Immediately upon my previous declaration, I embarked upon something of a life journey (fewer miles covered than the one that shut me down in 2006, but almost as big). I'll spare you the details, but, at any rate, although I'm mostly done, I've ended up with more demands on my time than I had previously. So, as always, the inestimable patience of my fans is so, very, greatly appreciated.
One of the pieces that's been slowing me down is my transition to - drumroll please - a mac! It's purdy, and it does stuff well, but it also does things different(ly)... and I haven't yet figured out how to manage my website workflow work on it. I installed Office, downloaded a basic text-editor (bbtext), and got a(n excellent, free) FTP client, but I gave up in frustration when all of my formatted quotation marks and apostrophes turned into accented Os and Is. It kills me, but I'm currently booted in Windows, and doing things the old-fashioned way. So, anyone with web-dev experience on a Mac - email me!
As for the story post itself, it's another several pages of Chapter XII - The Emerald Queen. There's an easter egg in it for anyone that wants to go digging, a link hidden in one of the words. There are benefits to being friends with your main characters - like having access to things that have probably fallen off the face of the Internet, and like having access to the people involved to ask if it's okay for you to put it back up. Caydiem has kept her sense of humor after all these years.
My new resolve has born its first fruits: the first four pages of Chapter XII - The Emerald Queen. The first scene is the reason this post took so long - it's a place that I'm very unsure in my footing, theme- and style-wise. Fingers crossed. The next scene - and, actually, the rest of the chapter - is being fantastically fun to write. There are little snippets of prose and conversation that I've had written for months, or years in some cases, waiting for their moment, and this chapter is where a whole bunch of them are slotted to go. I've been writing unexpected, unplanned, or just plain difficult scenes nonstop for the last few chapters, that it feels good to get back to somewhere where I've got a semblence of a longstanding plan.
You'll have to be the judge of how much quality I've given up for quantity. I'm looking forward to the comments.
Hi folks... I've got a free Sunday afternoon... I'm rereading the last few chapters in preparation for doing some writing, and something's just occurred to me that I think it might help if I vocalize, so here goes.
Somehow, going back and rocking the rewrite has slowed me down substantially in writing new stuff. There are parts of the rewrite - nuances of character and plot that I added with the perspective I'd gained from writing it all once already - which I'm really proud of, stuff that I really enjoy. I think I've set myself a high standard, one that's extraordinarily difficult to achieve on the first draft of anything. I've been having a lot of trouble writing lately, and I think that this is why: I've been letting failure to meet my own high standard get in the way of writing anything.
That sucks, because I don't want to deliver anything sub-par to you guys. But on the other hand, my output has been flagging, and it's become a struggle to write instead of a joy. I think need to lower my own expectations for how good my writing is going to be for a while, and just schedule myself another rewrite at the end of Book Two. What do you all think?
Chapter XI - Flight grew dramatically over the course of its writing. I also went through a bunch of personal-life stuff that, while all very exciting and time-consuming, has nothing to do with the site (most of it, yet) and so I'll spare you the details. At any rate, the President's Day weekend has been good to me, and I've done as promised: I've finished the now-massive Chapter XI. Here it is, picking up right where we left of last time.
