Progress report (29/06): Decent progress, more to come

The last two weeks have been a bit busier than I anticipated (aren’t they always), but I did still get more writing done than I have in quite a while. The first week of the holiday I just sort of crashed and did absolutely nothing productive whatsoever – a classic case of vegging out completely after being over-stressed for a while. This was obviously unplanned. The second week I spent moving around all over the place, before I finally settled down in Finland today to visit with family for three weeks.

This update is almost an hour late because I spent some time being distraught and later distracted by a certain failed rocket launch today, and then I fell into a blessed writing spell which I didn’t want to interrupt for anything. I should try making a habit of writing these updates earlier in the day.

So how are we doing?

The lore post “On the History of Bijuu Seals and Jinchuuriki” is currently sitting at around 90% completion, needing a bit of polish and review before I post it. It is an excerpt from the book, “Taming the Gods” by Nara Kaede. Another lore post which is written from an entirely OOC point of view, is about the general technology level and also contains general information about the world’s geography and rough international politics. It’s maybe a third done, and I’m still deciding what exactly to put into it, I intend it to be a basic primer on and overview of the more broad-sweeping changes that I have made to the standard Naruto canon. I’m also roughing out a potential structure for a post on ninja psychology and culture due to feedback from a reader, but I don’t want to get too distracted by all these lovely lore posts. We’ll see where that takes me.

In other news, the chakra post which has been languishing in development hell for a while now has been touched up a bit, but remains surprisingly stubborn and difficult to get right. I’m just not satisfied with the feel of it yet, and I might have to restructure a few bits. When I’m happy with it, or at least less miserable about it, I will post it.

So I got a bunch written on the lore posts. Now, how’s the story doing?

Not as well as I’d have liked, I’m afraid, but still a bit better than the former update. I’ve written a further 2731 words on Ignition 3 just this evening, bringing it up to a grand total of 4704 words. I’m now smack up against that difficult scene I talked about in the last update, and I think I’m going to simply write out a rough block-out draft without any actual prose and then leave it be for now.

I need to consider what will work best with that scene, as I would rather skip it entirely rather than do it badly. I realize I’m being hellishly vague, but I couldn’t say more without spoiling everything. You’ll recognize it when you see it. Meanwhile, my policy of not publishing before I’m done with the whole arc continues to grant me comfort and lets me skip difficult bits so that I can keep writing instead of blocking entirely, and get the meat of the arc done.

The next two weeks…

I’m going to have a lot of peace here in Finland to really get into the mood of it and whip my muse into shape. I anticipate getting a significant but unpredictable amount of writing done. Last time I wrote here in Finland, when at my best pace, I used to punch out between 5.000-10.000 words a day. I doubt I’ll quite get there, but even a fraction of that would be great.

Either way, I give genuinely good odds that you will finally see some of these darn lore posts I keep talking about in these next two weeks. It’s taken too long, but I think it’s about bloody time.

Now let’s squeeze that muse for all it’s worth. Until next time!