I Want to Finish What I've Started: Author Edition 

New words this week : 2,931 words which is somewhat less than I'd hoped for, but not entirely unexpected.

WIPs worked on this week : 2, with no new WIPs (yay!)

This week was... a lot. Visit went okay, they flew home Sunday night. This morning my mother-in-law called to let us know that my father-in-law just tested positive for Covid. So far so good here, but I'm pretty frustrated that I'm going to have this hanging over my head for the next week or so until I either get sick or I don't.

The Old Guard

☆ food truck au : 2,349 words which brings the total to 67,708 words and is there really any feeling more frustrating than having all the motivation to write, and be entirely lacking the time?? Next chapter needs like another 1.5k to be done, and that's like. I could knock that out in a day under ideal circumstances, and circumstances so far have been very very far from ideal. But anyhow, there is now KISSING and I'm hoping to get it off to beta by the end of this week. I did some very rough math, and if I can continue at my current previous pace I will finish the final chapter by the end of March. The story takes place in the spring and I'm kind of caught up in the idea of posting it around that same time, so I hope I'm able to... I'd wanted to start posting mid-March, and I guess I could still do that even though I would definitely still have a few chapters left to write, but I really feel more comfortable waiting until I've got the whole thing done, even if "done" is just a first draft.

☆ werewolf au : 582 words which brings the total to 13,921 words and I was just reflecting earlier today that if I'd known how goddamn long food truck au was going to turn out to be, I would have started working on this one first. Ugh, I'm so desperate to write it, but I'm also really trying to avoid doing that thing where I start a dozen different things and don't actually finish any of them. My 300k of unfinished and unposted HP fic will absolutely haunt me until the end of time and I'm trying my best to not repeat that experience. SO. Mostly I'm just jotting down scene bits and plot ideas as they come to me so I don't lose them, and then using this as extra motivation to get me to finish the thing I am actually trying to finish.

 Update on things:

Thing One. I am obsessively running finances in order to determine whether I can afford to take early retirement. Werk is underwhelming.

Thing Two: Research which is putatively part of werk is, on the other hand, very whelming. If I didn't have werk, I could devote more time to it.

Thing Three: I am still planning the life of a selfpublished novelist. Another reason to retire.

Thing Four: The sister sends photos of her over-wintering in sunny Egypt every single gloomy January and beyond day. And there goes another reason to retire.

Thing Five: I have written 1,700 words of Dudley/Draco secretary fic omg. If I retired, I could write 17,000 words.

Thing Six: I watched Everest on iplayer. The book by Kracauer was gripping, and so is the movie. Studio sets, though, are studio sets. Still, I should be thankful they didn't expose actors to life-threatening conditions.

Thing Seven: T'older son's wedding looms.

Thing Eight: My own divorce looms. 

Thing Nine: The dog is a dog.

Thing Ten: And now I must really to bed.

New words this week : 8,320 words which is so good, y'all, I'm so happy.

WIPs worked on this week : 1, with no new WIPs (yay!)

Still exhausted, still snow (though a bunch melted today as we got above freezing for the first time in weeks!) and more progress was made.

The Old Guard

☆ food truck au : 8,320 words which brings the total to 65,359 words and look at this! For the second week in a row I managed to keep my focus to one single WIP, I finished and sent off TWO chapters to my beta, and things are still rolling along! I'm now past the Confession of Feels and the chapter I'm working on finishing off now has kissing and I'm giddy over it. I took a little bit of a break today, poking at it a little and only making a few hundred words, but am hoping for a lot of words tomorrow. I will have houseguests arriving on Thursday and staying through Sunday, so I'm anticipating a much less productive writing week. Hoping to still be able to get the next chapter finished off, though. It's at 4200 words and I think it will end up around 7k, so that's entirely within reach if I can keep my focus on it and not wander off to later parts of the story.

Back in August of 2025, we announced a temporary block on account creation for users under the age of 18 from the state of Tennessee, due to the court in Netchoice's challenge to the law (which we're a part of!) refusing to prevent the law from being enforced while the lawsuit plays out. Today, I am sad to announce that we've had to add South Carolina to that list. When creating an account, you will now be asked if you're a resident of Tennessee or South Carolina. If you are, and your birthdate shows you're under 18, you won't be able to create an account.

We're very sorry to have to do this, and especially on such short notice. The reason for it: on Friday, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster signed the South Carolina Age-Appropriate Design Code Act into law, with an effective date of immediately. The law is so incredibly poorly written it took us several days to even figure out what the hell South Carolina wants us to do and whether or not we're covered by it. We're still not entirely 100% sure about the former, but in regards to the latter, we're pretty sure the fact we use Google Analytics on some site pages (for OS/platform/browser capability analysis) means we will be covered by the law. Thankfully, the law does not mandate a specific form of age verification, unlike many of the other state laws we're fighting, so we're likewise pretty sure that just stopping people under 18 from creating an account will be enough to comply without performing intrusive and privacy-invasive third-party age verification. We think. Maybe. (It's a really, really badly written law. I don't know whether they intended to write it in a way that means officers of the company can potentially be sentenced to jail time for violating it, but that's certainly one possible way to read it.)

Netchoice filed their lawsuit against SC over the law as I was working on making this change and writing this news post -- so recently it's not even showing up in RECAP yet for me to link y'all to! -- but here's the complaint as filed in the lawsuit, Netchoice v Wilson. Please note that I didn't even have to write the declaration yet (although I will be): we are cited in the complaint itself with a link to our August news post as evidence of why these laws burden small websites and create legal uncertainty that causes a chilling effect on speech. \o/

In fact, that's the victory: in December, the judge ruled in favor of Netchoice in Netchoice v Murrill, the lawsuit over Louisiana's age-verification law Act 456, finding (once again) that requiring age verification to access social media is unconstitutional. Judge deGravelles' ruling was not simply a preliminary injunction: this was a final, dispositive ruling stating clearly and unambiguously "Louisiana Revised Statutes §§51:1751–1754 violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution", as well as awarding Netchoice their costs and attorney's fees for bringing the lawsuit. We didn't provide a declaration in that one, because Act 456, may it rot in hell, had a total registered user threshold we don't meet. That didn't stop Netchoice's lawyers from pointing out that we were forced to block service to Mississippi and restrict registration in Tennessee (pointing, again, to that news post), and Judge deGravelles found our example so compelling that we are cited twice in his ruling, thus marking the first time we've helped to get one of these laws enjoined or overturned just by existing. I think that's a new career high point for me.

I need to find an afternoon to sit down and write an update for dw_advocacy highlighting everything that's going on (and what stage the lawsuits are in), because folks who know there's Some Shenanigans afoot in their state keep asking us whether we're going to have to put any restrictions on their states. I'll repeat my promise to you all: we will fight every state attempt to impose mandatory age verification and deanonymization on our users as hard as we possibly can, and we will keep actions like this to the clear cases where there's no doubt that we have to take action in order to prevent liability.

In cases like SC, where the law takes immediate effect, or like TN and MS, where the district court declines to issue a temporary injunction or the district court issues a temporary injunction and the appellate court overturns it, we may need to take some steps to limit our potential liability: when that happens, we'll tell you what we're doing as fast as we possibly can. (Sometimes it takes a little while for us to figure out the exact implications of a newly passed law or run the risk assessment on a law that the courts declined to enjoin. Netchoice's lawyers are excellent, but they're Netchoice's lawyers, not ours: we have to figure out our obligations ourselves. I am so very thankful that even though we are poor in money, we are very rich in friends, and we have a wide range of people we can go to for help.)

In cases where Netchoice filed the lawsuit before the law's effective date, there's a pending motion for a preliminary injunction, the court hasn't ruled on the motion yet, and we're specifically named in the motion for preliminary injunction as a Netchoice member the law would apply to, we generally evaluate that the risk is low enough we can wait and see what the judge decides. (Right now, for instance, that's Netchoice v Jones, formerly Netchoice v Miyares, mentioned in our December news post: the judge has not yet ruled on the motion for preliminary injunction.) If the judge grants the injunction, we won't need to do anything, because the state will be prevented from enforcing the law. If the judge doesn't grant the injunction, we'll figure out what we need to do then, and we'll let you know as soon as we know.

I know it's frustrating for people to not know what's going to happen! Believe me, it's just as frustrating for us: you would not believe how much of my time is taken up by tracking all of this. I keep trying to find time to update dw_advocacy so people know the status of all the various lawsuits (and what actions we've taken in response), but every time I think I might have a second, something else happens like this SC law and I have to scramble to figure out what we need to do. We will continue to update dw_news whenever we do have to take an action that restricts any of our users, though, as soon as something happens that may make us have to take an action, and we will give you as much warning as we possibly can. It is absolutely ridiculous that we still have to have this fight, but we're going to keep fighting it for as long as we have to and as hard as we need to.

I look forward to the day we can lift the restrictions on Mississippi, Tennessee, and now South Carolina, and I apologize again to our users (and to the people who temporarily aren't able to become our users) from those states.