Sometimes when you wait for something, you have to put other things on hold.

That's kind of what happened since my last entry. May 1 didn't see the first words of The Departure Protocol. In fact, I haven't done any work on the project in over a week. 

As I shared in my last entry, I was in a bit of a holding pattern over whether I'd make it through to the next round in ONC. That would determine my next step. As you may know if you've been following the ONC process, the results for round two were a little later than expected and the deadline for submitting the final story was pushed to May 5th. Unfortunately, this left me a bit less time to finish the story than I had hoped for.

By the time I found out I had made it to the next round, I had eight days to write almost 10,000 words. I wasn't sure whether to go for it or not. 1,000 words a day? Double what I usually aim for? In the end, I decided to go for it.

Why? Because it's a story that I've been wanting to write and if I made it through to the third round, surely it deserved to be finished. I also wanted it off my shoulders so I could switch gears and focus 100% on this project.

Good news! As of Tuesday morning, the story is complete. All together, I managed almost 21,000 words on Hive Island - The Awakening. It's also has an open-ended conclusion, which allows me to get back to the story should the zombie bug bite again. But, for now, that's that. 

Hive Island is complete.

That means I'm back on this project. However, I'll be taking it slow the rest of the week, just to relax a bit. Getting up at 5am to write for several days in a row tends to wear on me so I need a bit of a reprieve.

The plan then, is as follows: I'm going to take another ten days or so and plan on starting to write on the 18th. Will that work out? Who knows. However, I'm at the stage now where I really need to get my writing going. At this rate, I figure that if I do a bit of writing every day, I'm already into August at this point, something I'd like to avoid.

As to when I'll start posting chapters, well, that's up in the air. I figure that let's see if I actually get my writing going on schedule first. I'd like to have a handful of chapters done before I start posting, so we'll see where we end up.

No posts before June, that is one thing I'm sure of.