It barely counts, but I wrote a few lines on Chapter 6 of TSoA1. I don’t expect to accomplish much more as I remain wildly behind on my translation project. Gotta focus on what actually pays money over what doesn’t. Stay tuned.

I made more progress in Chapter 20 of CeleKing1, neatly making quota for the week. I also spent more time than I should’ve assigning positions to the noble houses of Erdi according to the Si Xiang. You know how House Suzuki was introduced as belonging to Baihu? Well, using the Zhongxin County of Tiandao Province as the center and making a second vertex at the intersection of the Prime Meridian and the Equator, I divvied up the map of Erdi into four parts and then assigned alignments to each of the noble houses based on where their territory fell. It was all sorts of fun for territories that were split across two or three divisions. If it was close to an even split, I’d have the count be assigned to one and the viscount to the other. Otherwise I’d just assign one or two baronies to the secondary alignment. As you know from the prologue of CeleKing1, your alignment determines the location of your house’s estate in the Capital. On the one hand, having your vassals in different sections can result in a weaker position but it also gives you access to more of the Capital. Of course, keeping the noble houses on edge and always looking for new and exciting ways to plot against each other is entirely according to plan.

Anyway, I’ve got to be switching over to TSoA1. I expect plenty more genealogy in my future, but I’m way behind on my translation project and really need to buckle down. We’ll see what I can get accomplished this week. Stay tuned.

I finished Chapter 19 of CeleKing1 and started in on Chapter 20. I’ve got a translation project that I really need to be paying more attention to, so I don’t expect any leaps and bounds before the switchover, but I’ll at least make a point to make quota. Stay tuned.

I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten myself caught up as far as the quota is concerned, getting really close to the end of Chapter 19 of CeleKing1. I have at most two or three paragraphs to go, which means I’ll be moving on to Chapter 20 before it’s time to switch over. Stay tuned.

I made more progress on Chapter 19 of CeleKing1, but I still have about a day’s worth of progress to make up. I should get there, though. Things are moving along, but finishing this chapter may be the extent of my progress this week. It’s a fairly long chapter, so I don’t mind too much. Stay tuned.

I managed to meet my daily quota working on Chapter 19 of CeleKing1, but I wasn’t able to make up for the past two days’ shortfall. That’s still on the menu. To be honest, I was a bit stuck on how to proceed, but now that I’ve got things going, they should move along just fine. I recently came up with a new twist in the story, so that’ll be fun. Stay tuned.

I don’t believe Mab was part of the original prototype for the story, but when I revised the concept, she was added in to be a counterbalance to Corona on Zephyr’s side. (This makes her a “rook” character in the series’ chess conceit.) My primary influences for the character and scenario were Gargoyles, the 1998 TV mini-series Merlin and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I would imagine Mab’s role as the primary antagonist in Merlin inspired me to use her over Titania. I’m more liable to associate Titania with the role of Oberon’s Queen, but I realized there was no reason not to have both, which served as an excellent source of conflict. While neither Oberon nor Mab were strictly monogamous prior, Oberon never elevated any of his flings to equal standing with Mab. That’s the main thing that sticks in her craw. It also doesn’t help that she had grown complacent in their marriage and stopped going out of her way specifically to please her husband, something Titania (at the point we’re introduced to her, at least) is very adept at. Now, Oberon is a terrible person, short-tempered, faithless and cruel, but there aren’t many Fae in the upper echelons of their society that embody many virtues we recognize. Think of decadent aristocracy at its most detached and you get a decent feel for Oberon’s court. While I’d like to think Mab elicits some sympathy, it should be noted that she’s not that admirable of a character. It’s just that she’s on the receiving end of the kind of cruelty she would regularly dish out herself and is never fully cured of her haughtiness and vindictiveness.

Now let’s dive right into the likely controversy that may be sparked around her section of the story. Let’s make no bones about it. Rowland raped her and there’s no excusing it. I wanted Rowland to sire Puck via Mab and I envisioned her trying to seduce him in a ploy to be free of her chains, and that ploy failing because, honestly, Rowland isn’t dumb enough to release an extremely dangerous High Faerie who has repeatedly expressed her intention to kill him just so he can have a supposedly transcendental sexual encounter. I found myself stuck, though, as I realized that this would destroy just about any sympathy Rowland might have as a character. (He’s got plenty of bad points, but it’s not like he’s without redeeming value.) This led me to come up with the idea of the madness that took hold of Mab, both a natural side-effect of her imprisonment and also a metaphysical thing due to the Fae’s reliance on the natural spirits to sustain them. (Things like cut stone and wood lose their vital essence, for instance, making human settlements basically dead zones for the Fae.) This drove her to desperation and I wanted to establish a certain closeness between her and Rowland that ends up being exploited. Yes, she did solicit him initially, but she didn’t consent under the circumstances that followed. I then wanted to have Rowland show indirect signs of guilt after the fact but I also thought Mab showing her utter contempt for him was important too. And, yes, in case you were wondering, all this was allowed to happen according to Oberon’s design. While Rowland deserves guilt for raping Mab, Oberon is vastly worse for orchestrating the circumstances for his wife to be enslaved and raped just to teach her a lesson. Yeah, he’s a real scumbag.

I did like contrasting Mab with Simona. Here you have two women in Rowland’s service, both far more long-lived and powerful to justify serving under him, one who despises him and the other who loves him to the point of fanaticism. In the end, though, it’s the one who hates him who bears him a son, even if he never knows the son in question. (Though as noted in the text, Rowland did regret never consummating his relationship with Simona after she was gone. It was purely for political concerns that he kept his hands off her and you might argue that his pent-up unresolved feelings for Simona got displaced onto Mab when she tried to seduce him.) For Rowland’s part, he cared for both of them in his own clumsy way. I’m sure you can sympathize with the poor mortal woman who found herself being stacked against those two.

I’m not entirely sure I did full justice to the character of Mab in the brief seven chapters I gave myself to work with, but it was an interesting effort all the same. Next time we’ll be looking at our final lead in TTWC3, the red warlord Akasame. Stay tuned.

Most of my writing time was spent on Mab’s character spotlight, which I’ll be posting after this. Once again, I did a little writing on Chapter 19 of CeleKing1, but still woefully under par. However, I should find myself a little more focused on writing for the next few weeks, so that’ll be good news for progress. Stay tuned.