Episode 1232: Steady On...

Have managed to incorporate half of the material left out of the revised version of the Prologue into Chapter 1, which brings my word count past 2500, i.e. I'm 25% done. The remainder is going into Chapter 2, which will require more substantial rewriting than Chapter 1 did, largely because there's just more story logic in it that needs fixing, which in turn looks like it's going to necessitate altering the focus of the chapter. In a nutshell, less conspiracy theory and more teenage angst. The conspiracy angle probably still has to be kept in order to fill my targeted chapter word count (approximately 1500), as well as advance the plot further in preparation for when the two main characters meet in the next two chapters. (Yeah, narrating in the first person means I can get double mileage out of a plot point like that.) With any luck, that will bring me all the way up to my required word count of 8000 for the story proper, and then I can start on my commentary, which should be a breeze because this time, I'm not really going to pretend there was any sort of serious academic reason behind the writing. Usually, I do have specific ideas I'm trying to work out in my portfolios, and if there aren't, I try to retroactively come up with something, but this time, I'm just going to go with something more relaxed and literally dwell on all the difficulties I encountered in actually writing the story and how I had to painstakingly revise it to work through these problems. Plus it's just cool to write a science fiction story, even if it's not very rigorous science fiction.