Audio
Audio Summary
Okay, so I wanted to record this as an update for the novel progress Cereus & Limnic: Escape From Okinawa Type-B. It entered editing last month in March of 2026, but I wasn't really committed to it yet. I was still doing many other things and didn't work on it for several weeks. Most of March and April, I didn't really work on it, and I basically started regularly doing it a couple of days ago. Even for someone that's so disciplined, a project of such a massive scope as this is intimidating, especially when you lose the flow. I went from writing and working on it every day from September 2025 to February when I finished the manuscript, to wondering what to do next. Switching phases from drafting to editing creates friction, and it took me a good month to settle in and find a cadence.
I'm not going to spoil what I'm doing with this novel because it is pretty special what I'm doing. Readers are going to be surprised when they pick this up, and I want that "holy shit" reaction where they ask if I really went that far. I'm going hard with this one—probably harder than I have with any other novel before. I know the level of detail that I'm putting into this novel is going to be crazy.
So, I am 12,000 words into a roughly 224,000-word total manuscript. We're at about 5%, so it's slow. The size of the manuscript fluctuates because I'm adding things and cutting some things. As I was writing this, a lot of ideas came up to add to the mystery, drama, suspense, and meta-commentary, including stories within stories. After the first roughly 10,000 words, I finally reached a cadence to sitting down and working on this novel.
I was live streaming myself working on it, but watching somebody edit a manuscript or write fiction is not fun or interesting to me. It puts pressure on me to make it interesting, and commentating slows me down because there are a lot of little decision points. So, I stopped, but I am committed to doing more of these smaller updates, maybe every 10,000 words or so, which might equate to once a month.
I told myself this week to hit it at least 30 minutes a day first thing in the morning—just line by line reading, editing, and cutting. Unlike my previous novels that used a traditional formatting structure, this novel is going to be a very different format. I'm doing all of the editing in Google Docs, which is actually more suited to the novel format I'm going for, whereas Google Docs is usually a nightmare for traditional formatting.
If you have any experience as an investigator, working for the government, or in the military, I think you're going to find a lot you like here. Just the presentation alone will be pretty cool. I really don't want to get into the details of what I'm editing because there's a lot of surprise to it, and I want it to be untarnished by the internet or external analysis. I just want it to come from me and to execute my vision on the story. We're not trying to optimize for algorithms anymore; we're just writing, editing, formatting, and releasing. See you in the next update.
