February Update

In the development plan I posted late last year, I made the educated guess that I would be finished Act 3 sometime around July or August.

It is currently the middle of February, and I am almost finished Act 2. At this rate, I may even finish the interlude that follows the end of Act 3 by the beginning of June.

A lot of this has to do with the new medication I’ve been taking for the past two months. For a long time, I really did believe that my inability to focus on almost any task was a normal thing which everyone dealt with and that this was really all just a lack of discipline on my part. I didn’t really consider that it might have had something to do with the chemical state of my brain until relatively recently – and it’s only been even more recently still that I’ve seriously considered getting a professional assessment and a prescription to manage it.

But now that I have, the results have been nothing short of phenomenal. Throughout my entire writing career, I’ve been stuck at a sustainable rate of about 40-50 000 words (counting code) a month. If I were really pushing myself, I might be able to manage 75-80 000 words, although I’d be more or less in a state of mental exhaustion after that.

I’ve written 80 000 words (not counting code) in the past two weeks – and this is accounting for the fact that I’ve spent two of those fourteen days solely on outlining and plotting. It used to be that 4000 words a day was the upper limit of what I was capable of in a 24 hour period. I’m now beginning to consider 4000 words to be a “slow day”.

I am genuinely not sure what my limits are right now, and sometimes I feel like I’m still testing them. I can only imagine how much I’ll be able to get done in the long-term, once I find those limits and become comfortable with them.

And yes, I will be making lamb chops tonight.

If you want to support the project – and get access to the development Discord and the playtest versions, take a look at the separate Patreon for Shadow of the Eagles here.

In the meantime, my first Patreon is still going strong. This month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea, Adventurer’s Guide to the Fledgling Realms, and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding, are now up, thanks to its supporters.