Status Report - March 31, 2025

I’m writing a novel.

It’s a science fiction spy thriller, set in an alternate future where the Cold War never ended. The working title is Razor; I’ll talk more about the setting and story in my next post.

I’ve written three chapters or 98,000 words so far. Part One will likely be around five chapters or 150,000 words. The completed novel will be roughly around 300,000 to 400,000 words¹.

(That said, I am consistently bad at estimating word counts, so don’t take that as gospel.)

You can read the first three chapters here.

I’m starting work on Chapter Four today, and I’d like to invite you to accompany me on my journey to start from rough outline to final draft. You can see my initial outline here.

Painful experience has taught me not to make any promises about how long Chapter Four will take, but I’m hoping that it will go more smoothly now that a lot of the worldbuilding is done and the outline for Part One is complete.

This blog is intended to serve several purposes:

• Working with the garage door open: This refers to a popular idea in personal knowledge management world, which I learned about from Andy Matuschak. While I’m not particularly interested in “invites to cool exclusive events,” I would like to let people know: I am here, working.
• Accountability: I hope being public about my work will help to encourage consistent effort (that said, I’m not asking for messages about ‘where’s the next chapter,’ I believe this is discouraging and demotivating for most writers, regardless of the intent). I also hope that people are inspired by my diligence to pursue their own creative endeavors.
• Clarity: Since a novel consists largely of mental labor, it can be very easy to fall into loops or get sidetracked or fall into brambles. The blog should, hopefully, serve as a rubber duck that helps me untangle my thinking.
• Improvement: I’m always trying to improve my process and methods, and if someone can offer useful suggestions, then I’m eager to learn from them.
• Education: I love research, and I’d like to not only share what I’m working on, but also communicate with people who are experts on the topics I’m covering or suggest resources I might not be aware of.
• Dissent: In my own work, I’ve become increasingly skeptical of a lot of traditional writing advice, and believe that a lot of modern fiction suffers as a result.

I plan to share a status report every Monday, along with another post later in the week about writing, literature, literary theory, history, technology, artificial intelligence, and the world of Copernica.

I’ll also be making these posts available on Substack.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to get in touch here.

Let’s get started.

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