Here's another update.

Progress on the book is getting glacial, which I guess is what usually happens towards the end of a huge project like this. In my previous update 39 days ago I was at 81,575 words. This time I'm at 93,562 words. There were weeks where I completed 10,000 words, and so I'm not moving nearly as fast as I'd like to.

I am doing a lot of revisions, which means that I'm sometimes rewriting scenes, and then removing the original versions of the scenes. So I've probably done significantly more than 12,000~ words, but that doesn't show up in the word count.

Anyways, the ninth chapter is almost done. There are only two chapters after that, and both of them have been heavily outlined. There are still a few things I need to think about, but nothing dramatic. Nothing that will substantially change the ending of the book.

There are still a handful of scenes scattered throughout the book that need to be rewritten, or they don't exist beyond a placeholder sentence. There are maybe five or six of those, and so that's less than a chapter's worth of work.

There's more editing that needs to be done, and that will be tiring, but I don't think it's going to be as bad as I had been imagining it would be. I've made very extensive notes about what I'd like to change, and I don't see there being any huge surprises.

If I have some kind of revelation that would require me rewriting a significant chunk of the book while re-reading it from start to finish, I think I'm just going to let it go, because I need to move onto working on something else.

That being said, I'm not going to fumble things out of apathy at the finish line. That's a big part of why this last chunk of the book is taking so long; I don't want to half-ass it.

I'm at a crossroads with the short stories that are going to be included with the novel. I'm feeling 50/50 about releasing the book without two of the short stories being finished, and then releasing an updated PDF with the completed stories later.

I think it would be unacceptable to release the novel proper in an incomplete form. I don't want people to read the book with scenes that I know I'm going to revise, with chunks that I know I didn't labor over enough.

But I think I can live with people reading the finished novel and then circling back later to download the updated PDF with the missing short stories.

This book needs to be out in the world. Not because I think it's going to be some kind of paradigm-shifting event, but because I want to start marketing the book and hopefully make some money off of it. I want to see people recommending it to their friends on bluesky, which feels optimistic, but it would be nice.

I can see the novel proper being finished by the middle of July. Completing the accompanying short stories will take another month, most likely. I have a ton of notes completed for both of the short stories. One of them I know the beginning and ending, but the middle needs a lot of fleshing out. The other, there are a lot of ambiguities I still need to figure out relating to the ending. I think it will be a lot of fun to dive into those after removing the pressure of finishing the larger novel first.

I don't know how many people are waiting for this book. Almost four hundred people have downloaded Sloppy Seconds. How many of those people have actually read Sloppy Seconds? Engagement means a lot, and if you like someone's work you should say something about it. Because a major obstacle while writing Sloane Lone has been the thought that I'm writing it for an audience that doesn't exist.

These updates are getting increasingly granular and gratuitous. The book should be finished soon, roughly when I said it would be finished - mid August. I'm still basically on schedule, even if I'm not working as fast as I'd like. I guess when you have low expectations for your work ethic you manage to deliver on time.