You know, as much as it sucks getting as run down as I am right now, I have to look on the bright side. For one thing, I knew I could just work from home, so that meant when I woke up with a random limp (thanks EDS?) I wasn’t panicking too much. Also now I’ve had a spring clean at home, it was quite a pleasant day. A lot of the tasks at this time of year follow a very similar pattern, lots of small repetitive tasks. And well, I adore small repetitive tasks. No really, I find it an immensely relaxing and cathartic activity, and tomorrow I’ll be moving markbooks, which is always my favourite start of term activity. Yes I know how sad I am, but I mean, I count myself lucky to love my job.
I forgot to mention this over the last few days because I’ve been pretty out of it in the evenings, but TEL is now over 50K. I mentioned passing the midpoint, but, well like with Project4 it still hasn’t sunk in we’re finally at this point. I’ve been working on this series for over a decade, even if not actively by any means for over half of that. It’s purely a coincidence that I’m more or less concluding the story I started at Uni right as I am about to go back. Make no mistake, all of the books need some serious work, and even with all the revisions I’ve made, I still consider them first drafts, which brings me onto part of the future: putting work out into the world faster.
I think I should start a webnovel. To put it in the most blunt terms: webnovels are not expected to have as much polish as a ‘finished work’, and people are happy to offer critiques as you go without necessarily holing rough edges against you. I always enjoyed the responses I got to TUS and others when I put them out there, but I just didn’t like having rough versions live and going back to edit ‘published’ chapters. Now, yes, I could apply that logic to the series…
…Which is why I am going to apply that logic to the series. Sort of. See I could sequence it, or I could just, upload it all at once. As to where, I have no idea. I’m pretty happy putting it up for free – heck, given it needs a LOT of work, I would not feel right charging money for it. We’ll see. But at least with a webnovel I won’t feel as self conscious. The real question will be if I’ll go with Clockspinning or Past the Gap. I can hear A Planet Named George sobbing in the background but that doesn’t feel like it’s long enough for a webnovel. It might even just be a novella.
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