Nice, looking good.

:)

Are you ok with me keeping the background relatively simple? I think it'll work well with just a gradient and a suggestion of the join twixt wall and floor. Worried that adding things like furniture are likely to complicate it overly...

Other than two things that your comment reminded me of yeah, that should work fine. In the story there's a coffee table a few feet in front of them with a pair of post-nommed pizza paper plates, and with the angle as it is it would likely be in the picture, at least in part.

That's what I'm thinking is the 'easy' one. The other, which may or may not be easy though hopefully is, is that the couch is actually a few feet away from the wall, with room enough for someone to walk behind it, rather than right next to it as the shadows would indicate.

I feel like such a putz for missing those two details the first time around and only remembering them now given I wrote the freakin' story the pic is from, hopefully they won't be too much of a bother to 'fix'.

Absence of shadows, no problem :) Everything's layered so I can switch out backgrounds at any point.

Presence of coffee table, I can certainly have a go at it, but it'll probably take me an extra hour. The other option is to just crop the image square-er to keep it quicker and cheaper. Totally your call :)

Yeah, I think cropping would probably be the better choice here, table wouldn't really add anything to the picture other than making it more 'story accurate', so cropping so that it isn't an issue wouldn't really take away anything from the pic itself.