Well now, July sure was a month, huh? I have some complex feelings about it, as with some experimentation, I settled on a potential model going forward for writing that feels workable while I’m finishing up school, and then promptly had to abandon it due to new concerns falling on top of me.

For the quick version of the Life of Bats, I have been entering a final stretch period of school in a big way, and then had a professional designation opportunity fall in my lap. I’ve been going back to school to get a degree relevant to my day job, and as of this blog, I am just finishing up a course and have five more total classes to complete before I get the degree. Now, credits-wise, at the start of July it was eight classes worth to go, including the class that just finished, but in addition to finishing one class, I tested out of an elective course via taking a CLEP test, and entering August, that plus the finished course puts me at six courses worth of credits to go. That’s one more elective course that I am planning to test out of with a CLEP exam. I am confident with the test I’ve selected, but unfortunately, I do have to study for it, which has eaten into a portion of my free time.

Then in the middle of that, I had the opportunity to get a new professional designation come up, with a course that I’ll get reimbursed for once I complete it, and 120 days of access to study for in my free time.

You know, all that free time I have.

It’s ultimately fine. I have this coming week between college courses that’s free, which I’m using to crunch for the CLEP test, and the 120 days of availability for the designation are overkill based off the amount of material that’s covered to where I can complete the designation over the next six weeks or so without driving myself too crazy. This has, however, taken away almost all of my free time and energy to focus on, and I’ve had to abandon writing for the moment. I’m hopeful I can reclaim that once some of this stuff is done, if not after the next CLEP test then once the designation course is finished. I hope it isn’t that dire, but it might come to that.

But real life blues aside, writing! I did find something that worked for a while with my not-completely-overloaded free time, and that I can hopefully work back into doing even through this mess. So let’s talk about what was working.

After feeling pretty down by the fact that I was only finding time for a single good day of writing per week, I had the thought that, even though I was tired and burnt out, surely I could get some writing done every day. Not my usual goal of 1k words, but 150 is manageable to do, even when tired, right? That’s a couple paragraphs, not even fifteen minutes worth of work. I figured it was worth a shot. And for a while it really did work! Let’s look at progress on Vorstnacht.

Vorstnacht (working title, novel)

So definitely some progress. This accounts for 3,438 new words written over July, with ten working days, most of those taking place over the course of two weeks. It got derailed, as I mentioned, but in saying that, I think I can get back on track to doing it again once I’m feeling just a little less hectored, as right now even the thought of 150 words most days is too much to consider. There is, of course, the fact that life frequently tosses Something New to be worried about and that even when the professional designation and CLEP test are both finished I’ll probably have other things to have to do around work and school, and that will eat into writing time. However, I think I can get there regardless, and hope I can work in at least a bit of writing over the coming month of August. We’ll see, hopefully it isn’t a repeat of June.

Anyway, that aside, the novel is making its way onto the page. I’m liking how this one is shaping up. That’s all I got for now, have a good August and I’ll hopefully have good news in September. TTFN.

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So howdy, everyone! It, uh, seems that time’s gotten away from me! Here I was being a smug bitch, starting up on a plan to try and keep myself accountable and maintain forward momentum with writing. Y’know, by planning a monthly update blog right as I returned to work after 12 weeks off for medical leave. And as should be a surprise to no one, writing went fuck all for a while there! So much so, that I didn’t do shit in May, and didn’t have shit to say at the start of June! Gotta love looking back on a month and going, haha, I didn’t get any writing done, hahahaha, hahaha, haaaaa …

*deep, soul-wrenching sigh*

June was shaping up to be about the same, too, with despair starting to set in around the edges of my mind. Here I was, so productive over my leave, in spite of being at like 70% capacity for so much of it while I recovered while taking on a full-time school schedule. Half-time school, full-time work, and 100% capacity would mean I could keep writing, right? Well, apparently not. I started to worry that I would have to just put all writing on hold until I’m done with school, which should be coming up in June of 2026. Just a year of no writing, then maybe I could start again when my nights and weekends were less full. All I’d have to do is let my soul get ground down to powder for another year! Awesome. AMAZING.

Fortunately for me, though, June wasn’t entirely devoid of writing, and I’ve begun to settle into a painful, but hopefully workable, compromise. Between work and school, I just don’t have the time nor energy to write every day (or at least most days of the week), the way I had been when on leave. I instead found that I could either work and do schoolwork, or work and write, but not both in the same day, and that there were enough other things going on with life that I couldn’t write every day that I wasn’t doing schoolwork. Hell, I could even write most days when I didn’t have schoolwork, either. What I could do, however, was make sure I wrote for one day a week.

So, in the last week of June, I made good on that option, and wrote for one day.

Vorstnacht (working title, novel)

So some progress has been made, but not very much. A total of 1,053 words were written, which is at least a decent amount for a single day, but that’s all that happened for the month, that single day of writing. Hey, I’ll take it. And considering what my overall writing in April looked like, it’s only like a third as much as was written for Vorstnacht that month!

I’m not crying, you’re crying.

Anyway, this is about the shape of things for the time being, I’m afraid. I’m planning to keep things going with a rate of one writing day squeezed in per week, and thus far I’ve kept to that in July. That means there will for sure be a retrospective to write in early August, even if I manage nothing else for the month, so I at least have that going for me. But this does feel sustainable, I think, which means I have a vague goal of around 4k words per month, keeping true with the once a week writing days. If that holds strong, I should be wrapping up the novel in like one year and nine months, which isn’t terrible, and I’m hopeful that if nothing else I can ramp up a lot once I’m finished with school. Either way, novels get written eventually at a pace like this.

Poker Game (working title, short story)

To make mention of this one, which I was working on back in April, I haven’t made any progress on it, but felt it sensible to talk about it a little. I’m glad I finished the draft in April so it isn’t something to feel guilty over about starting and not finishing, because when I started to get back into things at this reduced schedule, it wouldn’t be on the table work work on anything other than Vorstnacht for a while. I haven’t edited Poker Game as of yet, though. That has fallen far to the back burner while I’m in this current mode of just trying to find once a week to write, because I definitely don’t want to work on edits for it while I’m so strapped for writing time. I’ll pick it up again to edit when my schedule feels less cramped, whether if that’s when I finish school or something else changes. In the meantime, its first draft is finished and it will sit in storage until I decide to do something else with it.

Conclusions

So not a ton to report this time around, but there at least is a plan in place. There might be some weeks when I’m so swamped with other stuff going on that I can’t make time to write, and I’ll have to take those as they come (I’m planning on sitting for a CLEP test to hopefully test out of one of my elective credits in a couple weekends, and that week might prove too busy for writing if I’m doing that and also my regular workload), but I’ll hopefully be able to keep up this slow momentum, which feels within the realm of possibility for me. And at the end of the day, 4k words a month equates to 48k words a year, which is an acceptable enough total to not feel like time is totally wasted. It’s just a shame because when I’m in fighting shape my output is more like 250k-300k words a year, and it would be nice to get back there. Still, I see the light at the end of the tunnel for my degree, so I can maybe get back there soon. Either which way, slow journeys are still journeys, and I’ll take any forward movement that I can.

That’s all I got for this one, hopefully July treats me well and I’ll be able to post with a happier tone in August. TTFN.

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So April, huh? That was some damn month, let me tell you. In addition to being the first real bit of getting back into new writing (and immediately getting stymied, but we’ll get to that), I also returned to work after being on medical leave for twelve weeks. And immediately got the flu. And then had half my right hand go numb from carpal tunnel and need a wrist brace that’s still on my arm, making this blog difficult to type. Also there’s the *gestures vaguely at everything* going on with the world. So April! Whee.

Anyway, as part of keeping the cobwebs dusted here, I thought I’d start up an old practice I had on a blog on Fimfiction of tracking my writing progress month to month. Not all months are gonna be winners, but the goal is to always have some forward momentum with writing, and having the ritual of blogging adds an air of accountability to myself for maintaining that momentum. So let’s look at where my active projects are at.

Vorstnacht (working title, novel)

So this is the big project I’m working on. Not all of the finished words listed were written in April, mind you, that’s just where we’re at currently. Also the estimated words remaining is a figure best taken with a grain of salt, because I am just dogshit at estimating word counts. Based off the outline, I can hazard 100k words as not being an entirely unreasonable guess, but I might be hilariously wrong. I tend to underestimate things, so if anything, expect it to be longer than this. We’ll see how close I actually am once it’s finished.

For work that was done on it in April, the unfortunate answer is not that much. 2668 words written, plus some time tweaking earlier portions that were written several months to years ago that I went over while dusting this off to work on it. In that writing, I did finish the chapter I was working on, which is something. In addition to the raw word output, I also sat down with the outline (a document that beforehand had several general ideas and, like, vibes, bruh) and fleshed it out to a much more robust and followable place. I’m happy with where it’s at and the progress on it, though it ended up slowing down while I worked on a different project. It’s hard to know what the exact pace on it’s going to end up being, but I’m hopeful to see this going faster soon. Even so, if all I can manage is about 2500 words a month, that means it’ll hit its estimated total in 2 years, 11 months, and that’s a significantly faster pace than the previous novel! Haha. Hahaha. Haaaa … Life is pain.

Poker Game (working title, short story)

So this was a sort of dark horse entry to my writing of the month. There was a specific reason I decided to write a short story, though. See, after spending a huge chunk of my medical leave editing the novel Scars of the Grimalkin: No Pets Allowed, and then starting in on Vorstnacht, a part of my brain really wanted to finish a thing, and not by editing an old thing. See, I do this thing pretty often where mid-novel I decide to take a break and write a short story, because they go fast while novels take forever to finish. I tell myself the boost from finishing something will carry me through the rest of the novel. Then I rediscover that I don't like writing short stories. Womp, womp.

Okay, so I don’t hate them, but the fact that they just aren’t really fun to write for me is definitely something I seem to forget whenever I get mid-way through a novel draft. Listen. I may be stupid.

Anyway! I’m liking this thing, for what it’s worth. It’s a small-scale story about a poker game against Death, with the wager being the protagonist’s life … except the two of them already played for that same wager, some three-hundred years before. It’s a little magical realism story about life. I finished the draft for it, but haven’t had a chance to edit. I may or may not want to alter a bunch of shit with it during the edits, but the fact that I did write it quickly and got a good sense of progress from it maybe explains why I keep doing this to myself. It’s like child-birth, I block out the bad shit with time until I inevitably talk myself into this sorta shit again.

Total Results

So at the end of the day, between finishing a chapter of a novel and a short story first draft, I wrote a combined 7973 words for April. Again, not great, but hey, at a rate of 8k of month, if I just focus on Vorstnacht, it’ll be done in 11 months, which is honestly pretty fast for a novel! I am capable of faster, I know from experience, but I’m also struggling with the whole back at work with a cold and a fucked up hand and also in school so I’m busy all the time thing that life is like, and some months, hell many months, aren’t going to be good months. And that’s okay! If words hit paper, novels get written eventually.

Anyway, that’s it for the April retrospective, next progress update, get ready for the ramen noodle hair, because it’s gonna be May.

TTFN.

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Okay, so things seem to be settled in enough for a proper introduction, so … Hello! I’m Bats. I’m a fiction writer, of both the original fiction and the fanfiction variety, and all of it very genre-focused. You’ll see fantasy, horror, science fiction, romance, and adventure from me, and while I dabble in short stories, novels are my bread and butter. Also, while not exclusively the case, most of my stories are sapphic interest.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a professional writing presence online because there was this whole gender thing, you see, and my first name changed to Eris, though the Bats name’s been around forever and didn’t change, but all the stuff was in my deadname, not Eris, so it got all deleted, and now I’m here starting over. And because I have a couple of active projects in the works, it’s Time™ for this to happen. So! First things first, here’s what’s in the works that you can expect on a somewhat short but like not really because these things always take forever timeline:

Current Projects

I have recently finished a novel! Here’s a quick synopsis:

Scars of the Grimalkin: No Pets Allowed

After living in the same apartment for years, Jenny Sumner is ready for a change. Finding something that's in her budget, and still within spitting distance of her best friend, Lucia, is a little easier said than done. That is, except for an apartment just down the block from where Lucia works. The price seems a little too good to be true, and has everything Jenny could want, including hardwood floors and air conditioning, and it even has an Olympic-sized pool, though that's a bigger selling point for Lucia than it is for Jenny. It's basically the perfect place ... except that the listing says no cats, and there's no way in hell she's not taking her cat, Moxie, with her. But, perhaps, Jenny has a workaround for moving into the place that's too good to be true ... and, perhaps, it seems too good to be true because it is.

No Pets Allowed is an paranormal fantasy/supernatural horror original fiction novel, about 90k words total, and it’s been literally years in the making around other projects. It started out as a sequel to/reimagining and expansion of a short story I wrote (more on that down below), with the initial chapters written in 2015. In stops and starts, that first drift was written, chopped up, and put back together over the next few years, with a finished draft in 2019. It then sat in a drawer somewhere before I finally got up the gumption to go through my finishing edits, and the completed manuscript is going through some final reviews as we speak.

That dovetails nicely to the second project, which has to do with the publication of No Pets Allowed. I’m going to play the details of this a little close to my chest, but I’ll be more forthcoming as things start to come to fruition. The short, mum’s the word version is that this is in progress, with a planned release of probably 2026, unless things go much faster than I’m expecting. The release will be as an ebook for sure, and may also have a paperback print edition, but that remains to be seen. As this gets closer to happening, I’ll provide updates and fill in some of the details I’m being cagey about now.

Next up, I have recently submitted a short story to an anthology collection! Here’s a quick blurb on that story:

Tales Told in the Desert

Camped out in the desert with a gun at his side, Jim isn't sure that starting a fire is worth the risk of attracting unexpected guests. The one guest he gets, though, is a mangy, one-eyed coyote, looking for a pan of water … and maybe a story or two.

Tales Told in the Desert is a short story around 8k words in length, and the genre is weird western. This one was also originally written in 2015, as part of a short story jam, and I’ve held onto it with the vague plan of maybe publishing an anthology of my own short stories, once I had enough to fill a book. That hasn’t happened, and if it has a home in a different anthology, then that’s all the better.

The publication on this one is markedly different in plan compared to No Pets Allowed, since it’s far less of a sure thing. There’s a planned anthology with open submissions, and since I had a story that’s been lying around that fit the guidelines, I decided to enter it. I won’t go into details about the anthology beyond that since, like, it’s early in the process, I have no idea if the entry will be accepted, and I’m not looking to make a stink if they reject it. If it’s accepted, I’ll update here with the news and provide details and links for the anthology once it’s available. If it isn’t accepted, then I’ll take it in good humor with no hard feelings and just mention that it wasn’t accepted. If that were to happen, the story will go back to lying around for now, but might see the light of day at some point.

And last on the docket of current projects, I’m hard at work (or perhaps hardly working) on a new dark fantasy/romance original fiction novel! This blurb is a lot less settled, since I’m not anywhere close to finishing it.

Vorstnacht (working title)

Every year, when the gods go to sleep, the cold weather returns and blankets the kingdom in Vorstnacht, the long winter. Gwendolyn, a regal mage, spends her Vorstnacht on the outskirts of the kingdom in the little town of Dessel, a settlement that just grew big enough for the Regal Mage Academy to send out one of their members to shepherd the people through the harsh weather. Her assignment is about over, but as winter is supposed to end, for some reason, the warm weather doesn’t come, and wolves are howling at the doors.

This one, thankfully, was started much later than 2015. The first bits of it were written in … 2021, oh god, what is time anymore. Anyway! It’s the current thing on my plate, it’s fully outlined, and I’m picking at words as I can. The current draft as of this blog has about 13k words, and while I’m absolutely terrible at estimating these things, it’s probably gonna be in the ballpark of 100k words. This one seeing the light of day is gonna take a while, as I actually have to write the blasted thing first, but it’s what I’m currently working on.

So that wraps up the in-the-pipeline news. With that out of the way, for those who are curious about things that I’ve done before, here’s a quick rundown of projects, plus links where available, so if you want to check out my older stuff, you’re able to.

Past Stuff (Original Fiction)

There isn’t a ton to talk about here, unfortunately, as this is mostly forward-looking. There are some stories I have finished, as well as some things that have starts but no endings, which may or may not show up in a future update about things in-the-pipeline, but if we’re talking things that have already seen the light of day, there’s only one of those.

Lost Things

Jenny is a bit of a shut-in, and her best friend Lucia has a thing or two to say about that. Try as she might, though, Jenny can’t seem to bring herself to really want to leave her apartment … nor does her apartment seem to want her to leave, either.

This is the aforementioned prequel/original conception of No Pets Allowed, a paranormal fantasy/supernatural horror short story of about 9k words. Lost Things was published in 2017 under my deadname in a horror anthology called Restless, published by Frith Books. Restless was a cool little book, but unfortunately the press shuttered shortly after its publication and it’s since gone out of print. I retain publishing rights to it, though, and this is going to show up again in some form or another as No Pets Allowed gets closer to its release.

Past Stuff (Fanfiction)

Ah now, here we have way too many things to list individually! I would imagine that many reading this know me better from the fanfic days than the originals, as I have been quite the prolific fanfic writer, publishing under the name Bats for the past 13 years or so. I won’t go through all of it, because that’s like 40 things, but we’ll break it down by fandom.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

My Fimfiction Profile

This was where I got started and cut my teeth on writing. In the summer of 2012, I watched what was then a two season show, became totally enamored with the characters, turned to fanfiction to get the fix I was missing while waiting for a new season, went, “All right then, I’ll do it myself!” when I ran out of stuff I wanted, and then spent the next few years of my life writing story after story. Not to be too up my own ass about it, but I got to be fairly well known in the heydays of the show, and wrote what many consider to be a fandom classic, Spellbound Fireflies. I also wrote a story called Fluttershy Kicks a Puppy that gets the most, “You wrote that story!?” reactions out of anything else I’ve written.

The Owl House and She-Ra

My AO3 Profile

My Offprint Profile

It was a similar, though shorter history for The Owl House as My Little Pony. I watched the first season in 2020, wrote a fairly well regarded novel, Dangers in Fiction, while waiting for season 2, plus a couple of other stories. I also wrote some She-Ra to try something new around the same time, because fanfic can be a lot of fun. Which is why I’m including these fanfic stories here in this section! My experience in writing goes back over 30 years to my childhood, and while I always wanted to be a writer throughout my younger adult life, it was writing fanfiction that let me cut my chops and actually get good at it. These stories are not and cannot be for commercial purposes, but that doesn’t make them lesser, and I think fanfiction should be celebrated.

So What’s Next?

Next up for me is, currently, more writing. I’m tapping away at Vorstnacht (which should hopefully have a much, much shorter production cycle than No Pets Allowed) while things come together for publishing. Next update will hopefully have some good news on that front.

That’s all I got for this intro blog.

TTFN

This is a new space as I blow some dust off my online presence. I’ll have a real introductory blog coming soon, plus some exciting writing news after that, hopefully!