New Year. New Draft.

And thus it begins.

No longer can I simply start and restart the book, scrap everything, and postpone. I am committing to finishing this book. I have no idea how long it will take, or even how many chapters I am aiming for. What I do know is I am now putting it out there into the world and even though not many will see it in the grand scheme of things, I feel like I have a duty to continue writing.

With that being said, I found writing something I actually care about to be a lot more methodical than my 9 previous entires. Don't misunderstand me. I enjoyed writing all of those short stories, but I wasn't writing them to tell a story. I was writing them to learn and develop. I didn't care how something was said, how it was set-up, what the ramifications of it would be, and how it would pay off down the road.

[For the uninitiated, please check out my first post from June 2020 on the Purpose of the Site.]

I started writing this morning by doing what I had previously done with my 9 Shorts: set a timer for 1 hour and start writing. When the timer goes off, I quickly wrapped things up.

Today, however, I started the 1-hour timer and found myself only about 300 words in when it expired. For reference, the entire prologue is roughly 800 words. That wasn't going to be good enough. I needed to finish the prologue. I knew where it was going and I knew that I needed to properly build to it.

I found myself sharing the stress that I was describing Ptolemy going through. Because of this, I kept pausing to go through the motions myself. At what point in the conversation would his aggressive mindset change? What would build his stress? What would relieve it? How would the two mystery men react? Would they behave differently or in similar ways?

The process was slow. Added to this was my wife's voice in the back of my head telling me to keep writing. "Stop going back and editing. Just finish it. You can edit it later. Done is better than perfect." This was probably the mental push that I needed to finish the prologue in the time that I did, but I also know there are imperfections that can be cleaned up.

But I'm going to listen to her and just leave them for now. [Note: that last sentence was more as a reminder for myself than it was for you]

Next is Chapter one. Also known as "The Opening Image." Time to start to build the world that Ptolemy lives in and set the stage for the story that I have to tell. Keep an eye out.