I made some good progress on Chapter 13 of Tico4 and did a little work on Chapter 14 as well.

As you should know, rather than being centered on any one character, the Tico series relies on its ensemble cast to give you a wider view of the story. Scripting becomes a little difficult when you take all these charas who are the mains in their own little microcosms and put them together. You don’t want to weigh the performances too heavily in one direction or another, but also you have to deal with the relative perspectives of the active leads, which can be a little disconcerting when you’re used to a different perspective. For instance, if Matt is the active lead, Jeff isn’t Jeff but “Lieutenant Wallace” and for Jeff, Matt isn’t Matt but rather “Major Harold” (“Colonel Harold” now, technically).

When it comes to how I portray characters in their own sections, I often use their first names because I feel it makes them more relatable to the audience even though it doesn’t always fit for how some characters think of themselves. Someone like Miranda doesn’t actually think about herself using her first name, but particularly since I have two Grissons in the cast, it’s simpler this way. Someone like Commodore Frazier, on the other hand, I’d like to refer to as “Blake”, but I don’t feel we got close enough to him early on to warrant it and just stuck with the more formal label for consistency’s sake. Yes, I really do think this much about stuff like this.

That’s enough rambling for now. More to come. Stay tuned.

I pretty well finished Caligo’s Chapter 2 and epilogue in TTWC2 and did a bit of writing on his Chapters 4 and 5. What happened to Chapter 3, you ask? I’ll be getting to that.

I also did some more work on the peripheral materials for Student of Gladius. Adapting the Gladius Cycle to a Japanese high school AU is an interesting challenge to say the least. Some of the re-aging I’ve done to characters to make it all fit really wreaks havoc on the chronology.

In other news, I’m going to try to start having at least one commentary post per week in addition to the WIP updates. Later I may decide to increase the frequency to as many as three commentary posts per week, but we can take it slow for starters. Stay tuned.

When I finished Cronos’ section, I felt compelled to spend a little extra time discussing his character development, both on the page and behind the scenes. I feel like doing the same for Gamaliel. If I recall correctly, a prototypical version of Gamaliel existed from the earliest version of the story, but it wasn’t until TTWC came into its current form that he took up the role of antagonist to Solon and Xanthe, a role I expanded on significantly when the story was brought into production.

There was a time when portraying a corrupt cleric in fiction was edgy, but now the opposite is more of a surprise. There are basically two ways of characterizing the antagonistic cleric: the cynic and the zealot. The cynic has little if any real faith and merely uses religion as a tool to serve temporal ends. The zealot is a true believer whose fanaticism precludes whatever charity exists in the tenets of his religion. I was vacillating between these two options when I finally asked myself ¿Porqué no los dos? *cue trumpet rendition of “La Bamba”*

You see, Gamaliel is not simply a pious fraud leveraging the blind faith of the masses to gain worldly power. He sincerely believes that he’s working God’s will but is also coldly calculating when it comes to manipulating people and situations to achieve his goals. Related to this, I’d considered making him a coward who always shrank from any real danger, but instead his mad zeal very nearly compels him to be on the front line against all the horrors of the Darklands. (He’s not quite that far out there, but this is still the guy who was eager to set his men against Dragons.) The average reader may not be drawn in, but he certainly gets the job done in universe.

In Cronos’ case, I felt he was a character who didn’t live up to his reputation but then turned it into a plot point. For Gamaliel, I had very different directions I was wanting to take him and wound up with a fusion that’s better than the sum of its parts (in my opinion, at least). Now that I’m on the topic, though, I may go back and do similar reviews of the previous leads and continue to do so for the leads to come. These aren’t meant to be especially deep; just some musings on where these characters came from and the course of their development. Perhaps you’ll find it interesting. Stay tuned.

I went through Arachne’s Chapters 2, 3, 5 and her epilogue of TTWC2, pretty well wrapping up her section and also went on to do some minor revisions to Caligo’s prologue and Chapter 1. You know, it’s entirely possible that I may be done writing TTWC2 before it even debuts on the site. Wouldn’t that be something?

I was also stricken by a bit of inspiration and did a little writing on Student of Gladius and adding to the peripheral materials. Speaking of peripheral materials, I went into the Earth Arc encyclopedia and added the kanji and hanzi renderings of Japanese and Chinese characters respectively. All in all, a fairly productive day. We’ll see what else I can get accomplished before switching back over to Tico4. Stay tuned.

I worked on Arachne’s epilogue of TTWC2. By now most of the work left in her section is just filling some holes and rounding things out. Part of me wants to finish it out and another part wants to play around with something else. Maybe I’ll do both. Stay tuned.

Over the past couple days I’ve made progress on Arachne’s Chapters 4 and 5 and her epilogue of TTWC2. I don’t have that much farther to go before I finish up her section, but I may switch over to a different character for a change of pace. We’ll see. Stay tuned.

I made some progress on Arachne’s Chapters 2 and 3 of TTWC2. The former only requires a little more narrative to be filled in. I believe I’ve commented before on how characters can develop in interesting ways and certainly what Arachne is becoming is quite different from her original form. To be fair, most of the Dominion headliners were pretty flat characters in prior versions, so just about any development has a fresh feel to it. Ophis Python is going to be difficult, though. I still don’t quite know what I’m going to do with him. A problem for another day. Stay tuned.

I made some progress in Arachne’s Chapter 2 of TTWC2. I put in a nice little reference to Ishtar, which is a bit of an in-joke for me because Ishtar is actually a fairly significant player in the Tellus Arc mythos, though you won’t fully realize this until I get to The End of Times, which I intend to be the capstone of the mainline Tellus Arc continuity. That’s a ways off yet, though. More fun with the Spider Queen to come. Stay tuned.

I wound up getting Chapter 12 of Tico4 mostly finished after all and even did a little writing on Chapter 13. The former is probably going to require a fair bit of rewriting as there’s a lot of action that seems to get a bit jumbled, but writing is mostly rewriting anyway. I imagine I could just keep going like this, but I’ll switch gears as planned and pick up TTWC2 again. Stay tuned.

Perhaps to the detriment of other priorities, I made good progress on Chapter 12 of Tico4. I probably won’t get it done this weekend after all, but this is a pretty long chapter, already over 3K and bound to have at least another 1K to it before I’m done. We’ll see if I decide to push on to the end before switching back over to TTWC2. Stay tuned.