These past two weeks I’ve been finishing off the work I’ve been doing during my stay in Canada, and preparing to move back home to Denmark after three and a half months abroad. It’s been busy, but I found the energy and time to start this blog and to write quite a lot on the story – mostly in the past week.
How are we doing?
The first draft of chapter nine is now almost finished. Two weeks ago, the “usable” word count of chapter nine stood around 2000 (I forgot to make a note, so I can’t recall the exact number). It now stands at 11.446 words. One part needs to be rewritten a bit, though a lot of it can be reused, and a few scenes have gaps in them that still need to be filled out. I estimate that the finished first draft will be about 13.000-14.000 words. I might have to split it up later for readability reasons, but since I shall be in full control of the final publishing schedule, I could just have them go up as a quick one-two punch and retain decent chapter sizes for later binge readers.
The lore post on chakra is still in progress, as I’ve channelled my writing mojo into the story instead this past week. I have determined exactly what will go into the post and how, and have already written some of it. It will be an excerpt from the introductory chapter of the academy textbook, Chakra Fundamentals.
The book is fairly heavy reading, and is intended for the first year of students who are selected for the ninja educational track of the Konoha Academy. It serves as a comprehensive introduction to and overview of the entire field of modern chakra theory and its applications. As such, it is the first book on the subject that most children who grow up to be ninja will encounter. I hope it shall prove to be interesting reading.
Many of the chakra-related lore posts will be excerpts of various chapters in this book. As a quick taste, because I see no reason not to put it here, here’s an excerpt of the book’s foreword that I wrote yesterday, which might or might not make it into the chakra lore post itself.
Chakra Fundamentals is intended as an attempt to demystify chakra as part of the standardization of modern academy teaching material. Chakra has, throughout history, most often been considered solely in the contexts of spirituality and mysticism. The first lesson you will learn in the classroom is that chakra is not magic.
While it was once regarded as an inscrutably mysterious, esoteric and dangerous topic, and is still held to be so by many among the masses, the phenomenon of chakra has seen much study throughout the centuries. Even though there are still many more questions than there are answers, we know far more today than we once did.
As the field of knowledge is vast, and much of it is restricted, it is outside the scope of this book to delve into any one subject in great depth. Instead, Chakra Fundamentals aims to offer a solid grounding in and overview of the most basic and commonly accepted fundamentals of chakra theory and the ninja arts, and touches only briefly on more advanced fields to guide and focus further independent study. In many cases, additional reading material is suggested in the margins. In all other cases, such is left to the initiative of the student.
— Umino Kohari, “Chakra Fundamentals, Fifth Edition.”
The next two weeks
This Wednesday, I will be flying back to Denmark, and I hope to post the chakra lore post before that happens. I expect a turbulent schedule at least until next Sunday, where I will finally move in back home. The week after that I should be more free and I anticipate getting a lot of writing done then. I want to spend it finishing the chapter nine first draft completely and moving on to chapter ten so that I’m at least a few thousand words in by the next progress report.
On a final note, not publishing chapters immediately turns out to be the right choice for me. I’ve had a much easier time writing, this past week. The current draft of chapter nine is not at all “ready”, but I can move on, safe in the knowledge that it’s solid enough that I can come back to it later and touch it up.
So far, I haven’t touched the old chapters either. I expect that I shall get around to that sometime in the next month, but I anticipate no progress on that front before the next update. Travelling can be tedious, so I expect I’ll have my hands full already.
Until next time!
The next progress report will be posted on May 3rd.