Having to work a fair chunk of Saturday, it felt like I didn’t have any time at all, but after doing the update, I had the burning desire to have at least have accomplished something, so I did some writing on Chapter 20 of TWH. From here, I need to switch gears over to EM3 so I can have next weekend’s update ready (but before that, I still have a review post to make). With work-work, the new season’s viewing, the previous seasons’ backlog, reconstruction efforts on the site, story progress and more, time management is going to be critical in the foreseeable future. No promise on how well I’ll strike the balance. We’ll see what I can do. Stay tuned.

I finally got around to doing some story writing and got Chapter 19 of TWH pretty well done and ready to go for the weekend update. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it in an earlier post, but I’ve got the remaining chapters plotted out and it’s just a matter of getting them written. I’ll see what I can do on that front. Stay tuned.

I didn’t do any work on the website, so I might as well talk a bit about what I did instead. You may recall that I mentioned doing some reworking of the House Wulf family tree. Of course, if I did it for one of the Eight Stars, I’d have to do it for the others, and some were a lot more effort than others. I was just kinda picking at it until I just went in full-bore and devoted a whole day’s efforts to it.

One of my dictionaries, one with encyclopedic material, included a section on the etymology of names and that was my first reference when it came to naming characters. I would go on to transcribe by hand a dedicated dictionary of names and compile numerous other sources as well. That being said, when I was first naming characters, I was only looking at the meaning of the name. I wasn’t thinking about the heritage of the character, whether the name was anachronistic or not, etc. I’ve gone through one or two passes of revisions over the years, but amid the reconstruction efforts (and my earlier campaign of proofing my manuscripts), I started thinking about these things even harder and working to amend incongruencies where I found them. While doing this, I was also painting a clearer history of the families. For instance, House Wulf was originally based in Gotland before moving to Skadia and later Titan (then to Gladius and ultimately back to Gotland). Despite the heirs of House Wulf ultimately becoming more Northman than Gotlander, they nevertheless maintain an old Germanic naming convention. Claudius is actually the first exception (which shows that Randwulf regarded his queen more than family tradition).

Anyway, it’s been a lot of work and the results are going to reverberate throughout the Gladius Cycle. Instead of making piecemeal changes here and there, I’ll just wait to fully implement the changes when it comes time to proof the manuscripts. Fun, fun, fun, but before that, I should get back to work on the site. I imagine other detours will crop up amid the slog of plugging in the remaining 1926 reviews, so I’ll be sure to comment then. Stay tuned.

I did pretty well for myself today. I got through KoG2 and 3, T3W and KniTwi, as well as adding a fair number of teasers. From here, I can focus on the remaining Cross Arc stories and any other odds and ends and that should wrap up the Stories section of the site. I should be able to get all that done by the time the weekend’s out. From there, I can start getting the reviews back up, and once all the content is restored, I can start fighting with Drupal so I can get things looking the way I want. By my estimates, it’ll probably take another two weeks. We’ll tentatively set our goal at being fully functional by Easter. Now it’s back to work for me. Stay tuned.

P.S. While working on T3W, I did get sidetracked a bit doing some renaming of characters for greater consistency. Ended up renaming about half of Randwulf’s family tree, and that’s just for starters. I still have the other seven of the Eight Stars to go, but I’ll save that for another time, and maybe explain things in a Commentary post.

You didn’t expect to see one of these, did you? I wouldn’t have either, but as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve had a burst of inspiration recently while proctoring finals and I’ve figured out my plan for the next four chapters of TWH. As all my proctoring and grading are done and I was left with two more days in the workweek, I considered bringing my laptop to the office so I could continue my work on the site. However, due to the time required for the file transfers for updating Drupal, I opted to leave my laptop behind to finish that while I was off at work. (You’ll hear more about that in my next Road to Reconstruction post.) So, instead of reconstructing pages on the site, I used my time to write on Chapter 19 of TWH. A different sort of productive use of my time, but a welcome one. It may be a little too optimistic, but if there are no other major disturbances in the near future, I might even be ready for a story update by next weekend. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Well, let’s see what I can do. Stay tuned.

I did a little proofing on Tico1. Not much because there was something about a graduation ceremony that folks were making a big deal about. I would later go on to implement the edits to JJ2 and TWH. I’ll work on the Space Arc stuff I’ve done tomorrow. Not exactly thrilling content, I know, but maybe I’ll do a little actual writing as well. Stay tuned.

I finished going over TWH and at least managed to work out a general game plan going forward (albeit with no actual story progress), then I went through proofing the Space Arc shorts and went on to Tico1. While story progress on TWH would be ideal, I am at least doing something productive. At the rate I’m going, we probably won’t have a story update this week and I’ll just move on to EM3 next week. I’d like to have something more interesting to report, but expect more of the same for the time being. Stay tuned.

I continued to proof TWH and I might’ve finished, but there were festivities of the day to attend to. In the evening, I started sweeping the Space Arc shorts, which will lead to me proofing them once I’m done with TWH. What about actually writing on TWH, you ask? Well, as soon as I figure out how to fill the gap between where we’ve left off and the final few chapters, I’ll get right on that. Will it be done in time for the weekend? Stranger things have happened, but I wouldn’t advise holding your breath. Stay tuned.

I finished my sweep of JJ2 and started in on TWH. I’m hoping that the reread will help open up the path I need to go forward. Perhaps I should’ve focused on that in the evening, but instead I found myself making adjustments to the tags in a lot of the entries here. There were some changes I’d made since the time of those posts and for archival purposes, I wanted to make sure they were properly accessible. For instance, both EM and JJ were originally written without plans for sequels, but now that sequels have been written, it would stand to reason to think of them as EM1 and JJ1, so I made a point to add tags for both. Also, it was interesting going back over the record of my progress 8, 9 years ago. Hard to believe it’s been so long. Also, as far as progress goes, some things never change. Anyway, I’m going to try brainstorming while doing further adventures with the spellchecker. 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.