Schedule Slippage
Entry posted by Auserv: Toa-Kal of Emotion
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If you read What If?, you've probably noticed that my update schedule is grievously slipping. While I promise weekly updates, it's been more like monthly updates. This is because I bit off more than I could chew and started What If? during the summer, thinking I could keep up a chapter a week. As soon as I went back to school the September after the book started (I'm homeschooled, as I've mentioned before in this blog, but I'm taking classes at the local community college), it slowed down. By December the semester was over and I sped up a bit, but now the next semester has begun. In addition, I've recently been having a series of minor family crises, along with extracurricular things, and of course, sometimes even when I can be writing, I'm too stressed or uninspired to put any words on the page. I try not to force myself to write if I'm not feeling up to it, because I've noticed that when I didn't feel like writing at the time I wrote some scene, it's evident in the bland narration and dialogue and lack of anything interesting happening.
Still, Book 7 is a 20-chapter book like most of the others in the series, and it started in late July, so it should have been finished by the start of December. It's inexcusable to only be on Chapter Fourteen when the book started 37 weeks ago. It's already gotten to the point where I will have to delay the start of Book 8. And like I mentioned in my last blog entry, I want the series to be finished by the end of next year. As of this writing, there are 90 weeks until the end of next year, and 60 of them must be used on Book 8, 9 and 10. The remaining 30 are obviously for the intermissions between books. Normally I give myself 8 weeks between books, so if we assume 8 weeks between Book 8 and 9 and 8 weeks between Book 9 and 10, that means I have 14 weeks to work with before I start Book 8. I could safely drag Book 7 out to mid-July and still finish on time. Obviously, I don't want to do that.
However, expecting myself to write the remaining 6 chapters in 6 weeks is too much right now. Being realistic, I expect it to take at least 10 weeks. During school, it can take me almost 3 weeks to write a chapter (obviously depending on the length of the chapter, which varies from around 3000-8000 words), but when I'm off school I can occasionally manage one chapter a week. I seriously doubt that the rest of the book will take more than 14 weeks, especially considering there are only 5 weeks left in the semester, but if it does, I will simply have to shorten the other intermissions. Either way, there will be no intermission between Book 7 and 8. Because of these severe delays, Book 8 will start after Book 7 with no more than a single week of a break. This is well enough, because Book 8 picks up directly after Book 7 ends (I obviously haven't written Book 7's epilogue yet, but depending on if I can make it work as an ending, Book 8's first chapter might literally begin only seconds after the ending of Book 7).
This segues into the next part of my plan: writing ahead. When I started this series, I was updating three times a week. This was because I had written all of Book 1 before I began to post it. If I had done this with subsequent books, we might be seeing nearly year-long breaks between books. Because the books were so short at first (Book 1 was only about 70,000 words - for comparison, Book 7 had hit that mark by Chapter Eleven), I decided I would write them as I posted them. With Book 2, it worked out okay - I stayed ahead of my update schedule until almost the end. As I got more busy though, that became increasingly difficult and with Book 7 I was practically behind the update schedule before the end of the first month of the book.
To mitigate this effect, I'm writing Book 8 before I even finish Book 7. I'm already behind my intended schedule (I wanted to be finished Chapter 5 by now, but I'm only on Chapter 3), but since this is my final year of high school and I shouldn't have a very busy summer, I am hopeful (though not at all making any guarantees) to finish writing Book 8 by September, when I will start college full-time (as opposed to part-time as it is now). Whenever it finishes being posted really depends on when I finish Book 7, but I'm more concerned about staying ahead of my update schedule than I am about the update schedule itself.
It may seem counter-intuitive to be writing two books at the same time. Wouldn't that just make both of them go more slowly? Yes, really, it does, but I've already basically given up on finishing Book 7 with any amount of regularity to my update schedule by now. Please just bear with me until I finish Book 7. As long as I finish it within the next 14 weeks, I'm still on schedule. I am really hoping to finish it before then, so I can have Book 8 written by the end of summer, but I can only write as fast as my circumstances will allow.
By no means have I given up on the series - I will finish it out as long as I'm physically able to do so. Whether I will finish it by the end of 2012, and whether I will manage to provide any regularity to my updates from here on out, I can only make promises, but with this much work put into it, my own death (or losing my arms or something like that 
) is all that's going to stop me from finishing.
Again, I'm really sorry that I've been unable to hold to my promises regarding the update schedule. I've always prided myself on having a story where you could count on there being an update, even if it might be a few days late - not like the multitude of excellent fan fiction I've read only to find that the author has given up or isn't serious about updating regularly. But I've fallen into that myself now. Serves me right to make such steep promises, I suppose. But rest assured, any readers I still have - I am still here, still writing, and doing the best I can to keep putting out updates.
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