ckent45

Hi Wirecats, it's not a bother.  I'm very sorry to have left this sitting for so long.  I do plan to post more Please.., life has just continued to vex me.  Since you asked, I'll include some context, but by all means feel free to skip anything that's not interesting to you.  You can skip to the TLDR down below.  Up until the lockdowns I was making progress on Please.. but was moved from the job I was hired for to a project that was keeping me working most days from as early as 5:30 am (6:00 am was more common) to 11 pm (10:00 pm was more average).  I burned out hard on that schedule, especially when they told me I would be kept on the project (I hated the work) indefinitely.  I was offered another job at another company, took it and things were ok for a few weeks, then I went back to the same schedule, but this time with a massive amount of abuse.  I certainly wasn't the only one that caught that person's behavior, but it was rough working those kinds of hours with someone who was constantly demeaning me and I was doing it all in near complete isolation as we were all remote by that time.  Then in the middle of all of that, I had a massive falling out with my family that culminated in me being left standing on their door step on Christmas day while they ignored the door over me speaking up on behalf of my nephew regarding his treatment by his mother.  That whole saga actually dragged out nearly two years, but the short of it was I was persona non grata in my family for more than a year and a half until they needed my help clearing out my grandma's house (which my aunt was still living in) to sell it.  That saga also lasted several months as they meandered through the process of packing and moving everything and most of what I, my nephew and niece did was undone by my sister, who wanted it done differently, dragging the project out 6x as long as it should have taken.  My current job is better than the last two positions, but they aren't particularly good at respecting my time as I have ended up working late into the night on many occasions, but not nearly as much as in the prior two positions and at least this time they are nice to me (overall).  I poured myself into writing The Goddess Retreat as a way to cope with all of that drama along with other things, and it was very therapeutic, but also a ton of effort, and I did get a couple people who I know enjoyed the work, but by and large I put in over 1200 pages of writing with next to no feedback and that's left me very unmotivated and drained.  I've also seen my life not really recover from all that isolation, and that wreaks havoc on the mind after long enough.  Part of trying to get some human contact again has been getting involved in some local programs, but that's led to me getting a lot of extra responsibilities for the privilege of human contact.

TLDR: I'm having trouble getting the time, energy and motivation to get much writing in the last couple years.  I have Please.. written up to a point where the current arc is resolved and Erica finally manages to come to terms with the havoc she has wreaked and plays her part in trying to make amends to Lucas and others.  The arc where I am at in writing currently is dealing with the realignment after all of that drama before the two new antogonists appear.  One thing I would like to do is put in consolidated files with entire volumes of Please.. complete with table of contents because there are so many files.

Writing is a lot of work.  10 pages can take 3-4 times that many hours just to get typed out, let alone proofread and edited.  This is very much a project I want to see through, I'm just having difficulty, and I apologize for my lack of productivity.

Wow, thank you!  That's really nice feedback and I really appreciate it.  I really enjoy the whole concept of a GTS shrinking down, which I'm sure you gathered because Erica started out as quite tall in the story, but by the time I started leaning into Please.. I was a bit frustrated with the lack of content for half sized.  I've seen plenty of writers and artists focus on doll size and smaller, but the mini size was largely ignored, so I felt like I could really dive in and fill something for half size.  It also helps that Erica is obviously someone who has a lot of personal development to do, and that she could lead the other characters through immense development as well.  I've had plenty of ideas that would focus only on the process of shrinking, but Erica's tale is really special to me.  It's helped teach me how to write.