as a fanfiction author, normaly my storys start with me wanting to make something for the world lol. Then I come up with characters and plotlines and find ways to make them fit into cannon or the AU I'm using until I have a novle-lenght idea. I keep everything ordenised with a notebook I have, and this post reminded me to update that lol.
also wish you luck on the novel entry! I have a Wattpad, but I won't be entering since my big protect isn't anywhere close to finished or put on Wattpad, and I don't like to submit fanfiction for contests like that.

what's keeping track of things uh

i probably should ahaha

So all my story ideas are strewn in many different places, like Google docs, notepad on my hard drive, a note app on my phone, and this nice site by the name of notebook.ai
Admittedly, I haven't been writing as much as I should for lack of time's sake and competing hobbies, but I still do worldbuild quite a bit in my spare time for various things. I'm not much of a novel person and get incredibly drained just writing by myself for long periods of time. I find I write better when I have other people to bounce ideas and concepts off of in collaborative settings.

I have more of a problem getting stuck in the idea phase when writing. I've written half a novel but I ran into the issue of the main protagonist (of a two protagonist narrative, switching and unreliable in a sense) being unlikable and dragging the story into the dirt and forced me to discard what I wrote. What remains of what direction I planned that novel in, I want to eventually make a video game out of because I feel it would both work better to tell the story and allow me a larger protagonist cast to switch point of views in in the way I want.

I think overall I'm a character first type of person considering the large amount of characters I have without worlds and just.. general indecision about how I want to build story universes in the first place.
I feel like they tend to follow suit after I have an idea or concept to run with, but my writing process is less of an organized approach and more of a conscious stream of ideas overall. I don't have too much of a problem fitting ideas into place so much as trying to keep settings from getting too fantastical or silly. *shrug*

I also don't think I'll be entering as I don't like to share my writing publicly generally.

I prefer starting the main chars, then the world around them.

Omg yes please!! :DD Here's a link to the cover so it looks nice: link
Yay, world starting buddies! Also, in cases like characters with similar powers but different means of using them, different universes are totally necessary, like in your teleportation example. Also, a remedy - you can write short stories about each character! Like perhaps a short snippet of a day in the life of your wolf-demon hunter. And perhaps, like marvel does, add in some hinting at other characters lol. But short stories and collections of short stories are amazing and I adore them - especially if they have no business being in the same book xD

Yea, I thought it was funny they put fanfiction as a category. Fanfiction is amazing, but I somehow don't think you can get a publishing deal for that? Anyhow, I can't write fanfiction. I prefer pseudo-fanfiction - smashing two fandoms or a fandom and my ideas together. Either that, or I write novelizations. T.T
Glad I could help remind you! xD

Looks great! Thank you!! ^^
Yeah, I love connecting stories I write. If I ever finish my series, I don't think I'll be able to ignore it, so my next series will have Hiraeth easter eggs all over the damn place lol.

Hglfjd exactly! Love Riordan. Didja know they're making a PJO TV show? I'm excited even though it'll be out when I'm in college T.T