AUTHOR'S NOTE: No I hadn't forgotten you...

So it has been since March.  Yeah, that's bad.
I swore that I was going to be moving forward more regularly.  I didn't.  And that is worse.

I have a list of things that kept me from writing, not the least of which was that I found myself in a bit of a corner that I had some trouble solving - and which resulted in a rewrite of a portion of a previous chapter (I'll note that appropriately elsewhere.).  I also went on vacation (in May) and took my laptop with me with the intention of getting a bunch of writing done, but on day three, my 18 month old daughter accidentally screwed up my boot sequence so badly that I had to wipe the whole drive (once I got home) and everything I had written up to day three was lost, while the laptop was effectively relegated to being an overweight phone and iPod charging dock for the duration of the voyage.  Once home I spent an inordinate amount of time solving a truly spectacular string of technical issues for a client - a task that took much of my evenings that I would normally be writing during.  By the time I had all that out of the way, I was truly beyond the habit of working on Necropolis at all.  I gradually worked my way back into it, refamiliarizing myself with where the story was and what the problem was that I had to solve.  I spent many nights after the light was off pondering how to get past the issue.  I never totally quit, the whole time.  Other minor issues, too trivial each on their own added up, and now here I am, in September and I haven't posted a chapter in seven months.  Yeesh!

Well, that is about to change.  At least for the moment.

I have finished part two.  There are going to be new installments, starting tomorrow and following each Friday until part two is over.  (I haven't broken it up yet, but I suspect that the two remaining chapters are going to come in a total of three parts.)

In all that time thinking, I've had some serious shuffling of ideas.  Part three is going to be focussed on something different than I had planned.  Something that was always part of the story, but not made as important as I now intend.  From there, I'm not sure what will happen yet.  I can either finish the story I had planned for Book: the First by expanding to a fourth part, or I can shift that part of the story into Book: the Second.  I'm not sure at this point which is going to be most feasible.  It will depend a lot on how complete Book: the First feels as I get to the end.  No doubt start the second volume with what was intended to be the climax of the previous book will start things off with a bang, but it might be a structural nightmare.  Only time will tell.  I may even discover a third option - who knows.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Catching up in many ways

I WAS SO FAR AHEAD!

So very very far ahead.  But since early spring I have been doing virtually nothing but losing ground.  Sometimes I'd stem the flow a bit, but more often than not since April I've been letting entire weeks go by without adding anything to the buffer of written material I had.  Bah.

I kind of knew that once I got to this date that I would have the opportunity to get back on the horse, so to speak.  Well, here I am.

My film has finished up most of it's intense business - I mentioned in other posts that we had broadcast, DVD and Theatrical deals to do a bunch of work on.  We have agreed to more theatrical dates in October and will be doing the international DVDs soon, but all of that is relatively small-beans and is built upon work done previously.  Meanwhile my daughter has turned one year old and her Mum is finished with maternity leave which leaves me as Mr. Mom three days a week and working at my day job considerably less.

I am hoping that this will allow me to get more done.  Tonight for example, after dinner I figured Jodie would like to take an hour or so to play with December one on one.  That works well for me to take some time here to get some writing done.

I have no buffer left.  I ran out this week.  I had managed in the past few weeks to add a couple of installments which just barely got me to this date... but kind of not - I should have posted one more installment earlier this week in order to keep on schedule.  I actually did have something ready, but I wasn't happy with it.  I figured it was better to take another run at it than post something I wasn't satisfied with.

So, I'm going to go update some internal links and fix up that installment now.  I may even get to posting it tonight.  Failing that it'll probably be a few days.

It'll take a few weeks I expect before I can begin to predict how my new writing schedule will really be.  How often I can post, or if I'll actually make enough headway that I'll get ahead again and be able to post on a pre-determined schedule.  I'll check in with another note once the picture starts to coalesce.