Alright, I’ve finally finished the first draft of A Matter of Faith, and good mother of god is it rough. I wrote the climax of the story fairly well, I think, but I struggled with writing the connecting scenes, and it took me too long to realise what wasn’t working. Second draft should fix it up, though. Clanless is about halfway through beta-reading, and should be ready for final revision soon. All in all, slow progress this week.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’m going to Japan soon, so I’m gonna talk about that a little bit. I’m heading out on the 14^th of August and coming back on the 28^th, doing some general wandering around from city to city. I don’t imagine I’m gonna be doing much writing abroad, so there’s going to be a two- or three-week gap in updates over here. Given that this will be my first trip to another country, I fully expect the experience to be overwhelming, so I might not get back into writing for a bit after I return.

I am starting to wonder whether the “post per week” thing is actually working for me, because what keeps happening is that Friday rolls around, I realise I haven’t written my blog post, and I hastily scribble one together for Monday. Maybe I’d be able to write it earlier if I wasn’t working on so many bloody side-projects, but I don’t really want to put those aside either. Perhaps these are just the jaws of adulthood finally closing in on me. It’s certainly taken long enough.

In other news, I’ve started watching Amphibia. It’s a Disney cartoon that’s cut from the same mould as Gravity Falls and The Owl House, the style of “show that’s supposedly aimed for kids, but it is actually written for teens”. It ended about three years ago and hasn’t been in popular discourse for ages, so of course now’s the perfect time to discover it for myself and see what all the fuss was about. It’s pretty good. The pacing is like the writers trying to build a bonfire by placing each individual twig one by one on top of a flickering ember, but the writing is strong and the animation is appealing, and that’s really all you can ask for. I might post thoughts later on, after I’ve watched more of it.

That’s all for now, however! I’ll see you all next week, where I’ll … write something halfway interesting, I’m sure.