‪A love-hate letter to my brain.‬

‪We’re supposed to be working on the 2nd draft of Mars’ Rich Livery, which we know were it goes. Yes, we’re at the transition point where we grumbled & cursed last time, and yes, it’s still being a pain in our asses.

We both get that. You not wanting to write the fiddly transition point is not actually helping our shared reality that you mediate. So let’s just get it done so we can stop having to do it, and be better for having done it.

I know you want to write the new stuff. It’s exciting, we like these characters, we know that we’ve got people interested in the further performance we can accomplish with these characters. I agree, we have something really interesting in these specific characters.

Thus, though you delight me with your inventiveness, I am rather exasperated with you, Brain, because you kept cranking words last night, in the universe we’re not supposed to be playing in right now. 6500 of them.

Thanks, great. And hey, good start. I wasn’t actually planning for some of that for another 3-5 chapters, but... yeah, doing some of that early is going to help. But let’s not get them bogged down in their emotional lives, because they all need to WORK THE PROBLEM.

Let’s NOT forget what that problem is, and why THESE people are going to be working it. Because if it wasn’t for the PROBLEM, we could have a lot of other people addressing the Cimenarum Housing Crisis.

And let’s remember that we’ve got to keep a reasonable schedule. I’m 100% fine with cranking two chapters a day, but this time, we’re not doing 8000 word chapters. The goal is 2500 per chapter, up to 4000.

We’re not staying up late. It’s bad for us, and bad for Spouse.

I like writing Galantier, too! It’s comfortable and we know it well and I know we’ve had all sorts of ideas over the past year for this series. And I’m as much an outward oriented praise monkey as you are. I am equally aware that people are reading Galantier and want more.

But. They’re gonna love Sophia and Will, and Michael and George and Caro, too. They just haven’t met them yet, and they can’t meet any of them until we GET PAST THE TRANSITION POINT and work the problem.

I love you brain, but let’s work on the cooperative skill set some more. Because just doing what you want often means we abandon manuscripts. And that sucks because we like what we write.

We have cool ideas, and yeah I still wanna fix the Buffy As Mythos in Post-Apoc world. When we introduced the light warriors, we were ON TO SOMETHING. But you get so... distracted.

I love you, but I need you to focus, because we also have priorities. We need to finish the basement. Because we want to move all our work-spaces upstairs. And move all of spouse’s downstairs, so our dialogue stop irritating Spouse, and Spouse stops feeling like any movement will break our thoughts.

So I know you wanna be all up in the Ministry of Women & Children and the Cimenarum housing crisis and the deep mechanics of how to make a guild for sex workers work, but we have priorities. We gotta get the post-Napoleonic wars back on track.

And get all the stuff out, so the drywall guy can get in.