Unfortunately, I made less progress than I hoped for on the Kidnapping AU / The Prisoners’ Dilemma ch. 3 last night BUT progress of a different sort was made. 

I realized there were some scenes from 2025 – the year Newt and Hermann were actually together, that I had in my head but which weren’t very clearly sketched out. Sometimes it can be evident in a narrative when past events are not fully understood by the author and so are referred to even by the characters in vague terms. So I decided to go back and not just write the day Newt asked Hermann to marry him, but also the day Newt received the offer to work for Shao, and the day that the possession truly set in (though I may separate those two a bit, I had them as the same day for dramatic presentation purposes but realized it does strain credulity somewhat that it all happened at once). 

I also realized there’s a bit of dialogue from waaaay later in the story between Hermann and the Precursors that I was sort of excited to write right now, but that I feared I’d be less enthusiastic about once I finally got there because it’s quite far off within the story. I don’t want to lose my steam on it, so until about 2 am I wrote a VERY rough, exposition-y take on that conversation that I can hopefully edit to be more dramatic and exciting later, but that kinda also fleshes out my thoughts on how those two characters interact. It helped me nail down too things like “What does Hermann want from them?” “What do the Precursors want from Hermann? What do they think of him? What does their plan look like at this early stage? How much do they really understand humans? What are the gaps in their knowledge and how do they feel about those?” All this invisible shit that the author needs to have down solid or it makes the dialogue and story become wishy-washy and vague, but that may not be explicitly stated in the text.

Overall it worked out to be about 4,000 words over the last couple days ;P So that’s cool.