Yeah I haven’t written a full update for Shengzhang in like 6 months, but all the while there was hundreds of hours spent on researching, revisiting, recharacterizing. Not because I was planning on abandoning the story but because I realized I wanted to make it better. From an outside perspective it looks like the story is ‘dead,’ or at least it looked that way until I uploaded the post about it 2 days ago for polling. In reality there was a lot of work being done behind the scenes.
I actually had a talk with my therapist about this, the perception of not making a public update meaning that you didn’t do ‘work.’ I don’t know if other authors struggle with this but if so just know that work is work, effort is effort, even if it doesn’t turn into literal “word count” world building and research is just as important as the actual writing going into the story itself, if not moreso.