So, I tried piggybacking on that whole NaNoWriMo thing in the hopes it would motivate me to write a big chunk of story.

It didn’t really work. As I suspected, the NaNo environment, for want of a better term, isn’t for me. There’s too much emphasis on word counts. It reminded me of all those pointless ‘achievements’ you get in modern video games. Seeing people discuss methods of inflating their word count so they could hit the ‘target’ and get the ‘medal’ just depressed me, so I turned my back on it and reread some Plato, along with the Odyssey, to help me find the ‘voice’ for Episode Seven.

And then I printed off Episode Six – all 150 pages! – and started going through it with highlighters (blue: check the continuity for this; green: expand on this; yellow: revise/rewrite this; orange: maybe cut this; pink: definitely cut this!). I think I need to cut out something like five thousand words? Maybe eight thousand. This includes merging two chapters into one. Maybe I should post old drafts at some point?

Anyhow, I’ll be back later in the month with (hopefully) Episode Six along with tentative plans for 2017 (hint: don’t expect anything early in the year).