I made a little more progress on Daphne’s Chapter 4, but the main thing I did yesterday was resolve a problem with the Tellus Arc timeline that had been bugging me for a while now. You see, there’s a character who is born after the events of the Trident War Chronicles, but to fit in where I need him, I had to send him back in time. However, I don’t want to deal with all the attendant mess of time travel, so I decided to take the events of the Trident War and push them back ten years. This meant that not only the timeline and encyclopedia needed to be adjusted, but also the character database and dozens of other supplemental files. Some characters were pushed back to accommodate the shift and others were kept in place and became ten years younger. Obviously this doesn’t mean much for particularly long-lived species, but now Solon doesn’t reach quite as ripe of an old age (but 72 is still pretty impressive for the equivalent of the 5th Century AD), for instance.

You might be asking, “Why go to all this trouble for one event?” Well, the Tellus Arc timeline is synchronized to Earth’s history. The consequences would be much more far-reaching if I shifted the alignment with Earth, so all the work I did was the least I could do to resolve the splinter in my mind that is timey-wimey rubbish.

So, yeah, this is where my thoroughly detailed peripheral materials can work against me. Still, it’s better to have them than not.

Made more progress on Daphne’s Chapter 4. This one’s going to take a while to finish. Fortunately I have a good while before it’s scheduled to go up. I should be able to get it done before then. Stay tuned.

I mentioned before that I’d be doing a commentary piece following the release of Chapter 21 of Tico3. With the introduction of the Martian Militia back in Chapter 18, I really thought I should provide a little more detail. You get a little bit in the narrative of Chapter 21, but I wanted to take it a step farther.

The Earth Union has a number of paramilitary organizations. Most are the enforcement agencies of cabinet-level ministries, but there are a number of exceptions. Today we’re going to be talking about two similar organizations: the EDC and the Martian Militia. Though the Militia is more relevant to Tico3, we’ll start with the EDC.

The Earth Defense Corps was founded in the aftermath of the Lunar Revolt. Tensions between Earth and the Colonies were running high and reactionary elements agitated to form a secondary line of defense against a perceived Colonial threat. During the Sheol War, no small number of native Earthers refused to serve in the Colonies and the EDC was touted as a ‘true Earth army’. Because service in the EDC counted as an alternative federal service, it was a handy destination for Earthers looking to dodge the draft while still claiming they were soldiers.

The Martian Militia was formed essentially as a reaction to the reactionaries on Earth. Once Ricardo Banderas, a native Martian, became the first Colonial to be elected World Council Chairman, he authorized the formation of the Martian Militia. The concept was basically the same as the EDC, but there is a bit of a separatist undercurrent. It’s not really something that’ll be treated in any depth in Tico3, but it may come up elsewhere.

Naturally, the regular military doesn’t hold these paramilitaries in high regard and the feeling is mutual. Toss PMCs and local law enforcement into the mix and you can have some fraught joint operations. The Argyre Campaign has this in spades and I could almost write a full novel just on that. Maybe I’ll even go that far one day, but for now we just get some glimpses to paint the larger picture of the Battle of Mars.

I made some good progress on Daphne’s Chapter 4. This looks like it’ll be a fairly long one. Nothing to it but to do it, right?

A little more minor progress on Daphne’s Chapter 4 of TTWC1.

The bigger accomplishment for the day was giving shot-by-shot instructions to Kazuya for the animation project. What we’ll be able to show by the end of the year will pretty much amount to an animatic, but still it’s not a bad piece of work for one overburdened salaryman doing most of the heavy lifting.

I made a little progress on Daphne’s Chapter 4 of TTWC1. The main thing is that I figured how to get it started, which was really what was holding me back. I was having trouble deciding how to bridge this gap that was left after excising a certain chapter for the purpose of standardizing the length of each character’s section. I’ll probably turn that excised chapter into a short, but that’s a project for another day.

I did a little writing on Daphne’s Chapter 5 and epilogue. Ironically, I haven’t written anything on her Chapter 4 yet. I should probably focus on that, seeing as how its turn is coming up in three weeks.

Speaking of her Chapter 5, I’m mildly agonizing over how far I want it to go. While audacity can be a virtue in a writer, sometimes you can be more effective while showing restraint. It’s a bit of a dichotomy as I personally tend to be rather reserved in my own life but in my writing I often feel compelled to push the boundaries.

On a related note, I’ve been sitting on this Space Arc short for a while and I don’t know if I should publish it or not. I think I’ll run it by my beta reader and get her opinion. If she thinks it should be posted, then I’ll probably go ahead, though I intend to have a little sit-down with the audience here to talk about some things. Stay tuned.

I finished Chapter 22 of Tico3 and did some writing on Chapters 24 and 28. Why 24 and 28? Well, they’re directly connected. That’s why. Also, for some reason, I didn’t want to go back to Argyre right away.

Well, I found myself getting restless as I was trying to continue my work of going through T3W and instead hopped back on Tico3 and made some good progress on Chapter 22. One more push, I’d say, and it should be done. It would seem that I’m more eager to break new ground rather than retread the old. Given the sheer volume of stories I have yet to write, I suppose it’s little surprise.

I don’t know if this rightly qualifies as a WIP update, but if you consider all my projects to be WIPs until they reach publication, then I suppose it still fits. Anyway, I decided I wanted to go back though The Three Warriors. I’m looking to see if there’s a way I can boost it from its current 48K wordcount to a more publishable 75K or at least around 60K like KoG1. Then again, if I don’t actually exert any effort to pursue a print run, then it’s a moot point. My writing philosophy favors a piece being as long as it needs to be and so long as I’m not answerable to the publishing industry, I suppose my stance is tenable.

Speaking of pursuing publication, I’ve made one excuse after another over the years and now I just take the note in my schedule to work on queries each Saturday and kick that can down the road to next week. As much as I’d like to have the backing of a publisher to get my work out to readers and hopefully to start supporting myself by my writing, I really don’t want to deal with all the headaches associated with pursuing publication and what comes after if you actually make it that far. Who knows? Maybe in a couple years I’ll be in a position where I want to take a fresh crack at it. We’ll see.