Sunday, February 17, 2019

Writing Update: Middling Progress Edition

The snowstorm last week threw everything for a loop, and I'm just now starting to get back into a useful rhythm for working on my projects.

Very little got done on 'Hot Pressed,' though I have managed to get the first capture scene almost fleshed out. I'm stuck between wanting to show what's really happening during the abduction of the first 'victim' vs. increasing the amount of suspense/foreshadowing. The latter has won out for the moment, since I'll be showing the end result of what happened to this captive later on in the story.

It does preclude me from being able to write a hot conversion scene, but I think it's more important to the flow of the story that I make it happen this way. Flow matters more than show.

The worse news is that I'm not feeling the motivation to work on this story like I was for 'Robotic Restitution.' I think that's really more a fact that I'm earlier in the process - too many plot points need to be fleshed out, and I haven't gotten close to the characters yet, so it's harder to make their thoughts and dialog flow. I'm sure it will get easier with time as long as I stick to it. And this time I will stick to it - I will get these ideas onto the screen and out of my head.

I'm saying that just to convince myself, aren't I?

But it really needs to happen, as I badly need to plot out and start work on the teaser story for Robotic Restitution, as that will be a big blocker towards getting it released. Advertising is tough work when you're a nobody.

Robotic Restitution

Progress is being made on the proofreading process. I've just finished proofing chapter four. There are about sixteen more to go, and I'm estimating that each chapter takes about three hours to do the first proofreading pass.

That leaves about 48 more hours of work to do before I can start the second proofreading pass. From this end of the process that seems like an insurmountable mountain, but I'll keep plugging away at it.

Let's not mention the currently nonexistent cover art and teaser story that needs to be written before I can release anything.

Seems likely that it will be half a year before I'll be ready to publish. That seems exorbitant, but realistic. Real authors obviously get a lot more help than I am soliciting, so it wouldn't take them nearly as long as it's taking me. Real authors also have a better idea whether their project will be a success - I suspect that this probably won't be, since, to be realistic, what I'm writing is pretty niche. As it's a passion project, I really can't devote more resources to it other than my time since the return on investment will likely be minimal.

This is probably a stupid tack to take because it increases the lead time on getting anything else done, but there's too many uncertainties involved for me to feel comfortable doing anything else. Bummer.


This has already run on rather long, so I'll save some of my other discussion topics for another time. Adieu!

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