The following chapters have been done at Tanaver.
Part I
Chapter I: A Day in the Life
Part I, Part II
Chapter II: This Darkest Sea
Part I, Part II
Chapter III: Conversation over Lunch **New**
Part I, Part II
Chapter IV: City in Heaven **New**
Part I, Part II
The current wordcount is around 13200. One of the things I definitely decided on early was to make ordinary spaceflight to be long and tedious, and I have succeeded. Here we have two transitional chapters with nothing happening; very difficult to write. Chapter II, I think, is particularly weak; it had to be written over a series of very busy days and shows it. I am also behind two days, i.e., one chapter or somewhere between 3000 and 4000 words, because of Election Day: I had no time, having had office hours, logic tests to grade, an election to vote in, and a meeting to attend. That was one exhausting Tuesday. And by Wednesday evening I was exhausted. Normally Mondays and Wednesdays are my long days; I wouldn't have expected a Tuesday to be the first to set me back. And I have been unable since then to catch up. I'm hoping to make up the difference this week at some point. With extraordinary luck I might even make it all the way through Part I this week; but I am not banking on it. This November may be quieter than most, but November really is the busiest month of my year.
I had been thinking that for a 'special feature' I would talk a bit about Samar philosophy, but I think I will actually save that for next time, and this time just say something about how much of all this was thought out beforehand. I've had the general storyline for quite some time. The Samar, while background characters, provide key structural elements, and there are certain important characters who ground everything else in the story. But most of what is actually written is as new to me as to anyone else; it's all very, very first draft. This includes most of the background. I had deliberately done very little preparation here; I started throwing together a few Sylven poems about a week before this whole thing began so that I wouldn't get mired in the very first chapter, but doing any serious preparation without actually writing major parts of the story itself wouldn't really have been possible, and I wanted to keep actual writing as much in NaNoWriMo as possible. There are certainly less exhausting ways to write, but it seemed more in keeping with the spirit of things. It really is all thrown together, albeit with some rhyme and reason.
The Sylven poetry, of course, is based on Finnish and Estonian models, although here and there I stray west to Scandinavia or the Faroe Islands or south to Hungary. There are reasons for this, but they should come out over time in the story itself. Since it's all supposed to be in translation, anyway, I settled on primarily nonasyllabic formats to give it a distinctive feel.
