Chapter 11 of Almost Nowhere is up here 

(Actually I wrote this chunk over 3 months ago and never uploaded it because it was only half of a planned longer chapter, but word-wise it’s as long as a lot of the other chapters, even if there’s not that much plot motion there, and I figure making it into its own chapter will help make this book’s incredibly slow update schedule a little less severe.  At this point goal for Almost Nowhere is, literally, “try to finish this book before I die of natural causes” :P)

Wrote 819 words of Almost Nowhere today – which is only like 1/5 to ¼ of a chapter, but writing at all means a lot in terms of momentum, and I’d lost my momentum for a bit there.  Posting this in part to make sure I don’t lose it again.

One thing I keep thinking is that I’m being relatively uptight when it comes to this project – perhaps overly worried about keeping the level of “quality” (prose, continuity, that sort of thing) consistent, at the expense of the “fuck it, let’s do this” attitude which historically has been necessary to get my plots moving fast and my characters expressing themselves fully.  This is always a balancing act.  I’m always proud of each AN chapter after I’ve written it, in a way I wasn’t always proud of chapters in the earlier books, but aiming for that pride may be limiting.

Last update to Almost Nowhere was roughly 3 weeks ago.  I have the next chapter planned out thoroughly and all that remains is sitting down and writing it, but it’s been harder to write lately, for approximately two reasons:

1. I haven’t been sleeping as well as I’d like lately (this has been a problem for all of 2018) and usually when I do any serious fiction writing I end up staying up late, either because I’m still writing in the late evening, or because it’s hard to wind down from the excitement built up while writing; the sleep problem is bad enough that if I’m aware of a habit that keeps me up late, I feel like I ought to avoid it, even if that habit is “writing.”
   
2. I’ve been assigned a new, more open-ended project at work and the creative side of my mind seems to have latched onto it to the exclusion of AN.

I think #2 should be easily surmountable – I’m already trying to force myself to not think about the work project on weekends, which I expect will help me sustain productivity and creativity on it beyond the short term, and also I wrote my earlier novels in grad school where my research was competing with them in a similar way, so there’s a proof-of-concept there.

#1 is more concerning.  I think I’ll try to do some writing in the morning and early afternoon tomorrow if I feel up to it, and impose a hard cutoff time for how late I can keep writing.  This does mean that the writing will go less quickly overall, and I expect that even if I can settle on a sustainable and nonzero update rate (which is the goal), it’ll be considerably slower than my rate earlier this year.

I started reading that ebook I made of Almost Nowhere, to test out how it looked, and ended up re-reading all ten chapters, and guys, I’m really proud of this book so far!!!!

I finally got off my butt and re-figured-out how to fix the EPUB/MOBI files that AO3 auto-generates, so that they don’t have weird margins, too much space between paragraphs, broken images, etc.

So now I have ebooks of Almost Nowhere that I’m satisfied with – EPUB here, MOBI (for Kindle) here.  Unfortunately, I still don’t have an automatic process for updating these as I post new chapters (and putting one in place would be a lot of work), so I’ll have to manually update them, and I’ll probably forget.  But they’re up-to-date now.

Since I wanted to link this in the story summary on AO3, I figured I ought to replace the placeholder summary I had in there.  So there’s a summary now:

A young woman locked in a tower, with almost no one to talk to – besides her numerous other selves. A house under perpetual moonlight, where two men wait. A school where teenagers learn magic, and no one has any fun at all. An alien invasion. Levitating spheres of rainbow slime. The unexpected moral dimensions of bilateral symmetry. And so on.

You can see this all on AO3 of course, although AO3 is coincidentally having some site issues right now so you may get a redirected to a broken link with the word “unicorn” in it.

nostalgebraist:

Chapter 10 of Almost Nowhere is up here

Morning reblog

Chapter 10 of Almost Nowhere is up here

There will (almost surely) be no new Almost Nowhere chapter tonight – I’ve been feeling kinda depressed all afternoon and evening (same thing that’s been coming and going all winter), which makes it impossible to write.

I really really don’t want to fall off the wagon of frequent updates (or frequent by my standards, anyway), so I’ll try to write whenever I can in the coming week  and see what happens.  (“When I can” is pretty constrained on weekdays, though.)