This universe is a very large one (I try not to think about it too hard, but it's well north of a million words), and has existed for a long, long time. Long enough that, when I went 'I already made an intro post for people getting into the fandom, though' I had to take a bit of a moment after I discovered I had...in 2017.
So yes! Huge! Overwhelming!
So I'm going to give this another go. A lot of the 2017 post is still relevant, and includes a suggested reading order, how the universe differs from our own (some different teams, for one!), and a few other resources.
First and foremost, I need to point to the YCMAL wiki. It's an absolutely brilliant fan run resource that consolidates so much information it makes me a little breathless. They have their own getting started page, which has informed me that I have written in fact north of two million words in this universe, so that's fun. That's a fun fact.
I also cannot recommend enough the YCMAL Story Guide and timeline spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is a work of wonder; it consolidates all the stories I've written in the universe, across the (many) locations, and tells you where you can find them, with links to the free and Patreon content. It allows you to filter by character and pairing, which is invaluable if you want to read extra content of a particular pairing, and even includes an estimated story order.
Unfortunately a lot of my previous organization sort of fell apart as the universe grew a little too mighty for my ADHD, so I wouldn't use the tumblr tags or resources as a tool: the wiki and that spreadsheet are going to be much more useful to you.
Suggested reading order, with links, below.
I am brutally bad at describing my own work with pithy one liners, so this reading order doesn't include descriptors. If any readers have posted a suggested reading order of their own that includes that, I'm happy to link it here.
Suggested Reading Order, YCMAL 'verse:
Start here!
(Free)
no expectation of returns - this one will be taken down for publication in the next little while, so possibly one to prioritize
Vinny gets a life
it's a setup
(Published)
You Could Make a Life - the story that became the universe.
Thrown Off the Ice
Between the Teeth Trilogy (link to first in series)
Don't start here! (But I've provided links for when you get around to them)
(Free)
Follow the North Star (read Thrown Off the Ice first)
giving in to the influence (read YCMAL first)
it's a commitment (direct sequel to it's a setup above)
if all is enough (read YCMAL first, read Vires Acquirit Eundo in the outtakes after)
throw up your fists, throw up your wits (Maybe have a nice self-care day planned)
duelling banjos (spoilers for YCMAL, unfinished)
Impaired Judgment (and other excuses) (spoilers for literally every published novel, Longest Story In the World)
but always in tandem/still always in tandem/always in tandem (ongoing, massive spoilers for Between the Teeth)
Cards on the Table (ongoing, spoilers for always in tandem)
This post includes a super helpful visual of how the series interact with one another, including which are standalone.
I had plans today. Correspondence to get to, a tax appointment to finally set up (in my defence, self employed deadline's different, but, you know. It's this week. ADHD gonna ADHD.). Capping off with finally finishing the Kickstarter story so I could send the damn update.
Hah, capping.
Anyway, I am in the midst of a slight dental emergency. Apparently June is the month for that. All plans, including taxes, are momentarily on pause while I sulk the sulk of Joey Munroe, and just appreciate that, unlike him, I've still got the front ones.
At a certain point you do just have to laugh, and I have reached it. Back when...well, back when I'm back.
Sorry the Patreon poll is late -- the getting slowly back to work is mostly going even smoother than anticipated, except I suddenly have the inability to do more than one thing a day. Today it is apparently this? (Tbh today is, in fact, mostly bitching and moaning about prostaglandins, I hate those fucking things).
Things are all still coming, I'm just finally pacing my work to Sustainable versus Max Throttle Then Quiet Dark Room and it is...much slower than I thought it'd be. Some of this may fade as burnout does, but going forward I'm going to be a little more -- well, not slow, necessarily, because I've already been that, but a little less frantic like if I don't meet my word quota I'm going to be brought before a tribunal.
This isn't really a reflection of outside pressure -- you all have been fantastic as I've deal with family emergencies and sort of bumbled my way through diagnoses and medical shit the last few years, in addition to trying to once again attempt to beat burnout by force of will (sadly, no go). Or if it is, it's the sort of general pressure that follows every activity right now. I had to pick 'content creator' as a job for an official form recently. Author was not an option. Not writer, except, they specified, the technical kind. I cannot overstate how much I hate this reframe of everything as content.
But it's mostly internal pressure. It's in fact an internal narrative I've been constantly sparring recently, and I think have actually maybe finally defeated? Not in a 'oh good, my tendency to tie my sense of self-worth to my productivity is gone, phew', but now that I literally can no longer perform at the level I was achieving in my 20s (volume wise, at least), now what? Because continuing to try to do it anyway hasn't served me all too well, and at a certain point I do have to quit doing the same thing and expecting different results.
So I'm doing new things. Right now that's one thing a day. Today's thing is this.
I am going to do the formal 'what to expect in June' thing this month, but I'm not going to do it quite yet. For one, I'll be finishing up this arc of always in tandem, and I'm not sure what's going to step forward when I finish that part. Holden and James? Gabe and Stephen? Robbie and Georgie again?
What I am going to sort of focus on in June, as leading into the halfway point of the year, is catching up on all those (very!) late stories of the month and week, and I will, again, discuss this in more detail in the formal 'what you can expect in June' post, but until that part gets done, I don't entirely know what to expect in June, so it'd be a bit of a blind leading the blind situation -- I mean, even moreso than it usually is.
So stay tuned! I have not yet begun the final part, but I have outlined it, (this is unusual for me, to say the least), and Robbie has been remarkably cooperative with me since I started writing him again in SAIT, so let's say, barring the unforeseen, next Monday. Kickstarter update is half finished and should be ready before that if the writing gods are kinder than the hockey ones. Everything else still remains to be seen.
I have to post a story of the week (a week late, natch), see my therapist (virtually, thank fuck), see my niece (always a delight, but she's two, so it's a lot), and watch the Eastern Conference Finals.
It's also the tenth anniversary of Always in Tandem, which is -- a little insane. Ten years in both the real world and the text, a pretty huge ten years for me and a monumental ten for them.
Ten years ago I'd just published my first book. I was making sub-minimum wage at this crack at being a writer, but at least it, unlike the barely more than minimum wage job I had left, hadn't pushed me straight into burnout. If I hadn't been living with my mom at the time, I wouldn't have been able to swing it. If I hadn't been so tired that the idea of working a nine to five job genuinely terrified me, I wouldn't have been willing to.
Fast forward ten years, four more books, and a lot of series: I am able to provide for myself doing what I love. And I was falling apart. Physically, mentally, all across the board, I've been falling apart.
Part of that is convoluted health stuff that was unmasked after COVID. Some of that was continued internalised ableism -- I should be able to still handle the things I used to (that, in hindsight, I don't think I handled as well I as I thought I did). And part of that was good ol' depression, something me and Georgie have shared through this past decade (or two).
And so much of it was the dumbest shit imaginable. Just -- shame. So much fucking shame.
Always in Tandem is really fucking Catholic story, which is interesting, because I'm not. Am I baptised? Yup, but my parents didn't care enough to do first communion, let alone confirmation: it was a thing my cousins did that I didn't. My brother thought there were two religions 'catholic' and 'public', and we were public because we went to public school. My devoutly Catholic grandparents were good, kind, supportive people, the exact people you point to when you talk about true Christians.
And I still inherited that shit. Catholic guilt and Catholic shame don't even require you believe in God -- you get the feeling you're failing him all the same.
There's been this sort of pattern with the tandem -- picture me with a little lantern, herding them along a dark path, only a couple steps ahead. That's the way I write most series, really, but the few steps ahead have been so integral with them. I need to know just enough for them to learn it too. This series has needed the ten years (plus!) because I could not have written Robbie and Georgie at 35 when I was 25, or 30. Everything they had to learn, I had to learn first.
And something in me is a little afraid of what the final arc will bring, if only because the things I'm learning, they cost something. They take time to process, to distill into something that's true and isn't ugly, or if it is ugly, it's ugly in the way it needs to be. Ugly in a way that's true.
I've been minimizing my career to myself for a very long time. Waving a hand, 'oh, I get to work from home', 'oh, I make up stories in my head all day', 'living the dream'. All things that were true, but there's a cost to it, and this series has taken a bigger bite out of me than any other, I think, with the very possible exception of Thrown Off the Ice, which I am still probably not entirely over. It is, including TOTI, the one I've left the most of myself on the page.
It's strange -- ten years is strange. On the one hand it's absurd that I've been working at this so long, on the other hand, I'm afraid to say goodbye to it. I think that's why IJ(aoe) went on a little (lot) too long in the end: it's hard to leave the happy ending, especially if you've been working for it for that long.
And we've still got another arc, two more parts in the penultimate one, plenty of liveblogging the end to do before that. We've probably got a year of this thing left. Eleven years in tandem, baby. Possibly more!
But for those of you who've been here that whole ten years, whether or not you initially voted for Georgie to get hit by a bus: thank you. For those who found them after: thank you. For those who are brand new here: welcome! And thank you.
I've been doing recent Matt Maeson a lot with Georgie, for good reason, so let's go a little earlier with this one, to a song he released when he was about the age Robbie and Georgie (and I) were at the start of this. Let's just say he was ten years ahead of the rest of us.
I have finally (FINALLY) finished the next part of Robbie, but we are only days away from the 10th anniversary of AIT and no way Georgie gets finished by then so poll time because Instant Gratification is fighting Meaning hard right now.
AIT today or Thursday?
Dates are meaningless, give us the goods today, woman.
Extremely early but the lead is decisive enough this is like those polls that get closed ten minutes after they start counting.
For those who would prefer the meaningful post (I will admit my unmedicated ADHD ass sided with the majority chanting 'POST! POST! POST!' once I realised I didn't have a 'show me results' option and therefore had to pick a side to see the result.), there will be a no doubt very earnest post on the day of, as I'm having a lot of Feelings about being on the precipice of their final arc.
I have finally (FINALLY) finished the next part of Robbie, but we are only days away from the 10th anniversary of AIT and no way Georgie gets finished by then so poll time because Instant Gratification is fighting Meaning hard right now.
AIT today or Thursday?
Dates are meaningless, give us the goods today, woman.
Hi all -- a bunch of symptom fluctuations happened to coincide with a bit of a health scare last week, and that plus -- full disclosure because I'm me and it's pretty fitting right now given AIT -- a new therapist (she specialises in Audhd and is already the best therapist I've ever had) meant I spent a lot of time in bed with no energy while my mind whirred away at processing, and when I wasn't, I was at medical appointments.
I'm through it though, and thankfully health care providers have actually started to take some of what I'm experiencing seriously instead of an amorphous Long COVID ~issue, and I've been connected to some specialists, so this is actually good news! Inching ever closer to answers, and as my eye emergencies taught me -- if you want an ailing, overstretched health care system to move fast, scare them enough that you become their priority. Unconventional, but it works!
I'm back to work today but taking it very, very slowly for a few reasons -- health, obviously, especially as I'm on a new medication, but also I'm a little rusty right now. So the story of the week will definitely be late, and absolutely best case scenario Robbie's ready for Friday.
Beyond that I'm promising nothing at the moment -- I have a very bad habit of prioritizing my health dead last, and I'm trying to break that trend at the moment. Thanks, as always, for your endless patience with me as I figure this whole existing in a human body thing out.
My word count in April was under 100 words a day. This has probably been the worst writing month in my career, with the exception of like, post-surgery periods, and possibly not even them.
But I'm in a good fucking mood, because I figured out what was holding back basically every project that doesn't involve Robbie and Georgie, and in the case of pretty much all of them, knowing is enough to fix things. Not necessarily immediately -- I'm still having some trouble on the writing front itself -- but I can steer the boat around, you know?
So that's what May's basically going to be for me -- tackling everything I'm working on from a different direction than the one that wasn't working, seeing if I can break through. Probably won't be all of them, at least right away, and I can't really be more specific, because I know myself, and whatever one is flowing is the one I'm going to follow, especially considering how hard it is to get anything flowing right now.
But May's also going to be the end of this penultimate arc of Always in Tandem. I'm not going to lie, some of this delay has been because I've hit the point, at the end of a project, where I'm grieving the loss of the characters that have been in my head for the duration. And I'm not done with them yet, obviously, there's one more arc to go, but it's been almost a decade with them, and I guess the grieving's started a bit earlier this time.
So here's what you can expect in May. Probably.
On AO3: Gonna be Tandem throughout, likely, though I wouldn't put it past COTT to suddenly jump in just to spite me (also because playoffs)
Patreon and Kickstarter under the cut:
Patreon:
SOTW: 13th, 27th
Not going to lie, priority is finishing Tandem on its ten year anniversary, because that's fun, so the SOTMs will likely not appear until June, and then will likely come one after the other.
Kickstarter: the update (with actual story!), and the first of the Stephen POV
I didn't even realise! (Or I totally would have posted today instead).
We're getting very close to the 10 year anniversary of the series too! (May 21st, and if I play my cards right, and the other Whalers behave, I can end the arc on it.)
I'm still sick, along with the rest of my nearest and dearest (toddlers are elite biological weapons) so this will be pretty brief. I've thankfully reached the point I'm able to string coherent sentences together, but not quite at the point where I can string together fictional sentences.
Thanks to a mix of medication management, the sun returning to the evenings, and the world around me no longer being a white wasteland, I'm starting to feel a bit better, but I'm going to take things agonizingly slowly (possibly agonizing for you, definitely agonizing for me) for the next little bit, and will, as always, keep you posted as that changes.
Here's what you can (probably) expect in April
On AO3:
Tandem's going to dominate again. There's a possibility of COTT, but given we're in the final stretch of an AIT arc, and momentum tends to carry me through those periods, I wouldn't be surprised they don't give up their spot in the queue until May.
Patreon and Kickstarter below the cut:
On Patreon:
Jared and Bryce after the apology phone call from James and Oleg POV of David and Jake
On Kickstarter:
Not quite as early in the month as I'd like it, thanks to this cold, but aiming for completing that by later this week or early the next.
