Spoilers to follow. If you haven’t read or finished Lambskin yet, I advise you do not read this until you have.

Lambskin is the fastest work I have ever written. Between August 16th and September 16th I wrote just about thirty-nine thousand words. It is also the first work I published serially as I wrote it. As a result, it’s a first draft; I’ve done some spelling and grammar passes on rereads, fixed some awkward wording, but it’s still quite raw. I’d planned for a bit of doing a definitive edition of it, packaged as an e-book as well, however, my experience in the process of that, and my struggle in finishing the epilogues, has made me realize the story has several shortcomings.

Broadly, Lambskin is an internal story, it is told from within Kelsey’s thoughts at a deep level. There are places where this is a hindrance, and others where I think I did not dive deep enough. The speed at which I wrote it, as well as the lack of re-draft passes, also makes for some kinks in the flow. Of particular note to me:

• Kelsey is too innocent for what she is and how she acts. This wasn’t particularly intentional; it just felt like establishing that she has killed or committed specific crimes would complicate things and get in the way. Now that I know the scope of the story, I have an idea for how to address this. Another motivating factor here was the struggle between the facts of the story and the allegory wrapped up in it, and I let my concerns about the allegory win out, when I think it should’ve been the other way around.
• Michaela isn’t as well defined a character as I think she should be. This is a place where I was too inside of Kelsey’s mindset while writing much of the story, and something I intend to fix.
• Kelsey’s creators are ill-defined in their motives and the scope of their action. While not necessarily a problem of the text itself (always better for these things to be mysterious to the reader, in my opinion), it was a problem for me, as the author, as I found myself writing around what should be a central aspect of the world the story is set within.
• All of the above add up to make the ending feel somewhat contrived. Part of the problem here is that I originally imagined Lambskin as a much shorter story. I had the ending in mind, and raced towards it, yet I ended up taking a longer route than I envisioned.
• There’s also a handful of awkward scenes or constructions resulting from the story’s rapid growth. The few paragraphs is one of them; it establishes a malice to Kelsey that doesn’t really bear out, and now I think there are other ways to make a more compelling opening. Then there’s a bit of stumbling over Michaela’s parentage, which was motivated out of my desire to preserve a single line that I thought was funny. The conversation with Michaela’s father is also particularly awkward in my mind, and it wasn’t fun to write, either. I don’t think it’s going to be fun to fix, but I’ll try.
• Some of the world/lore dumps I think can and should be trimmed. At the time my thought was “I’m writing this for fun, fuck it, I’ll find out if this is a mistake” and it appears that in some cases, yes, it was.
• In general there are things I want to address on a craft level; small things that when added together make a difference.

In the end, I’m happy with what Lambskin is, but not content. I aim to make it the best version of itself that it can be; to that end, the changes I do make aren’t going to affect the events, plot, or relations in major ways. Rather, I intend to give it the polish I would’ve given to a story written in a more regular process. This, I think, will let me finish the epilogues in a satisfying way.

Mitosis, Literally was the first real attempt I made at a long-form story written solely by myself. I started writing it as a character study on a whim while between classes, midway through February of 2020. As a result of the circumstances of its creation, it has a few major flaws.

First, while it is a story I had wanted to tell at some point, it was not meant to grow into the story it is now, at least, not at that time. Alyssa was originally conceived of as a major character or even deuteragonist in a work that would focus on Cynthia’s point of view. The story that would become Mitosis was one I envisioned as either a sort of spin-off or sequel. As it stands now, I still intend for it to be the latter. However, this leads to the meat of the issue. After writing what would become the first chapter of Mitosis, I found myself too emotionally invested to rewind, at the moment. I had been struggling justifying a world of superheroics to myself; Mitosis, by its nature, is a story that pulls back into a more mundane facet of the world, so I felt more comfortable writing in its confines, and more able to approach it seriously. The downside is that the story is largely unmoored from the world, kept crammed within this mundane facet, to leave room for me to work later. The first arc is driven by emotional relationships that I knew would exist after the planned preceding work, so I didn’t need to draw from any unwritten events.

I then started Arc II.

The second arc magnifies the foundational problems of the first arc, in that it leaves that small slice of the world I had so neatly sectioned off for a part of it that, while still isolated, is much more connected. This means Arc II is more work for me, as a writer, and for the reader; I must introduce new characters, settings, et cetera, and I must make sure these things are compelling. At the time I started Arc II, I was also struggling with the fact that I am not practiced in writing at this length. The first arc had nearly been ruined when I tried to incorporate what was going to be a substantial portion of my first planned story told via a series of flashback chapters, interwoven with the present events of Mitosis. Fortunately, I didn’t do this. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn my lesson. I was having problems navigating where I was in the second arc to where I want it to end, and decided to rectify that by the same process that nearly destroyed the first arc: trying to plan it out from start to finish, in detail. The problem is that my work is in flux until the moment I have written it; it changes even as I am writing on the page, and trying to conform to a plot I’d already planned is incompatible with that. I wrote chapters that didn’t do what I needed them to do. They’d hit the plot points but not the emotional beats. So I started going back and up and down and left and right in my outline to find space to insert a small chapter here, a new section there, to fit the emotions in. All this did is make the story bloated—worse, the parts that resonated with me were pulling me away from what I’d planned.

At the same time, I was starting to get a better feel for the world outside of the confines I had placed around Mitosis. I have notes for how I want Cynthia’s story to unfold, and how it leads up to this one, and the world that they both share. This presents complications, however. The wider setting of Arc II makes the influence of past events more impactful, and would make their absence more conspicuous. In some sense this was a problem I’d already had in miniature between the first and second arcs: there are characters in Arc II that didn’t exist when I wrote Arc I, and the narrative impact of their presence in Arc II creates, in retrospect, a void in Arc I. Now I have that problem in reverse order; persons and events that will exist when I write Cynthia’s story will not be present in Alyssa’s, despite their chronology.

By now it’s been three years since I started writing Mitosis, and I’d be lying if I said I was surprised it wasn’t done. My life has changed substantially in that time; I was in the third year of my degree when I started writing it, and I now have a full time job as an electrical engineer. I want to finish it, and finish it the right way, but I don’t really like the options I have to do so. First option is to just focus on writing it to the end, then working on Cynthia’s story after. The second way is to put Mitosis on hold for now, which would probably mean archiving it on this site until I can return to it—something I don’t want to do. The third option is to try and work on both stories at once, which I think is insane, but it might be the better one of the three. I’m not really sure which one I’ll do; I just needed to get my thoughts put together.