So the funny, it goes like this.
I have written the last line. Sometimes I will write the first line and the last line and this helps. In this case, it did not help, because while I had specific markers and a beginning and an ending, the tricky bit with this story was all the low-action-points in between. However, I have written what in my head I tend to call The Conversation of Denouement, and I have written a sort of gentle-easing-off-into-a-sequel... thing. I have now completed sixteen chapters (of which at least ten will have to be, if not completely re-written, then at least extensively tweaked, but this is not as taxing as re-writing, especially as I have an eight-page document of notes about Political things That Must Be Mentioned, People Who Must Appear Briefly For The Purposes Of Future Worldbuilding, Timeline Issues Which Must Be More Obviously Established For The Sake Of Readers Who Are Not Actually Inside My head), and have written the first third of the seventeenth, the second and fifth fifths of the eighteenth, possibly the first quarter of the nineteenth, and the very beginning and very end of the twentieth. I have plotted out, in detail, all the missing bits. You pretty much don't care, of course - I mention it mainly for my own reference.
But. My brain. Do you know what my brain has had me doing, since yesterday afternoon? It has had me retconning Plato; researching historical floods in or around 360 BC; e-mailing my mother regarding the descendant line of the MacLeods running from Norse invaders and the Isle of Mann and when they are supposed to have taken Dunvegan in relation to clan myth (clan myth being one of her hobbies); attempting to reconstruct a rudimentary and occupational form of Italo-Celtic (under the assumption that such a thing cohesively existed); attempting to set a date at which said language would have become practically extinct, and adding phylogenetic linguistics to the list of Things I Probably Shouldn't Google While On Break At Work (I have this list because it tends to make me lost total track of the space-time continuum... also on the list is Harry Potter book release countdown clocks, among other things.).
And this morning, I spent fifteen minutes writing a verbal startup routine in a modernised form of Italo-Celtic (I need to come up with a different name for this) as it would be used to reboot a six-thousand-year-old computer. It's ten lines long and liberally (and inelegantly) mixes Latin and Scots Gaelic words, and thank all the gods I still have a functional knowledge of Gaelic grammar, or it would look even sillier. I will of course have to discard the entire thing and start from scratch, should I ever use it, so pardon me while I *headdesk*.
The truly ridiculous thing, though, is that these things are not actually a departure from my task. They're kind of a departure from the immediate task of writing StP, but after consideration I've determined, with some slight horror, that the Paxverse has now become so complicated in my head that I can go off on tangents on the order of thousands of years and still be technically working on the project, without actually doing anything useful, if that makes any sense.
Send help. o.O
P.S. I'm about a hundred pages from the end of Lioness Rampant and I... er... don't like it anymore. Don't anyone kill me. *hides*
P.P.S. I'm writing an essay! On second thought maybe you should kill me. *hides again*
But. My brain. Do you know what my brain has had me doing, since yesterday afternoon? It has had me retconning Plato; researching historical floods in or around 360 BC; e-mailing my mother regarding the descendant line of the MacLeods running from Norse invaders and the Isle of Mann and when they are supposed to have taken Dunvegan in relation to clan myth (clan myth being one of her hobbies); attempting to reconstruct a rudimentary and occupational form of Italo-Celtic (under the assumption that such a thing cohesively existed); attempting to set a date at which said language would have become practically extinct, and adding phylogenetic linguistics to the list of Things I Probably Shouldn't Google While On Break At Work (I have this list because it tends to make me lost total track of the space-time continuum... also on the list is Harry Potter book release countdown clocks, among other things.).
And this morning, I spent fifteen minutes writing a verbal startup routine in a modernised form of Italo-Celtic (I need to come up with a different name for this) as it would be used to reboot a six-thousand-year-old computer. It's ten lines long and liberally (and inelegantly) mixes Latin and Scots Gaelic words, and thank all the gods I still have a functional knowledge of Gaelic grammar, or it would look even sillier. I will of course have to discard the entire thing and start from scratch, should I ever use it, so pardon me while I *headdesk*.
The truly ridiculous thing, though, is that these things are not actually a departure from my task. They're kind of a departure from the immediate task of writing StP, but after consideration I've determined, with some slight horror, that the Paxverse has now become so complicated in my head that I can go off on tangents on the order of thousands of years and still be technically working on the project, without actually doing anything useful, if that makes any sense.
Send help. o.O
P.S. I'm about a hundred pages from the end of Lioness Rampant and I... er... don't like it anymore. Don't anyone kill me. *hides*
P.P.S. I'm writing an essay! On second thought maybe you should kill me. *hides again*