I actually did have some incremental progress from Saturday, but I feel kinda silly reporting so little. I realize that the whole point of these WIP update posts is to keep a running log of progress great and small, but sometimes it feels like I’m just wasting everyone’s time saying, “Yeah, I managed to write a few lines of dialog. Whee.”

Anyway, putting Saturday and Sunday together, I’ve finished the dialog for Chapter 14 of Tico3 and filled in the narration for two and a half sections. I just have two and a half more to go, so I stand a good chance of getting the chapter out on schedule. The actual content of the chapter has changed a fair bit from my original (albeit barebones) plan, so the name is going to be changed from the former “Phalanx” to “View from the Back”. You’ll see what it means when the time comes. Until then.

I didn’t get much work done. My progress was mostly conceptual, figuring out the flow of the chapter, which I suppose is no small part of the work. I made the token gesture of getting at least a line done for each section. I know that’s not saying much.

I don’t have a lot to report. I was out of it most of the day, but I did manage to get a couple hundred words written on Chapter 14 of Tico3. I’m still debating how I want the chapter to play out, though. I may need to switch gears to TTWC1 while I make up my mind.

I actually could’ve posted yesterday, but because I wait until pretty much right before I go to bed, I inadvertently passed out before I could make my post. So much for that. ^_^;

I really didn’t accomplish much yesterday, but the rest of the time I was away, I pretty well finished up my current batch of work in the Space Arc peripheral materials and made significant progress on Chapter 13 of Tico3. Today I managed to wrap up that selfsame chapter, maintaining my lead time there. I guess now I should switch back to TTWC1 to stay ahead of the game there.

That’s really all I have to say on the subject of my recent work. I’m fairly excited about Chapter 13 because my approach is fairly different than what I usually do. We can talk about it more when the chapter drops in four weeks. Until then.

I believe I have the coming naval battle pretty well sorted out. Some of the fine details remain, but I think I have enough to move forward in the story. I’m even going so far as to work a little ahead on the logistics of Tico4, but I probably should be looking to get back to writing the story proper.

I’m going to be out of contact for another spell, I imagine, so we’ll see if I can bound ahead as much I did during the last incommunicado period.

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.