Jaycee Woods

I have been editing my Chad Seeks Wife stories, which are my largest block at 51 stories with more than 600k words drafted. I estimate that at 3 books, The Misadventures of Chad Seeking a Wife novel plus 2 anthologies of short stories that were not essential to the novel. These stories are about what happens when the mythical meme Chad decides to abandon promiscuity to find a wife.

All the stories, with the exception of a few alternate endings, will fit within a sequential timeline, but stories in the anthologies occur throughout the novel timeline. For example, in the novel, Chad will refer to blind dates that appear in the anthologies but don’t appear in the novel. An instance of this later will be his blind date with the memorable Lilith, who is a public school teacher LARPing IRL as a demon.

I am considering the idea of numbering the chapters in the novel by their sequence within the full timeline; thus, the novel would have chapters with skipping numbers like 1, 4, 8, 14…etc. This numbering would result in creating a sense of missing chapters and time jumps within an otherwise complete novel. Meanwhile, it would allow the sequential reading of the full timeline by a reader with all three books, but that would be unnecessary for enjoying the novel alone.

As I make progress editing, I am going to need to sequence the full timeline and identify the stories for the novel. Stories related to Audrey, Iris, Helen, and Purple will all go into the novel as those characters become critical to Chad’s character arc in the novel. Meanwhile characters like Aphrodite and Jennifer may have their feature story in the anthologies while they appear as supporting characters in another blind date’s chapter.

One idea that I am playing with is to create an ability to have a new Chad story in the future that doesn’t have to be a prequel or sequel but could occur within the timeline based upon Chad’s existing character arc without impacting the continuity of the whole narrative. Thus that new story would not be about Chad’s evolution but about how he impacted others. This would parallel how this backlog of story drafts got created out of sequence at different stages of Chad’s character arc.

Meanwhile, I have a harem of dozens of developed female characters who had a blind date with Chad and can reappear in other non-Chad stories as a lead or supporting character. For example, Chad’s blind date Esmeralda with the unexplained tear drop tattoo will appear in Chappo’s Geronimo’s Spirits novel where the origin of her tattoo will be dramatized.

This size is daunting; however, as each story is self-contained, the stories from the anthologies can also be published separately earlier as teasers to the novel. At the same time their title may include a reference like ‘Chapter 22 – Chad & Luna’ to inspire the questions of what happened before and what happens next.