Three Dollar Quill

I've got a conlang concept that I've been batting around for years, which attempts to use aspect, case, and word order to drastically cut down on the number of verbs in use; although it favors stative verbs over adjectives, so it's maybe kind of a wash in numerical terms. This is the language that I was trying to develop when I was doing Conlang Year, but I got distracted by coding linguistic evolution stuff, and by the question of, sure this con-culture I came up with is interesting, but does it make sense for them to be speaking this language?

My attempt at addressing this was to start fresh, not have a con-culture (since my first attempt spiraled into a worldbuilding project that ended up getting distracted from the culture that was supposed to be speaking the language), and forgo linguistic evolution, in favor of deriving roots like I'm making a terrible auxlang, which is a well-documented process.

I right now have a spreadsheet with a bunch of roots in it, and, separately, a bunch of documentation. Today, I started trying to bring them together into a single document, and didn't get too far.

My "new" approach is hitting a few difficulties that I need to deal with or ignore:

• I came up with a fancy phonology and phonotactics that I can't really use. I either need to practice this stuff pretty thoroughly, or cut it down a bunch; maybe both.
• Relatedly, I have no guarantee that the way I'm currently slapping roots together adequately covers the phonological space.
• More fundamentally, today I was doing stuff like coming up with a stem for "darkness", then concluding that I should actually have a stative verb for "to be dark" and use the established nominalization suffix. So, I'd like some kind of guiding principle I can refer to for this project, of "how should I break a concept down into stems?" This may end up pushing things more in the direction of a philosophical language, which is fine with me, even though I admit that philosophical languages never "work out", per se.

I thought I was going to come up with something to cap this off, but I'm just tired.

Good night.