September 2023 Update
Drafting of MK2 is actually going pretty steadily. I’ve been plugging away consistently at it a bit every day and I’m currently up to 15k words, which I estimate puts me at about halfway through the first act. I’m loving how this story is shaping up—a lot of really interesting material I was planning on revealing later is coming out now. It makes sense for the story, although we’ll see how I feel about when I get to those later chapters when I was planning on revealing it!
One thing that is different this time around for drafting is that I am continuously updating a timeline excel spreadsheet I pioneered for myself in MK1 and I’m updating the series bible as I go. This slows down the drafting process but makes the writing easier. A lot of the world rules and structures are already set in MK1 and spelled out in the series bible, so I have to do a lot less making things up on the fly and just draw on the rich world that already exists. These are important behind-the-scenes structural components to keeping a sprawling space opera manageable but it’s always more fun to decorate the cake (drafting) than bake the actual cakes (all this bookkeeping).
On the MS front, it became clear over the summer things were deteriorating with my leg and my fatigue levels in general so I went to the neurologist and was officially diagnosed with MS and I’m starting on disease modifying therapy (Ocrevus) in a few weeks. Nervous, of course—potential for a lot of infusion reactions and side effects, but it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. The first infusion is 6 hours long, so rest assured, I will be bringing my laptop to chip away at MK2–looking forward to a bit of forced productivity on the novel. But it won’t all be work, I’m planning on buying a Nintendo Switch to play Breath of the Wild which has been on my radar but never got around to.