I've always been fascinated by language. I remember when I learned that Tolkien had created his languages from scratch, and I thought, "That's really neat! There's no way I could ever do that!" Still, etymology continued to fascinate me.
I've created vocabulary before. Words for things. Slang. I got maybe 3 chapters into Marooned before realizing that this would not be feasible. I found a product that would generate a language for me, but it's rather imperfect. Some of what it gives me is in IPA - the phoenetic alphabet. Some words just don't exist. Some slang translated stupidly. I have found that sometime I have to spend way longer translating things because I have to go back to the etymology of what I want to translate, and then work my way forward using roots.
Karthok has grammatical rules that are consistent, and I do try to follow them. Nounification of a verb, or verbification of a noun have rules, and the suffixes are given in IPA rather than letters. For longer conversations, it's easier to italicize the English, and give clues for the reader to infer that it's being spoken in Karthok, but written in English to simplify reading. There are situations where the characters need to speak a different language in front of others.
Work continues on book 2. I'll begin publishing when it's done, but will likely release only a few chapters at a time. I'm kind of OCD, and I dislike releasing things before they're perfect...but it'll never be perfect. I need to fight with myself to accept "good enough". I don't want to have to go back and rewrite chapters I've already published.
Marooned began as a needed break from another story that I was (and still am) stuck on. The idea was to write a short story that I could complete: Man gets stuck on a planet, meets an alien babe, bangs her, and they are finally able to leave together and live happily ever after, blah, blah, blah. Of course, the characters took on a life of their own and made things more complicated than that. It took me three years to get the story done, and I refused to publish until it was complete. I've read enough abandoned works on this site to know how much I hate it. So when I finally got the ending done, I slapped an epilogue on it and published: the story had met my criteria for completion (they leave the planet) and was ready to be released into the world.
I didn't want to put effort into any kind of continuation if nobody read, or liked it. Which doesn't seem to be the case, so now I have to write more. Again, I don't control the characters and what they do, I just write up the incident reports. Luke and Thivkari continue to live in my head, so this doesn't seem to be too much of a problem. The problem arises from when the characters get themselves stuck, and I have to unstick them. I have to go back and rewrite pieces to fix a problem four chapters later. I have to remove inconsistencies.
The other contention is my ADD. Right now, I'm focused on writing. Next month? I could be obsessed with video games. Or a TV show. There were six month breaks when I wrote nothing on this story.
So, where's the sequel? I'm about three chapters in. I have an idea of where the sequel is going...but I always know where it ends, in somewhat fuzzy terms. I read somewhere that if you have a beginning and an end to a story, the middle will just fall into place. I can tell you that this is a load of horseshit. The middle is the hard bit. A story isn't a journey from point A to point C via point B: it goes from point A, to point B, then wanders over to point C, and moves to point D, etc. It goes from point A to point Z. It's all the points in between that are problematic. I expect to get stuck around E.
I am hesitant to publish chapters from the sequel for fear that it will jinx me and the sequel will never get completed. I can do this as a serial, but if I do, I can promise that there will be periods of many months between updates.
My other story, Ugly Duckling, is twenty chapters and some ninety-five thousand words after six years of work, and is nowhere near done. I hope that someday I'll finish it. Maybe, when I reach the end of the current arc, I'll slap a Book One label on it, and upload it.