Mobius Update: July 2023

Hello readers, greetings from the 21st century! It’s July 2023, and time for another Mobius progress report.

This month, my goal was to increase my productivity and write 4 chapters. I did not write 4 chapters. I wrote 5! This brings the draft halfway to the finish line at 20 chapters out of 39.

An interesting thing has been happening lately. I’ll begin writing a scene and it will unfold in ways I did not expect. After a while, it naturally brings me to the next scene. It feels good! I’m playing in fantasy land, discovering the details and getting surprised by the characters. It feels like the worlds and characters are coming alive. This is what I’ve always imagined writing is supposed to be like. I can’t wait to go back to the early chapters next year and see them come to life!

I still had time in the month after I wrote my 5th chapter, so I took a break from the prose and wrote some appendices for Mobian technology. Given my physics background, it’s fun for me to not only put sci-fi technology in my world, but develop the science of how it works. I enjoy finding loopholes in Special Relativity to create faster-than-light methods without allowing time travel, and explaining my instant-communication particles without waving my hands and saying “it’s quantum.” I’m considering uploading the appendices to this site, but I think that would give the misconception that this book is on the technical side, rather than character-focused. From a branding standpoint, I think it would make more sense to release more chapters first, which likely won't happen until I start draft 2 next year.

The chapters I wrote this month were short, so it might be overambitious to aim for 5 again. I’ll aim for 4, and if I get more, it will be great. I’m deep in the thick of Act II and it’s exciting! My outline has become very strong, so I expect the rest of the draft to flow quickly and naturally. I’ll be back with another update in August!