Angela is starting to feel some momentum.

In this episode of Unpublished, Angela and Daniel check in on the latest progress with Eros et Flamingo and talk about what it actually feels like to build a novel one chapter at a time.

After spending months rewriting and reworking the opening of the manuscript, Angela is starting to find the rhythm of the characters, the dialogue, and the story itself. That leads into a bigger conversation about how chapters take shape, why some scenes seem to appear almost accidentally, and how tiny details can suddenly become important much later in the book.

Along the way, they talk pacing, chapter length, filler, cliffhangers, foreshadowing, killing your darlings, endlessly tinkering with old work, and the strange moment when you finally have to decide something is done and move on.

Plus, Angela has some thoughts about people online casually announcing that they wrote an entire novel in two weeks.

This is Part 1 of a conversation about writing chapters, but mostly it is about the very unglamorous reality of slowly turning a story in your head into an actual book.

What does it actually mean to tell a story in three acts?

In this episode of Unpublished, Angela and Daniel dig into Act One, Act Two, and Act Three, and why that familiar structure still helps a story feel focused, emotional, and hard to put down.

As Angela works through the opening chapters of Eros et Flamingo, she talks about getting out of the wilderness of the beginning, finding Sal’s voice, shaping the doomed love story with Carlos, and building toward the inciting incident that will launch the rest of the manuscript.

Along the way, Angela and Daniel talk three-act structure, first chapters, character development, emotional stakes, dual timelines, fan fiction as craft practice, and why structure is not just a formula, but a way to guide the reader through a story.

In this episode of Unpublished, Angela and Daniel dig into one of the biggest questions facing any writer trying to publish a novel: where does your story actually fit? As Angela continues drafting Eros et Flamingo, she talks through moving from outlining and planning into the messy, surprising, emotionally intense process of writing the first chapters.

This episode explores genre from both the reader side and the publishing side, including the difference between commercial fiction, romance, upmarket fiction, book club fiction, women’s fiction, and literary fiction. Angela breaks down why understanding your genre matters for story structure, audience, marketing, literary agents, query letters, and comparable titles, also known as comps.

Along the way, Angela and Daniel talk about writing a manuscript from scratch, letting an outline change once the story starts to grow, writing emotional stakes, building a doomed love story, learning from fan fiction, reading inside and outside your genre, and why every writer should understand the business of publishing before entering the query trenches.

Angela also reflects on the lessons she learned from querying The God of the Dead too early, how those lessons are shaping Eros et Flamingo, and why reading, research, and genre awareness are helping her build a stronger, stickier, more marketable story from the beginning.

Whether you are writing your first novel, preparing to query literary agents, trying to find comps, moving from fan fiction to original fiction, or figuring out whether your book is commercial, upmarket, or literary, this episode is about learning the rules of the publishing world without losing the emotional spark that made you want to write the book in the first place.