So here’s what’s going on.
I had to go to visit my customer. I work for a tech company, and the customer is quite some distance away. Most of my meetings are online, but physical meetings are necessary. At some point you’ve got to go talk to people face to face.
Last fall I took my qualifying exams for the PhD. I’m particularly displeased about how those tests went, but I passed. While studying, I wrote a lot of TiH. It was low intensity fun work. The first draft is nothing like what has been published. It’s full of airships and gun battles. But I had twenty chapters or so of the second draft done when, in early January of this year, I got bored and wanted to start publishing stuff.
AO3 makes publishing original fiction difficult and prohibits fiction I intend to publish in book form, so I couldn’t put it there. It all went up on LC (here).
Now, on a personal note, if I don’t have deadlines, I don’t get anything done. On the other hand between school, work, and writing, I’m overloaded. I also do a lot of BJJ, which eats time but is vital for physical and mental health. For a long time I was coasting on my cushion. That ran out a few weeks ago, somewhere around chapter 30, and I’ve been staying one step ahead. Last week, on a customer visit, I tripped.
Tolkien got stuck in the Lord of the Rings when the Hobbits came to Bree. JRR didn’t know who Strider was, where to go, why Gandalf wasn’t there, or any of it. That’s how I feel. He put things aside for a long time. I’m too impatient for that.
But I do need to push a few leads. I write like I’m solving a maze, full of dead ends and plot lines that peter out into nothing. Most of these plot lines take two or three chapters to reveal the problems. When I’m only a chapter or so ahead, I don’t have time to fix all that. This was the problem with the Nine, btw, and compounding factors like AO3 and the job/work/time dichotomy made everything worse. What I need to do is get five chapters ahead. I’m not sure how to do that within the clock constraints