August 2024 Update
Whelp, despite my best efforts, that epistolary section that was boring to write, was boring to read too.
So, I cut the section by about 50-60% and cleaned it up quite a bit to smooth out the edges. My whole “I think this does something different” might’ve been true, but I think I would’ve lost a lot of readers in this section. I’m going to have a character sum up the important bits the reader would’ve gleaned otherwise.
On the plus side, I should get back to drafting prose tomorrow; on the negative side I lost three months to this one section. The epistolary section amounts to ~5k words which is about 2-3 weeks of my normal drafting speed when writing prose. So, this was a rather large hit to my timeline.
Of course, my timeline is already generous—I think it’s going to be years before all three books are ready to publish. I had hoped to finish book 2 by Summer 2025, which could still happen, but I would need some serious bouts of inspiration coupled with solid butt-in-chair time—increasingly difficult to come by as children grow, day job demands increase, and MS fatigue sucks away endurance.
But I get to start drafting prose again—that’s the fun part. We’ll see how the next month goes.