It was over a year ago now that I told my family and friends about this idea that I had. The publishing industry was in trouble, I said, and so I'm gonna take the novel that I was starting and serialize it weekly on my website. I wrote and finished the first two chapters and, on February 4th, released the first few pages on my site.

In my head, I had always imagine that A Kind of Drug would finish out around 300 pages. That would make each of the 12 chapters that I mapped out for th novel about 25 pages each; a pretty reasonable length. But then, something happened.....

The book started getting longer. Much longer. As of this moment in time, AKOD is about 250 pages long and only halfway finished. I have been obsessing over this book for a year now. Working on it constantly. I even sit on the subway with printed pages and a red pen in my hand to do line edits. This book has become my existence. Which I'm not complainging about. But....

I did get exhausted. I decided I needed a short break before I lost what little was left of my sanity. And so, AKOD is taking a short break for the rest of 2011. It will be back in 2012 to complete the second half of the strange story that has really ran away with itself. And don't worry. This isn't some half-ass scheme where I say it'll be back in January, but maybe in won't. I already have 10 pages finished of Chapter 7 and plan on getting 5 to 10 more pages written tomorrow. 

In the meantime, because I don't want to this site to become a tomb while AKOD's on a break, I'm gonna post some other stories to keep you all entertained. Some back catalog material that I never originally put on my site, for one reason or another. I hope it will keep you all entertained until Words return on January 6th.

So, I hope you enjoy Despair VIII as the world finally crumbles. I sincerely hope you stick around till next year when things really start getting crazy. Because if you've read this much, so far, you're really gonna love what happens next.

Ta for now. See you all again soon.

At the end of Chapter 3, when I posted the "Behind the Scenes" pieces, I talked about how writing can sometimes be very frustrating. That you find yourself working against yourself on a relatively frequent basis. That you are "punching yourself in the face".

Well, that sort of happened again here.

Only a week or two ago, I was looking over the chapter and realized that while I hadn't screwed up Delirium as bad as I screwed up Hilarity, I did have the tone and pacing all wrong. This means I am now in the process of re-writing most of the chapter while simultaneously trying to conceptualize and write Chapter 6 - Despair.

Punching. Myself. In the face.

So, please, bear with me these next few weeks. I might be even less sane than normal.

Because life happens, Chapter 3: Part 1 will not be posted today, as the normal schedule would've required. I was running very behind in terms of chapter progress and there are three reasons for that:

1) I got terribly sick for about a week or so
2) My brother was in town from LA
3) I scrapped two halfway completed versions of the chapter which wasted about 20+ pages of material

Add all that up, and it's about a month worth of writing time lost. I'm actually still scrambling to try and get myself caught back up. Especially since the trip I'm making to Argentina next month probably won't exactly help my production schedule either. Ah, cest la vie. See everyone next week.