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.

I continued my adventures with the spellchecker with particular focus on RttW and TWH. Speaking of the latter, I plan on doing a proof sweep like what I’ve been doing with all the Cross Arc stories, which I’m hoping will get me in the right headspace moving forward. Stay tuned.

I didn’t make any story progress, but I did do a fair bit of work in the peripheral materials for the WttW series. It’s got me thinking about ditching the old forum on the site and replacing it with a wiki. It would go a long way toward making the extended content available to the audience. One thing among many to think about.

In other news, I’ve noticed a long-standing issue where the site’s CSS wasn’t being parsed by Chrome. It wasn’t until I was looking into the site’s SSL that I discovered that I needed to add a separate reference to the HTTPS link, and now that that’s done, the problem is solved. That being said, I still need to think about updating the overall code, maybe modernizing the design a bit. I definitely need to do something to make it more user-friendly on mobile. Things to do, things to do. Oh, yes, I also need to be switching gears to TWH. I’ll be honest with you, though. I’m a bit stuck on the upcoming chapter, so I’m not terribly confident I can get it together by the weekend, but we’ll see. Stay tuned.

Monday I was mostly busy with the review update, much as I’d be on a normal Sunday. Tuesday I still had that one as of yet untitled story on the mind. I’d brainstormed a few scenes, but I didn’t get much written due to a fuzzy someone’s interference. I managed to switch gears to RttW on Wednesday and write a bit on what should go in Chapter 9 or 10. I was also doing some peripheral work to flesh out some more of the game system.

Besides this, I was continuing my work going through EM2 and digging into EM3 as well. I won’t say there’s a massive amount of errors to be had but definitely more than enough for me to be glad I caught them. Periods where I was having to do things like transcribe handwritten work or use my tablet to write warrant a decent share of the blame for a lot of the typos, but since I’m my only editor, sometimes it takes time for me to come back to a manuscript with a fresh set of eyes to catch things I overlooked in the initial passes. Anyway, that’s enough for now. Work is keeping me hopping at the moment, but I have time opening up in other places that should mean good things for me making progress. Stay tuned.

I had to go to the office for a few hours and didn’t really have anything to do, so I was able to make some progress on Chapter 7 of RttW. I need to be switching over to TWH, though. Stay tuned.

Monday was another day of me making minimal progress on Chapter 22 of EM3 before conking out and yesterday would have been even worse, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t even get to making a simple post like this, but I actually did better than you might think, making some nice headway in Chapter 22 of EM3 while working on the outlines for the WttW series during my free time at work (enjoying it while it lasts, which isn’t long).

I believe I’ve mentioned before that my most recent projects have taught me that writing by the seat of my pants is terrible and a major contributor to all the delays we’ve seen in those projects. I want to avoid that in the future, so I want to go back to putting the proper planning back into the process. That can be a little tricky when I’m pushing myself to consistently release new content, but in the case of RttW, I already have a good headstart that affords me some time to get things sorted out. How well all this works remains to be seen, but if you want to achieve a goal, you’ve got to set it first. Stay tuned.