heya, good luck on the PhD stuff. i was actually going to do mine but got talked out of it. in the psych world it's pointless unless you wanna teach or specifically be a psychologist-- which honest i wasn't interested in because i dont like testing stuff. otherwise, you can do all the same stuff with a masters and it's a waste of money. ton of writing and work though so i wish you luck-- and most importantly- sanity.
So Str8 isn't a true story. all of the characters are fictional and i quite literally make things up as i went. only had one original outline and it was a messy flow chart. i didn't plan much ahead because i liked the story and characters and i didn't wanna be spoiled either so i only outlined updates one at a time with only a couple benchmarks throughout the story i was interested in hitting. i wrote a pretty detailed post about this on my Patreon page that i can link here if you're interested in all the details.
True Story?
Aaaaand, it hit ENTER too quickly. but thanks again for the kind words and holy crap, you said all those nice things before you got out of Chapter 5? you're not even to the good stuff yet. i think it starts to pick up in chapter 5. 6 was the game changer for a lot of people back in the day. i still get mail about that chapter and i was really intimidated and excited to get to it for the revamp