On this Easter morning, I was writing a new “The Circle” chapter when I noticed that my site was changing and crashing.
Panicked, I contact my developer friend who helps me with the site, and he told me that he woke up early and wanted to try adding back the statistics code he had made for my other site at www.nsfwauthor.info
I am not 100% sure I like how tall my story boxes are, so I added a “scroll down” box at the top to warn people that the more recent stories are at the bottom.
He did explain to me how to turn the stats off if I decide I don’t want them anymore, but so far, I think it’s not that bad! I remember the old stats helped me get motivated to write in neglected stories if only to bring the last chapter to a more recent date, so perhaps this will help me!
So, let’s see my neglected stories:
- Harmony: I have an outline of the next chapter planned, and the one after should bring it a major plot line that was in the original plan and not yet written
- Alex: this one only has 3 chapters and I never really mapped it enough to bring it to a high number, so I would need a lot of outlining. In fact, the reason I decided to bring back a buffer is to give me some time to plan Alex. That said, the next 2 chapters are rather clear in my mind and I hope to get to it soon.
- Sue: I left Sue in a rather weird place: have a plan on how to move forward, but I left it stuck in slow time (more below), but I think I am getting close to having a clear enough idea on how to proceed
- Cookie: the next chapter is outlined at 80% and should have been written already, but each time I sat down to write it (like this morning), something distracted me. I really hope it’s the one that will fill Friday the 26th’s slot, in other words, to the next one chapter written.
What is slow time and why is that a problem?
Most of my chapters are built in slow time. The Circle has 8 chapters totaling 9342 words occurring over the span of only a few hours on a Saturday morning: it’s not even lunch yet!
Faith has 15 chapters written, and apart from the first chapter, almost all of the 17,047 words occur on the same day and there will be 2 or 3 more chapters on Faith’s first day aboard the ship.
It’s what is blocking Harmony: in the last chapter, we hear about her plans for in a year or so, but she’s barely arrived on the colony! I haven’t actually counted the number of days she spend there over her 31 chapters, but it certainly hasn’t been a full month yet!
Pets, with 46 written chapters is probably occurring over the span of only a few weeks.
This is what I call “Slow time”. Every single day is narrated and I personally enjoy that a lot more jumps thru time, but it hurts because I need to focus on every single detail like counting meals, sleep time, etc…
So I’ll need to learn to do fast time: to jump thru weeks at once, to setup certain routines. It’s Harmony I need to apply this to the most, so if you see weird experiments with time, that’s me trying.
Sorry in advance…