First, my apologies. Between work at the shop, a trip to the company, and taking my child to his grandmother's this afternoon, I've only just got back. So I have to take today off.
Since having a child, whenever I'm home, I have to go to him the moment he stirs. My writing speed has dropped a lot. And because he's so young, sometimes we have to take him out, which takes a whole mobilization and leaves no room for carelessness. It's seriously cut into my writing time. Things should get better when he's older.
Also, I'd already planned to slow down and take a day or two to sort out the next volume.
But what I mainly want to talk about today is this volume.
In both structure and content, this volume didn't turn out as originally planned.
Structurally, each chapter title in this volume was meant to be a line from a poem. When I made the outline, I had already planned out the content of every chapter. But during this volume, things were busy around my wife's due date. Our child arrived over a week late and had a slight illness after birth, which took up a great deal of my energy. As a result, many chapters fell short of my original targets and plans in both length and content.
At the same time, as the story developed while I was writing, I added and cut quite a bit. Many chapter titles ended up only loosely fitting their contents. And because I was limited by the number of lines in the poem, I had to simplify or cut much of what I'd wanted to write to keep the volume complete. By the end, I was even forced to move the volume's conclusion forward.
Because of that, I