Graham.

With any project that you hope to sell commercially, there is a give and take as to what the final product looks like. You want to keep the core bits and determine what needs to be shed or added, either to make it viable, or to appease the market and its gatekeepers. That being said, there are certain lines you draw in the sand that would either fundamentally change the core of the project, or morph it into something you are no longer passionate about. Clevenger and I discussed this topic on a few occasions, and from a few different angles, on both a macro and micro level. Meaning there were things I felt strongly about on the story level, and things on the production side as well.

From a story level, I have several things that cannot be removed from the Sainan Series without it losing what it is. First, I set out to write a gay romance, so without that, I lose much of my motivation for this particular story. Will the next book be the same? Probably not, but we shall see what happens when that river gets crossed. Another hill to die on is the best friend, Thorn, who started out as just that, a best friend to my protagonist. When we started, she could have been removed with little issue. But now that we have written her, and she has developed, I adore her so much that I will quit writing before I remove her from the story. Finally, I had a specific storyline that was an important trope subversion. I won’t say here what it is specifically, so as not to spoil the subversion, but it is a particular fantasy element that has been a favorite of mine for years. The ability to finally put it to paper is simply amazing to me. So there you go. To mimic Clevenger, there is a plot element, a character, and trope.

When it came to the work side of the project, things were a bit simpler. First, this was a project for fun, a way to have a reason to spend more time with Clevenger. Later on, this might become a career with hard deadlines and financial pressures. But for now, this story this is for fun and accomplishments. We may set goal oriented deadlines, but they are to provide motivation, not pressure. Second, but on a similar note, this is a project for me to work on with Clevenger. If something horrible were to happen to him, then it is probable I would finish this to honor him. But if he were to merely lose interest and was no longer willing to see it through, I would probably abandon it to write something that was purely my own. At most, I might strip my ideas back out from his and rewrite the plot. Not that this is something I ever want to have to think about.

So that’s basically it. I guess this was a real short entry this week. Just a little bit on the hows and whys of what is truly important to me on the story that is the Series of Sainan. Next week I will go into what ideas and concepts I would be perfectly fine with whoring out if there were gains to be made. Haha. See you then, and until next time…

Don’t forget to love one another.

Graham