Today is the second anniversary of the Anta Baku project, and also I feel like an update is desperately overdue. I’m still here! I’m still intending to finish Hera of Lexington, and there will be a second season of The Cell Phone Towers of Elfland, and there are some other things that I intend to do at some point. I know how all those things go, I just haven’t been able to write them.
It’s been interesting, doing this, to observe the highs and lows of my ability to work on it. I had a big, frustrating gap in working ability last spring, but then came out of it extremely productive; this year it’s been even worse. I haven’t written much of anything since finishing the first season of CPTE in November. I’ve gone through a lot of stages of frustration and aggravation over that, and right now I don’t have any sense of when it’s going to come back, but I’m trying to get rest and let my brain work its way back to productivity on its own. Everything I’ve tried to get it moving again has been futile, so it’s just a point of patience.
In the first year of this project I wrote 95800 words; in the second year I wrote 98400. I started counting this hoping there would be a lot of growth in those numbers, feeling like I did a lot last fall and that would give this year an edge. But seven months of very little production will take its toll, and year-over-year growth is disappointing. It’s a reminder that I still have a lot of work to do on increasing my productivity before this project can really meet my goals.
On the other hand, finishing one book and writing 5/13 of another is pretty good for a two-year-old. I’m just hoping I can get going again soon.