I am having very strong sensations of Marathon Butt with this story.

I have five scenes left to render, but two of those are Big Scenes and one of those Big Scenes is only very sparingly plotted. I did mostly catch up unwritten dialogue today -- all but one scene I've laid out -- but that one scene is also a Big Scene and its dialogue is going to take a while.

It is about to be the twentieth of April. I have several actual work things to do tomorrow and a doctor's appointment.

I'm sure it'll be fine, but oof. When I first began doing the longer stories, I figured one of them took about two weeks. Then I bumped that mental estimate up to three. Now for some of them, it isn't safe to allocate less than a month.

The stories haven't gotten all that much longer -- I do have some page creep, but Sleeper Squad has been pretty steady on "twenty-three to twenty-seven pages" for a while, and the other kinds of stories tend to be under twenty pages. The renders haven't started taking longer.

What has changed, I think, is that, particularly with Sleeper Squad, my plots have gotten bigger, as I try to cram a lot of things into an issue, and that means more scene changes and more care -- and ultimately, more time.

The irony is that if I did a Sleeper Squad every two weeks, I'd feel less need to do as much story maintenance as I do, and they'd be shorter as well. But then I'd be doing nothing but Sleeper Squad at all times and I don't want to do that. One every other month, the current schedule, feels about right, but that means there's always a lot of backstory waiting to be tended.

(And at least one reader who wants all the backstory to be tended in every issue, which is simply not mathematically possible.)