I feel like I should make a post just to let anyone who comes by know that I’m still here and still working at this point. It’s been a long, difficult summer for me. For most of the late spring and summer I’ve been fighting off some significant cognitive disfunction, in ways that aren’t necessarily debilitating to general life but make it very hard to keep all of the things in my head that I need to in order to write series fiction with arc plot.
I ended up taking eight weeks almost entirely off from writing, and then the last eight have been something of a slog as I try to retrain myself to do this. Even though these are short stories, they still take a very long time when grinding away at a few hundred words per week. So I’ve been making progress on Hera #4 and CPTE #12, but it’s been very slow progress, and I don’t have an ETA for publishing either of them yet.
In terms of writing volume, though, I’m beginning to see progress, even though it is still very much three steps forward and two steps back. I feel better about what I’ve been doing, and over the last couple of weeks I’ve gradually been able to start scaling up how much I’m producing. The levels are still small but they’ve crept up into four digits, at least, and I’m optimistic that I’ll be somewhat back up to speed sometime this fall. If you’ve been reading along so far, I really appreciate your patience; I had hoped to be working both of these stories toward their conclusion by now, rather than being hung up halfway through in the case of CPTE and about a third of the way into Hera.
On the bright side, one thing I have been able to do recently, when not writing, is work toward ensuring the financial stability of this project. That’s gone very well, and I’m starting to get some ideas of how to expand things a little bit here so that publishing things regularly can be not entirely dependent on my ability to write regularly. I expect this winter to go better than last winter – I have a large sheaf of contingency plans for being in warm places – but this summer has really proved how easy it is for everything to stop when I can’t manage to finish the next thing. I don’t have any specific plans in that direction yet, but you might see some before too terribly long.
And through it all I’m still motivated to finish these things, which was one of my worries from the beginning that hasn’t yet come to pass. I have several exciting new things scheduled to work on once these are done, but it hasn’t even been tempting to try to jump off the track to go running after them. I really like what I’ve got coming for you very soon in CPTE, and the rest of the season plot there, especially. These stories are still engaging me, and I hope I can pull the writing process together enough for them to be engaging you as well before too long.