Enemies To Lovers Romance Is The Journey From Sweetheart (derogatory) To Sweetheart (affectionate)

On one of Sarah j. Maas pin boards, she has a one of your pictures with a man sitting on a throne with a glass of wine (or blood) with a girl, in a gorgeous black dress at his knee. I can't seem to find it any where else. What's it from?

This one? It’s an older painting of mine, though it’s not ‘from’ anything in particular. Just a personal piece :)

(though I know some people like to take it as Rhys & Feyre heheh)

Inspiration is not always there when we need it but I still wanted to share these unfinished arts of Feyre and Rhysand because I’m so excited for ACOWAR!!!

The first was the scene in the summer court, when Feyre makes water float around them. The second was the bathtub scene, right before Feyre cleans Rhysand’s wings. I’m sad I never finished them but they felt visually flat and I couldn’t keep working on them. Thought I was quite happy with the faces, especially in the second drawing. 

Sketching up Aelin and Rowan from the latest book from the “Throne of Glass” series by Sarah J. Maas.

The Court of Dreams • The Men - Rhysand, Azriel and Cassian

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Yaaayyyy! Another Feysand art for you, my friends. 😂 I’ve been meaning to draw this and I’m sooo happy I finally got past my art block. 🙇

Feyre back at the Spring Court

I knew I saw that dress somewhere before!

Look at that! She wears the dress from @charliebowater magnificent drawing!

Hi! I love DAUGHTER & am SO excited for ACE OF SHADES! I know you're an excel person for outlining b/c I follow you on twitter, but was wondering if you'd be able to elaborate for an excel newbie myself w/ maybe some examples?

Yes! I love Excel as an outlining tool. Here is a breakdown of how my Excel outlines work.

I start with this base structure. It is based off Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat plotting method, which breaks your story into three acts, each act then breaking further into particular segments. There are a ton of resources out there about this method, so I’m not going to go into it here. 

Then I select all of the cells below it and do some conditional formatting. I actually do these outlines in Google Sheets so I can access them on any device. Conditional formatting means that, if I type in the name of one of my POV characters, the cell will automatically fill in with a specific color. You could do this manually, but this saves me a ton of time. 

The color-coding is helpful if you have multiple points of view. It isn’t as necessary if you have a novel with a sole narrator.

Some Google Sheets how-to’s:

- Text wrapping: Select all the cells of your grid, click “Format,” “Text wrapping,” and “Wrap.” This means the cells will automatically grow larger to accommodate all the words you type into it.

- Conditional formatting: Select all the cells in your grid, click “Format,” then “Conditional Formatting.” Set “Format cells if…” to “Text contains.” Type in your character’s name into the box below it. Then click the paint bucket icon to select your character’s color of choice. Repeat for each POV. (Note: Whichever character’s formatting you enter first will be dominant. Meaning, I did Enne’s formatting first. So even if I type in the word “Levi” into a cell meant for his POV, if the word “Enne” is in there also, it will format purple because Enne’s formatting is dominant. I avoid this by typing in E to indicate her role in the chapter but type in Levi so the formatting picks up correctly.)

Options:

In the Shadow Game series, each POV character gets a full chapter. The chapters do not jump between POVs. So that means, for me, each cell indicates a chapter. You could alternatively do it by scene if your novel uses a different style. 

Next step:

Fill in all your chapters/scenes! Here is how the order works: Let’s say you have three opening scenes in your Set-Up section under Act I. That means they go in cells A3, A4, and A5–1, 2, 3 vertically. Then, let’s say your chapters 4-7 are your Catalyst chapters. Put them in order in B3, B4, B5, B6. You always start a new segment at the top and work your way down. I would post what this looks like but…spoilers. ;) Plus, I think you get the idea.

Ways to make this method work for you:

After you finish making your Excel outline, you’ll notice something: it forms an upside-down bar graph. Assuming you kept the amount of words in your cells (therefore the size of the cells) fairly consistent, you can literally graph the structure of your novel. It makes it easy to go, “Hey…my B-Story is WAY too long” or “I didn’t realize how many more chapters Enne has in comparison to Levi…” 

Say you need to indicate something else to yourself, like mark every chapter that is being affected by a rewrite. You can switch the font colors to white to differentiate them. Again, it makes everything super visual. (You can also write yourself comments by clicking “Insert” –> “Comment.” If you want to get particularly in-depth. You could skip a Word outline altogether this way, which appeals to me because I hate scrolling.)

It is super easy to move the cells around using CTRL-X and CTRL-V. It’s essentially like plotting with notecards but a thousand times more efficient.

You can add extra tabs at the bottom to keep all your other data in the same place. For instance, I literally graph out my books based on scores I give each chapter on Emotional Intensity, Action etc. It’s another method for understanding pacing…but that’s a topic for another time. I also make calendars, revision charts, and all sorts in other tabs. They are all saved together in the same document.

Conclusion:

I always have my Excel outline open as I draft. I do make myself more in-depth outlines as well, either in the Comments in the cells or in Word, but the more in-depth I go, the more I tend to deviate from my outlines. The Excel is basic enough that I don’t actually deviate very much. And I like to think, even if you’re not an Excel pro, this is fairly user-friendly! Give yourself an hour and your future self will thank you. 

Hope this is helpful!

Rhysand completes me <3

Can we please talk about that beautiful, heart-warming moment when Rhys tells Feyre how he started dreaming about her, and how he sent her the memory of the night sky for her to paint it, how much he wanted to find her, and how heartbreaking it was for him to pretend he didn’t care about her, how desperate he was when Amarantha killed her and how much he wanted to kill Amarantha for it. And finally, how EVEN THOUGH HE LOVED HER WITH ALL HIS SOUL HE LET HER GO BECAUSE HE THOUGHT SHE WOULD BE HAPPIER WITH TAMLIN, HOW HE RESPECTED HER CHOICES (not like a tool I know…)

I just love that part so much. It’s my favorite

I got to meet the most wonderful @sjmaas today! It was so surreal and she is so lovely, as his her husband! And I gave her two prints, this being one of them. She said she recognised my art and I nearly passed out. It was so amazing and I had the most amazing time, and thanks to the lovely girl that came up to me at the end, you were so adorable!