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.