I've run out of chapters I had backlogged and it's a bad feeling. Last night was worse though, cause I stayed up till 5AM to grind out a chapter I'm only marginally happy with - even now I'm tempted to go back and do some heavy revision - and then went to work today. So I'm taking a week off to regain my backlog of unposted chapters, having them really helps my writing process - makes it easier to line the story up the way I want it lined up within the framework of the larger plot. Just writing a chapter, doing a quick and dirty proofreading / editing session, and then posting it does not feel good at all to me - feels like publishing a first draft or something.
So why have I run out of backlog? Partly because of writer's block, but mostly because the wordcounts on my chapters have been creeping up (until I almost worry they're too long - but hopefully that isn't an issue) to the point that it takes a large amount of my avalible free time to write them. When I started on this project, I was aiming for 2k words a chapter - mostly to just see if I could sit down and consistently produce 2k words in a sitting - and now my chapter lengths are double that or more, as often as not. With the amount of time I have to spend on this, 6k words a week is easy - very doable - 12k words, 15k, or 20k, not so much. Maybe still doable, but much harder for me.
On top of that, I've made the story rather difficult for myself to write - by using first person present tense throughout. Writing entirely in first person is easy, writing something good that people might want to read in first person is much harder. I could complain about it at length but let's just say that building a large world well with a largely apathetic POV character is a challenege without relying overly on alternate POV chapters all the time (which I try to avoid, I know how annoying it is to constantly switch away from the main character in a story). It's the main cause of my "writer's block", not not knowing what happens next, just not knowing how to communicate it to the reader believably from the first person POV.
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
So where am I going from here? Well, I could cut back on chapter length - but I don't really want to, I said my chapters sometimes seem too long to me but at the same time they always seem too short, I always feel I could have said more. I might go to bi-weekly uploads but again I really don't want to - I enjoy being able to upload frequently and get feedback from all of you. Probably I'll just try to spend less time on video games to make up the time to be able to keep my schedule going forward. Speaking of that, I might try to rearrange my upload days to make it easier on me, I still haven't decided on that though - if you have strong feelings on what days I should upload on feel free to let me know in the comments.
So yea, that was a lot of words to say I won't be uploading for the next week - sorry guys! See you in a week~