While I haven’t accomplished much today, since my last post I pretty got Chapters 11 and 12 of Tico3 finished. However, before I can move on to Chapter 13, I have a lot of work in the peripheral materials to do.

Although it probably isn’t all that apparent in the stories themselves, I do a lot of meticulous work on the logistics of the events that play out. Almost every name and number you see is planned. Very rarely is anything you see random. This is great for lending depth and consistency to my work, but the story itself becomes the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Heaven help me if I ever make a mistake or decide to adjust something that needs to be propagated down the line. For instance, I have a spreadsheet of all the major political figures in Union history (still highly fragmentary, of course). Well, I realized that there was a misalignment early on that was more than just a matter of simply shifting everything a year. Some things had to move while others had to stay put and then there was everything that referenced that spreadsheet like my timeline, encyclopedia, etc. I wouldn’t doubt that I spend more time on the peripheral materials than writing the actual stories, but that’s just how my method is. I have to be careful not to bog down the reader in all this extraneous information, but I think I do a fairly good job of restricting the narrative to only what the reader needs to now with only the occasional bit of trivia sprinkled in.

This current flurry of work in the peripheral materials could very well carry me through the rest of the book. It’d be nice.

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