Writing Update: 02/12/23 (Patreon)

Not much to report this week.  A few edits here and there, and typos hunted down and corrected, but not major work.  Basically, this cold--now in it's twelfth day--has really floored me.  I'm barely surviving the working day, let alone finding the will to write afterwards.  After some disheartening time spent staring listlessly and blurrily at the screen early in the week, I decided to take the week off. from writing  In terms of editing, I think it was a good ideas as well - on Monday, I'll come back to it with fresher eyes.

Didn't abandon the work completely, though. I started plotting out the rest of the story.  I'd always planned Constant to be two "series" of ten "episodes."  (That's not entirely true - at the very beginning, I may have planned for three "series" but I don't think that's feasible anymore.)

So, that leaves five chapters to wrap up the story.  I started plotting that out and... it's a pretty tight fit.  On the one hand, there's a lot of potential room there - if each chapter comes in at around 15k words, that's 75k - a short novel's worth - to wrap things up.

On the other hand - well, there's a lot of ground I want to cover, scenes that have been floating around in my head since I first started this thing over a decade ago,  The end point has always been clear - the prologue helps to keep that destination pinned - but a lot of new stuff has come crowding in through the writing: resolving characters and plot threads that weren't part of the original plan.  And with a natural tendency to over-write....

And finally, well - I don't want to be writing this for the next two or three years, I'd like to bring it to a conclusion so I can tackle other writing projects!  That being said, I also don't want to pull a "last season of Game of Thrones" and rush to a (for many) unsatsifying conclusion.

(Personally, I was fine with the ending of GoT, but less fine with the way characters just started teleporting all over the map in the final two seasons.)

In any case, the shape of the rest of the story is there, now, and I'm looking forward to tackling the next chapter once done editing the Interlude.  I think I need to learn to "kill my darlings", as I've seen it termed - and come to terms with the idea of brutally editing and paring back what I write.