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.