A milestone reached

Just finished one of the fiddliest parts of a new chapter: the "previous-chapters" summary.

You're probably thinking: huh? What's the big deal? But in fact, these are fairly difficult to do, and I sometimes wish I'd never started. The problem is that, in the plain-text version of the story, these segments are fully-justified text; and the justification is done, not by adding extra space between words, but by actually wording the text so that the lines naturally all come out the same length.

It takes hours.

I did the first summary with chapter four, I think. (I went back and added summaries to chapters two and three later.) As I was writing it, I noticed that—by complete coincidence— the first few lines happened to have the same length. I thought it'd be fun to write the whole summary that way. I was a dolt.

As more chapters were finished, I kept doing the same thing. By chapter 10, I was up to 35 lines—nearly 400 words—of hand-justified text; and it was getting longer every chapter. To try and keep it to a manageable length, I was having to rewrite the whole damn thing every time. Come chapter 11, I'd had enough, and replaced the overall plot summary with a brief overview of the last few chapters. Much shorter and easier.

Well. Anyway. Chapter 12's summary has been just a stub for all this time, and today I finally worked up the determination to do something about it. Thank goodness that's over with…

15654 words, and counting.

New art posted!

Two terrific new pictures by Genevieve D.—one of Itsuko, and one of Miyo. Thanks, Genevieve!

I've also redesigned the fan-art page, so each artist now has his or her own "block". I think it looks rather better now—let me know if you disagree!

It should, I hope, go without saying that further fan art submissions are most welcome. (Hint.)

In terms of writing progress…It's been slow, the last week or so. (I've had some very interrupted weekends, which are usually my main writing time.) Current word count is 15198.

Where it's at

Haven't posted here in a while; sorry. For the record:

Progress continuing nicely. The chapter is now standing at 14300 words (around 83K). I'm buried in the middle of a Dhiti scene at present; and as with most Dhiti scenes, she keeps on talking and bouncing from subject to subject and refusing to get to the points I actually want to cover.

Oh, well. ^_^

Things weren't flowing right and I though for a while that I really was going to have to dump the Crystal Tokyo flashback scene, but I've managed to save it, at least for now. Things are getting fraught again.

A couple of characters from the original series have unexpectedly reappeared. Not sure how much of a difference they're going to make. I kind of like their being there, though.