Posting the story on the 23rd of December may have made sense at the time, but between the holidays that followed, several bouts of illness, and family matters, I suddenly found myself without a story reserve. In hindsight, I could have planned things better.
However, I'm not discouraged. Life tosses us curveballs. I just need to get better at juggling all of my responsibilities while captaining this ship! There! I mangled three metaphors together. You have no idea how immensely satisfied I feel at this moment having successfully done that.
Seriously, the story ran into a problem. I had become bogged down in details. It was as if I had created a new genre: Hardcore IT tech fiction! Our hero Sharp encountered a body in the server room. Can he decipher the routing tables and trace the IP of the killer before the cops pin the murder on him‽
As interesting as that might seem, writing about routing tables wasn't exactly what I signed up for. I mean, I understand them, as well as the benefits of static versus dynamic IP handling, or the need for manual IP configurations for individual devices. Doesn't everybody? However, I wanted Sharp to be trapped next to a dimensional doorway, bickering with an interdimensional hottie with horns, so I felt we were far afield of the real plot.
Also, I discovered that my character description sheets failed to prepare me for introducing half a dozen new characters in chapter four with disparate feelings towards our main character. The scope was so much larger than I had planned. To give the characters justice, since they'd be recurring throughout the book, I needed to be judicious in how I introduced them. The trick was to establish the setting and the characters while moving things along at a good clip.
The other issue that I ran into was feedback from Gray and our editor. Suddenly discussions and rewrites took up time as my writing was scrutinized by modern workplace standards. I tried to raise a timid hand, "Um, hello? I'm writing a satirical comedy where the main character is trapped in a room with an anthropomorphic cow and a portal to another world," but they were very, very fixated on workplace standards. Fortunately, their individual workplace traumas added a nice touch of realism to those scenes, but was it too much realism? After I rewrote those scenes, Gray was relieved that Syd wouldn't be escorted out by security as happens to him all the time. I suppose writing Syd as a villain wouldn't be a good idea if it meant our villain got fired, ne?
Is he the villain? He certainly isn't very nice. I like his hair, though.
So now it's time for me to end this rambling mess and go work on the next episode. I hope that you are enjoying our story as it is serialized on Kindle Vella. I've decided to release each chapter as an ebook for wide release while we wrap up the story. With episode six, chapter one is soon coming to a close. You're going to love what comes next.
—Dash