~Corllengatu

If there's one thing I /should/ have learned by now, it's that I'm not capable of doing a "small one-off". Planning out a story almost always leads me to underestimate the length of the story I'm going to wind up writing, and therefore the amount of time it takes me to actually sit down and write the roughs for it. That's not even counting my revisionist tendencies, and penchant for throwing out or re-writing entire sections when they don't accomplish what I want. I /should/ have learned ... but I didn't.

A month ago, I thought I was looking at maybe a week's worth of work to finish what I have left of the Breakthroughs series (that "Coping Mechanism" was part I of) with the idea being that it would wind up being just slightly longer than Part I. I'd sit down, put the pen to the paper, edit it the next day, and call it a day. I even went so far as to tell people I might be able to start work on my projects for them later that week (yeah, I'm dumb).

Instead - in the wake of how popular Part I was after the level of love and detail I put into it - I scrapped what little I had written of Part II and started work on something undeniably better, but also considerably ... longer. With a set background for Sam already in place, my approach to the story changed - and it let me flesh out the ... experience a lot more. I've also deleted two more entire sections because they didn't accomplish what I wanted and I had a better approach. It's slow going - especially after I'd made it seem (to you guys and myself) like this would be a small project.

To give you some idea, after my writing session today, the entire Breakthroughs series clocks in at just over 10,000 words over 6 sections so far (longer than ANY-2, but still shorter than the entire ANY series), not counting the revisions and entire sections of text I've deleted - and I've still got a 'planned section' left to write, and who knows how long that'll stretch out.

So anyway, I just wanted to stop in and kinda give an explanation for why something that was 'right around the corner' isn't out yet. I'm still here, and I'm still working - this is just panning out to be one of /those/ projects, and I'll get it out when it's done.

Take it easy.
~Corllengatu