@manuuuu1416 for the book in general, I started it a little over a year ago, just outlining the idea in a notebook (the story was quite different when I first started out). Then I started writing the first chapters, and outlined the timeline in more detail (week by week to match the football matches). At first Noah was supposed to be the only MC and Ethan was “just” the love interest, but that version of Ethan pissed me off, so I did a lot of extra work on him as character and made him an MC on his own - that also meant changing a lot in both the first 15 chapters I had, and adjusting the full story outline (which was based on the key emotional beats), then I just kept editing and editing (the story not getting better for it), deciding to start publishing to push myself write new chapters rather than just polish. As I wrote I sometimes got new ideas, or learned that something in my outline didn’t fully fit, and then I adjusted along the way, but I had a pretty good idea of sort of the main flow, emotional beats and plot points of the story. I also had small character descriptions for the side characters and bigger for Noah and Ethan, and did a lot of work to think about why someone like Noah would fall for someone like Ethan and the other way around. It has been a really fun process, but also my first book, so I learned a lot along the way, and I could probably keep editing lines forever.
I’m very happy had those 4-5 months with the story before I started sharing it, getting to know the characters and see what works through writing the first part - for my next story I have outlined it all by hand so far, and are also just playing a bit around with the different parts and the characters, writing little scenes I find fun (I also wrote several scenes ahead for C&C, many that I didn’t end up using either).
That was long, hope it made sense and was useful in some way? :-)
