Scipio is definitely the token good teammate on the Alliance side. I mean, they’re mostly varying shades of grey (except the unambiguously evil Akasame), but they tend to be on the darker side of the spectrum. I liked the idea of giving the Alliance a “conscience”, though his advice isn’t always followed. How much of a difference he made, it’s hard to say, but it’s more than what he would’ve accomplished if he stayed in that tower.

It was a newer development to have him infiltrate the mage conscripts. In an older version, he avoided conscription by casting a spell on the mages in question. In retrospect, even if this worked as well as I originally wrote it, there were bound to be problems later. Also, for his part in the capture of Castle Notos, it would be a lot more effective from the inside. Since we already had the precedent of Rowland infiltrating the militia, it fit with the MO of an Alliance operative. A much better solution if you ask me (probably why it’s the version I went with).

Scipio is pretty much the only person in the Alliance with an eye on the greater scope of things. Rowland’s only really interested in Notos, Simona only cares about what Rowland wants, Carpos is using the Alliance as a stepping stone for his own ambitions, Garm thinks of nothing but getting his people home, and though we haven’t gotten to them yet, Urgill has her own mission, Mab is simply biding her time until she can be free, and Akasame like Carpos is using the Alliance for the sake of his own ambition (and for the opportunity to kill people). He’s the only one to gives credence to the threat of the Darklands (except for Urgill, of course, given that she’s from there–Simona doesn’t count because due to her three hundred-year absence, she wasn’t quite up to date on current events over there), though he is somewhat skeptical. Had Rowland launched further attacks after the Battle of Kalonis, it’s likely that Aristides would’ve pushed for stomping the Alliance. Oh, the Alliance might have survived and carried on guerrilla attacks until the Zephyrians withdrew, but they wouldn’t be in any shape to form a government as quickly as they did and waylaying the Zephyrians may well have resulted in the Dominion being that much better positioned to receive them. Considering all this and factoring in the seal on the Darklands, it wouldn’t be incorrect to characterize Scipio as having saved the world. Things definitely would’ve been much worse without his hand in world events. Not a bad bit of work for a former hermit.

There’s an order of mages that’s founded after his death calling itself the Scions of Scipio that serves Notos for nearly six hundred years. It goes a long way toward keeping his name alive. It actually outlives the republic Rowland founded, though not by too much. That’s a story for another day, however.

And that does it for Old Scipio. Next time we’ll be discussing poor Urgill, who has the uncanny Goblin knack for getting the short end of the stick. Stay tuned.

I managed to finish Chapter 12 of CeleKing1 and made some headway on Chapter 11 as well. Should be able to finish Chapter 11 with one more round. Chapter 13 has a big fight sequence, so that’ll be fun. Stay tuned.

Most of the writing I accomplished was redoing my work on Chapter 12 of CeleKing1 from Sunday because I lost what I had written when my laptop crashed. (I usually save reflexively every ten or fifteen minutes I’m working, but I suppose said reflexes are rather dulled around 0500.) I should finish said chapter after another day’s work, then I can go back and finish Chapter 11 and go on from there. I’ve certainly got enough of a head start for the series’ launch next week, but I need to stay on top of things and make sure I’m at least getting one chapter done per cycle, preferably two. If I can get through Chapter 13 by the end of business Sunday, I’ll be satisfied. Stay tuned.

The main accomplishment was getting the TBP manuscript all rearranged to match the new outline, but I also wrote some reviews and made progress on Chapter 12 of CeleKing1, about enough for a day’s quota, obviously not enough for the week. As such, I’m going to extend my work on CeleKing1 into this week and then switch over to TSoA1. Speaking of TSoA1, I’m not going to start serializing it until I have at least ten chapters written, so while CeleKing1 will start its serial run next week, TSoA1 will have to wait a month or two (or three). I don’t imagine it’ll hurt anyone’s feeling too much. So, that’s the plan for the immediate future. Now, if you’ll excuse me while I grumble about my lack of a (functioning) Japanese cell phone preventing me from upgrading my limited edition SR Shiburin… Hopefully we’ll have more genuine progress to report this week. Stay tuned.

Besides some idle edits and additions to the prologue of Tzipi’s Garden, I didn’t get any story writing done, but I did continue my work sorting out the timeline for TBP, adding, deleting and moving several chapters, rendering my comment yesterday about the chapter order obsolete. (Now the old Chapter 3 has been pushed up to Chapter 8 and because that’s a long time to be without any mention of Cassandra, I have a new Chapter 3 and revived a previously deleted chapter to take the Chapter 5 slot.) I think I’ve finally got it all battened down, though. I still need to rearrange the chapters in the manuscript itself. Whee fun. We’ll see what work gets done tomorrow. Stay tuned.

If it weren’t for the regular updates to the site, you might be forgiven for thinking I fell off the face of the Earth. It is the week of Thanksgiving after all. (Okay, I’ll admit, they’ve got two scenario events in GBF and they’ve brought back the Kyle hero quest in S&D, so that might bear some of the blame for my current lack of progress.) I didn’t figure the single sentence I wrote in Chapter 11 of CeleKing1 on Monday was worth mentioning. And while I haven’t made any story progress per se, I have made some serious headway sorting out the timeline for TBP.

While the scale of my maps isn’t necessarily precise, I decided to actually attempt to crunch the numbers for a more accurate calculation of travel times. (I’ve done some calculations for the KoG and TTWC series, but never applying quite so much math.) In so doing, it completely threw the original timeline into chaos. However, after a lot of work, I finally managed to get things lined up. This is going to cause some reshuffling of the chapters, which is going to make my earlier WIP posts make less sense looking back. (For instance, at the moment, the new Chapters 3, 4 and 5 were formerly 4, 5, and 3.) I had about a 20-day offset I was able to resolve by giving Cassandra’s group an additional side trip leading up to the final confrontation, so that’s something.

Given how much of the week has passed with no appreciable progress on CeleKing1, I’ll likely spend next week on it as well, but we’ll see. Stay tuned.

While I ultimately fell short of the weekly quota, I did manage to wrap up Chapters 3 and 4 of TBP and do a little work on Chapters 5 and 6. I would’ve gotten farther in the story, but I started doing calculations for the distances between locations for a more realistic view of travel times. My measurements aren’t precise of course, but it’s more than enough to get a ballpark estimate. It’s going to dramatically affect the timeline for the story. Even though I need to be switching over to CeleKing1, I’m probably going to spend a little more time on it. Stay tuned.

I may have actually hit quota this time working on Chapter 3 of TBP. I think I may have been going a different direction with the chapter originally, so I’m having to tweak it some to fit the new text. Maybe I’ll try doing some writing before 0400 and actually be a little more coherent for it. Stay tuned.

In spite of intentions to do otherwise, I once again put off my writing until I was pretty well wound down for the day and so I once again fell short of quota writing on Chapter 3 of TBP. It may well be that I don’t make up my lost time until my usual Sunday rush. We’ll see, though. Stay tuned.

Another day of under quota progress on Chapter 3 of TBP. Unsurprisingly, when my writing is the last thing I do in the day, I don’t get too far. I’ve managed to clear the story section of this week’s scenario event of GBF, so that’s one less thing to vie for my time. Maybe I can get caught up. Stay tuned.