And that's all there is to say at this time, except that I apologize for the colossal gap and I really did think it had only been like, three days, and I'm not sure what happened there.

I can think of one thing that might have affected it: It becomes clear that this issue of Sleeper Squad is a race against the clock. Work began at the beginning of August, it needs to be done by the end of August, August has thirty-one days, and this story has twenty-seven scenes. Some of them are quite short (there's one that's only one row -- that is, a quarter of a page) and some of them are pretty long (anything two or more pages is "long").

At the moment -- at 8:19 pm US Eastern time on the fifteenth of August as I type this -- I have spent pretty much the entire day catching up on unwritten dialogue and I can say, with some pleasure, that I am fully caught up. That is, every scene which is rendered and laid out has its dialogue completed. That would be all the way through scene 16.

But this means that I am only one day ahead of the calendar. That is, it's the fifteenth and I've done sixteen scenes. This is a real problem. I do not want to be working on the final scene of the story on the twenty-seventh. And yet, given the amount of time I've had to devote to All Activities Other Than Working On Story so far this month, and the fact that some of the longest and most involved scenes are yet to come, I do not have high hopes.

So, anyway, that's what I've been doing any time I could scrape time away from All Activities Other Than.

I don't charge for my work because even if I did the pittance thus obtained would not support me in the modest lifestyle to which I have become accustomed (and would not, for example, help pay for what will likely be sixty-plus-thousand dollars of home renovation, starting Any Minute Now). But I admit I do sometimes dream of being just independently wealthy enough that I could just not have a day job. I'd still have all kinds of other demands on my time (it's called Life), but it would definitely free up a fair bit of space in the queue.