Today's Second Update

It's finished.  I just kept writing, most of today.  Chapter 16 is done.

It's not posted yet.  First I need to re-read it and do, well, probably quite a lot of editing. It would be nice to have somebody else look at it, too, but all my beta readers (or "pre-readers" as we used to call them) have been out of contact for many years. (Chapter 15 was eventually posted without beta reading.) I'll do some thinking about that.

(If you'd like to be a beta reader, and I mean if you genuinely think you can add value to a story through commentary, then drop me a line. By email, not by a comment on this blog post. Comments with offers to be beta readers will be rejected. If you have to ask what my email address is, you probably shouldn't be a beta reader.)

Final first-draft word count: 34,394 words.

On to chapter 17…

Today's Update

I've made a few typo corrections to some of the early chapters: removing unwanted spaces from the middle of phrases like "dark- brown hair".

The prelude has been updated to correct the inconsistency I mentioned in my previous post.

And I've updated appendices 1 and 4, adding a new name to the Who’s Who. It's for a character who first appears by name in chapter 16, so this is a tiny bit premature…but as spoilers go it's pretty negligible.

As regards progress on Chapter 16…I'm so, so close to the end now. A tiny bit of wrap-up work left to do on the big battle scene (in which I have finally written the climax of a plot-line that's been building literally since chapter one), and one more short scene after that.

Progress update: 32,226 words.

But wait, there's more. Last Wednesday night, I had quite a vivid dream of a scene from Chapter 17, a story development that I've been planning for quite a while, but which—in my dream—didn't go anything like I'd been expecting. But I love it so much that I started writing it. So, long story short, there's about 1600 words of Chapter 17 written now, too. Spoiler hint: Sailor Uranus goes on a spirit-journey to the planet Uranus, and meets the ruler of that world. Why? She's looking for the Space Sword.

As part of researching this bit, I had a long dialog with ChatGPT, trying to decide on a title that Uranus should use to address the ruler of Uranus.  We came up with 蒼穹大王陛下—Sōkyū Daiō Heika, Great King of the Firmament. (I didn't just take the AI's word for it, I've also discussed this with a native Japanese speaker, who saw no problem with it.) If you're a Japanese speaker, and see any problems, do let me know!