1300 words yesterday, 1000 the day before.
Box of Trouble is at 82K words in, all major plot points resolved, details filling in as I work.
1000 may not seem like much for a daily goal, especially to the authors who follow me, but my process is heavily front-loaded. By the time a section makes it out of outlines and summaries into literal words, it's pretty much done.
For those of you who are following, you know this has been a struggle. Progress is slow, and Sara's battle with cancer takes priority.
Here, on X, I write angry. Anger has a purpose. It armors us against injustice, makes us willing to work, to fight, to act instead of bearing what should not be borne.
But the engine that powers Orbital Space isn't fury. It is enthusiasm, and it is joy, and most of all, it is hope.
This may seem an odd thing to say about a series that starts so thoroughly mired down in the grubby crawlspaces of the human soul, but it does not dwell there with smug, cynical self-satisfaction, and it has no intent to stay.
Sometimes for a light to be visible, you have to take it into dark places.
But enthusiasm, joy, and hope are difficult to feel while sitting in a hospital. No one is enthusiastic about hospitals, they are not places for joy, and the best hope they can contain is the hope that you might walk out with all the parts and processes you had before you needed to be there.
They can be very dark places indeed.
The good writing days happen out of the hospital, when the sickness recedes a bit, and I am can think of other things.
The funny thing about cancer is that while it strives to murder you, it doesn't actually make you very sick at all, not until you are very close to death indeed.
No, what makes you sick is the things we do to kill cancer before it kills us. ( A fact we would all be advised to remember after the upcoming election.)
So the bad days are the treatment days, and the autoimmune storm that follows, sometimes with life-threatening viciousness and might.
On those days all I can do is hold on. No one feels like a hero during a fight. You feel overmatched. You just do what you're trained to do, and try to make it out the other side.
It's only later that someone has the luxury of saying "That thing you did while you were scared shitless? That clumsy, improvised, stupid thing that worked? That was heroic."
For now, I just have to hold fast, take care of Sara, and seize on the days between treatments, the recover-from-the-brink-of-death days, to try to move the ball forward, every play straight up the middle, three yards and a cloud of dust.
But while I do, I'm going to keep spilling these updates here, unorganized stream of consciousness or not.
Because authors are human. We can can bleed. So the work isn't always done when it was supposed to be. But if we are not fat cowards, we can be honest.
Repeatedly.
So everyone knows what's going on.