Been a while with no word, I know.

So, after I finished up the last chapter of NOC, I wanted to get down into the weeds and start revising/editing the entire thing, working on it towards the end goal of making it into a big ol' novel of some kind. I quickly ran out of steam with that, finding the task daunting, intimidating. The process of writing it was arduous, taking me roughly a year and the end result is something I have faith in conceptually but not in execution.

I had some discussions with a friend who'd been helping me along, concerning how to proceed. Different angles to tackle, ways to present the story, what to cut, what to add, all that. As it stands, I still don't know. Truth be told I feel rather adrift with the whole project. In my head it's this dramatic saga with nuances and messages existing in a rich world that I could talk at length about, a whole society with tons of interconnected dynamics and relationships, but what I've laid down is just a sequence of text blobs on a furry site that got very little attention, and holding onto that silly little dream of it being what I feel like it can be and deserves to be is proving more and more difficult.

On the other side, that story exists in the same universe as the other project I've been saying I want to work on since November of 2019, and one I farted a few chapters out for back then. That in and of itself is a reboot of a behemoth project I wrote from roughly 2012 through 2015 before it petered out and was left unfinished. That has all these intertwining arcs and characters I fell in love with where I also feel it deserves a proper retelling, and just like the above, every time I sit down to work on it, I feel like that picture of the teeny excavator scratching at the dirt near the grounded ship in the Suez Canal.

Meanwhile, I've become involved with a project that a friend of mine is working on, a rather serious one no less, that's not set to be released for about a year and is having some roadblocks of its own. I'm greatly enjoying it, but it does take up a good chunk of energy that's pulling me away from putting time into my own. Then, on top of all that, my work has gotten more hectic to the point that I have only a small sliver of day that I can devote to these endeavours.

I wasn't sure how to lay this all out there (nor how many people would actually read it), but I figure I should explain why I basically vanished after that last chapter was posted, and hopefully explain where things are going now. I'm not done, I just am at a crossroads and having a struggle with taking the next steps. Hopefully that will change soon.

Thank you, those of you who've been sticking around all this time.

Donut