[progress] end of month check-in (Jan.)

So far…

• ~190,000 words (including code), still on chapter 8’s first divergent path
• The story is now unwieldy to work with using a single document (it was over 600 pages), so I decide to start chapter 8 in a new file and try out illume proofing format to do the approximate combined word count: 85,436. That should be a more accurate number for the actual story content.