Day 464,
Morning thought: I’m actually awake before anyone’s come to get me, how about that? Chock it up to being excited about the equinox festival I suppose. Or nervous. Both I guess, but moreso the former.
Well, at any rate, I’ve had time to eat a spot of breakfast and review my notes for tonight’s telling. I should probably head out and meet up with Lin and Maiko.
Back in the library. Brought lunch with us. Or rather, I loaned Lin the key to take Maiko back and while Vernon and I picked up food to bring to them. While Maiko’s mostly gotten used to the Village crowds, the extra influx of everyone from the outskirts for the festival was getting to be a bit much for her. And if I’m being honest, I welcome the reprieve as well.
If Lin’s disappointed that she wasn’t able to get Maiko to dance with her following the ritual of the false shades, she’s doing a good job of not showing it. She mentioned the other day that she had been looking forward to that, but she was also the first to pick up on the fact that having nearly the entire Village’s population crammed into the market forum was making Maiko anxious. She was actually the one to suggest coming back here. Why here and not the lighthouse I don’t know. Then again, the library’s been a sanctuary for all of us at some point or another.
Maybe they’ll get that dance later this evening in some more secluded courtyard.
And there goes Vernon. Says he’s got mediator duties to get back to but he’ll try to catch us again later.
As for Cass, she ran into Xia earlier in the day and I’ve not seen the two of them since. It was… interesting meeting her former(?) best friend, but I’m glad to see them apparently patching things up. I only hope for her sake that no old wounds get reopened in the process.
The evening ceremonies will be starting soon. I’m nervous, as usual (is three enough of a sample size for “as usual” to apply?), but Vernon’s reassurances have helped. Such nerves are the price of dropping pretenses of “remembering” and choosing to truly write tonight’s tale from scratch, I suppose.
Okay, enough of that. I’ve got this. I’ve practiced plenty of times for everyone and made appropriate adjustments. I can do this. I’ll be fine great.
It’s been a long night, but a good one.
Ayyy, glad we are getting at least some updates to this. I do have to ask, how did you manage getting out a chapter a day for over a year?
Happy to hear that someone's still interested. There will be about a dozen or so of these epilogue entries over the course of the next year or so, although some will be multiple months apart.
And to answer your question: By cutting back on other hobbies, and sleep, and exercise. Also, the few times that I sort of planned things in advance were in response to IRL things I knew were coming up; the biggest example being the "children's fever" arc of the Archivist in which there were a few weeks in a row of short entries coinciding with a period of time where I was anticipating not having much time to write. But mostly I kept the schedule simply by making a habit of it and treating it more like an extended solo roleplay than "writing a story" (and it may have gotten a little bit semi-compulsive at points). The big reason I stopped at the (approximately) one year mark instead of keeping it up indefinitely was that I was getting very burned out, physically, mentally, and emotionally (the last month or two of updates were *rough*), but there was also the secondary reason that by that point it was starting to feel uncannily like I was living a second life and it was dawning on me that that might not be healthy if it kept going. Effective for constantly coming up with things to write day after day, but maybe not so great for IRL functionality.