I’ve made a little progress on Chapter 20 of TWH, but I need to pick up the pace if I want to make it to the finish line in time. Stay tuned.

I went a bit farther after finishing the update to finish Page 10 of the movie reviews. I’m almost at the halfway point. It’d be nice to have more time to focus on the site, but I’m juggling a lot and I just have to carve out what slices I can where I can. Stay tuned.

I added some movie reviews while I was doing some other stuff. I wanted to finish Page 10, but I didn’t quite pull it off. Still, progress is progress. No telling when I’ll get more done. Stay tuned.

Warning: The following contains spoilers for Welcome to the World: Return to the World.

I’ve commented before how my protagonists tend to be less and less good as people as I’ve progressed in my writing career. There’s a line I haven’t crossed until now, but that line gets crossed in RttW. Let’s be blunt about it. One of the first things the main character does when he returns to the World is rape a young woman. The natural question is, “Why would you do this?” It’s not for any prurient interests, not for myself and not for the audience. It’s not some gimmick to draw people in. If anything, it’s going to be almost impossible for me to garner any sympathy for Pawel. It’s not a gamble you want to take with your protagonist, so why risk it? Well, let’s talk about that.

One of my inspirations was Westworld. I was intrigued by the idea of people’s moral code breaking down in an environment where they can let go of their inhibitions with little or no consequences. Also, consider the sort of cruelty players can engage in when they play video games, or even the random, thoughtless acts of cruelty in real life you see from children (or older folks who never developed a functioning superego). I wanted to explore the psychology behind this in the WttW series. The World in the WttW series summons children between the ages of 10 and 12. Mentally and physically, they are not yet fully formed, putty in the hands of whatever force guides the Game. It is quickly established that Players are a different breed, essentially demigods. It doesn’t take much for power to go to your head and bad things follow when that happens. Mix in a cruel world that gives you little choice but to fight and kill to survive with odds quite heavily stacked against you and it’s a recipe for some very broken people who will perpetuate the cycle of abuse.

At this early point in the story, I’ve only begun to hint at Pawel’s own experience and the nature of the World. I’m not excusing him in the slightest, but he is a thoroughly damaged individual whose tenuous sense of restraint didn’t hold up when presented with a convenient outlet for a variety of pent-up frustrations. If it’s any comfort to the more delicate reader, there will be log-lasting consequences for this lapse. This only scratches the surface of the ugliness of the World, but I’m not here to fetishize that ugliness. I want to dig into how characters face that ugliness, when they’re strong and when they’re weak. Will I succeed in crafting a compelling narrative in the process? We’ll see.

Anyway, I’m not the one who decides whether or not this little experiment works out. That’s for you, the reader. I may well have to have another one of these chats before things are all said and done. Stay tuned.

While not making much in the way of progress, I was at least going through RttW and doing some editing from around Chapter 2 to Chapter 7. Regarding Chapter 2, here I am so close to the moment of truth and the temptation to chicken out is really strong, but I’m going to bite the bullet and go for it. I plan on having a little chat with the readers after I post it and we’ll see where things go from there. Sometimes I wonder if I’m too conscientious or not conscientious enough. One of life’s many questions. Anyway, I’ll be back in a bit for that chat. Stay tuned.

It doesn’t count for much, I suppose, but I did some genealogical work for PMGtK. It’s more than nothing, but not quite story progress. Can I turn things around? Maybe. Let’s find out. Stay tuned.

I did some more writing on PMGtK. I’ve got these big confrontation scenes in my head, but once I put the story into production, I’ll have a lot of connective tissue to make. Anyway, I do need to focus on RttW, so I’ll try to switch gears to that. Stay tuned.

You may recall me talking about a random project that I started developing but hadn’t really decided where I was going to place it. Well, for the time being, I’ve decided to place it in the Else Arc and I’ve given it the tentative title The Poor Man’s Guide to Kingmaking. I was making some edits to what I’ve written and the peripheral materials behind it. I was considering some adjustments to place it in the Aurean Empire of Merkab from Tzipi’s Garden, but I’m not doing that for the time being. The Else Arc affords me considerably more flexibility and I’m thinking about integrating a number of other ideas I have lying around while I’m at it. Nothing is definitive just yet. It’s not the progress on RttW that needs to be happening (not that I don’t have considerable lead time there), but it’s enough to at least warrant a mention. We’ll see what follows. Stay tuned.

Because I accidentally overshot one of the reviews in the backlog, I ended up posting more than originally intended, so a bonus for the reader. I then restored a few of the older movie reviews. Perhaps if I was willing to sacrifice sleep, I would’ve gone ahead and finished the current page, but adult priorities and all that. I don’t know what things will settle down so that I can focus on making progress, but I’ll have to see what I can do when I can do it. Stay tuned.

I made a little more progress on Chapter 24 of EM3. Under quota again, but I’m thankful just to be making any progress after the recent dry spell. I’ll be switching over to RttW next. We’ll see what progress I can make amid everything else. Stay tuned.