My brain definitely knows it’s spring this week, as I was just pouring out words and hours on Monday, at least relative to where I have been. The last few weeks I’ve been doing a really productive job on Mondays and Tuesdays, and then having a hard time getting back to it in the second half of the week, so while I’m definitely getting some good moments in I’m not making progress quite as fast as I had hoped. I’m still feeling pretty reasonable on getting Hera Chapter 3 ready for publication next week, and I already have the public domain illustration I want for it, but I’m less confident in being able to go weekly right away in April.
The Hera stories being longer than expected turned out to not be just a one-time thing with Chapter 2, which is making the schedule more difficult as I ramp back up. Chapter 3 is already as long as Chapter 2, and there’s quite a ways to go still. I had the idea that if I could get to 7500 words/week I could publish weekly, but CPTE stories are getting a little bit longer, more in the 5k range than where they started at 3k, and Hera just keeps going. Even my backup alternate schedule with three CPTE stories for every Hera, rather than alternating, means I’m going to need to get to 10k/week if they’re ballooning out beyond 15,000 words.
And the last few weeks have really brought home to me that writing can be extremely tiring. I don’t think 10k/week is at all unreasonable, but 10k next week is definitely out of line. Later in the summer, when I’ve had time to train up more, and learn more about taking intentional rest, I’m pretty confident that I can get there. I like this chapter a lot, I’m pretty pleased with where CPTE is going, and the next story there in specific. I just think the schedule I had in mind was a little too ambitious, and you’ll probably be seeing two or three stories in April instead of four.