Now, anyone familiar with my usual patterns can be forgiven for not expecting an update here. Yes, I’m playing Breath of the Wild now and, yes, I’m spending a lot of time with it, even during the off-hours at work thanks to the Switch’s handheld capabilities. I don’t go so far as to bring the AC adapter with me, so there is an upper limit to how long I can play, which is both fortuitous and partially by design. As such, I’ve managed to more than make the day’s quota on Chapter 23 of CeleKing1. Taking the time to transcribe what I’ve written in my notebook is another story, though. Eventually my hands will give out from playing and that’ll be something to do while I recover. There’s a lot I can say about BotW, but I figure I’ll save most of it for my review, probably coming in about a month from now. Meanwhile, more story progress to come. Stay tuned.

I know I haven’t been missing many days lately, but I actually was doing story-related work Saturday. I was mostly updating the map and crunching numbers based on some new developments to the story. I realize I may have characters moving at slightly unrealistic paces in some spots, but I guess so long as no one else sees my calculations, it won’t be a problem.

Once all that was done, I was able to jump ahead and finish Chapter 21 of TBP. I know I haven’t finished Chapter 20 yet, but I had a flash of inspiration and wanted to strike while the iron was hot. Next time, I’ll probably have trouble with Chapter 22 because I already have a lot of it written and so it won’t be easy to match things up when I’m writing in my notepad at work. That’s fine, though. I can just finish Chapter 20, do the opening of Chapter 22 and then move on to 23. But that’s three weeks off. This week we’re going to finish CeleKing1 and hopefully start CeleKing2, if my desire to take advantage of the Switch’s mobile capabilities to play Breath of the Wild doesn’t suck up all my free time. ^_^; Stay tuned.

I finished Chapter 19 of TBP and started in on Chapter 20. I’ve managed to do nearly 9K words of progress so far this week. Honestly, it seems like having to resort to pen and paper has been one of the best things for my progress. I’d like to at least finish Chapter 20 if I can before the weekend’s out, but if I don’t manage it, I’ve already done more than enough. Next week we push on to the end of CeleKing1 and likely will be starting CeleKing2, so I’m looking forward to that. Stay tuned.

I pretty well finished up Chapter 18 of TBP, which means I’m above the power curve, which bodes well for a smooth serialization once the story debuts on the site in two weeks. Ten years after starting the site and nearly 20 years of sitting in development, it’s finally going to get its time to shine. Stay tuned.

I managed to pretty well finish both Chapter 16 and 17 of TBP. That succeeds in meeting my goal for the week, so everything after this is a bonus. I may well manage to get two more chapters knocked out before the weekend’s out. Stay tuned.

I made more progress on Chapter 16 of TBP. Even with a few more of my slots filled up, I’m doing rather well for myself and the task of handwriting hasn’t proven to be as burdensome as I would’ve thought. Maybe because I’m so eager to write, it’s a mind over matter thing. Who knows? So the goal is to finish two chapters in the week and it seems doable, even with Chapter 16 turning out so long. Stay tuned.

I made some progress on Chapter 16 of TBP. The goal is to get at least two chapters finished this week, but the chapters tend to be longer here than in TSoA1, for instance. We’ll see what I can do. Stay tuned.

In an early chapter of TSoA1, the narration, from the perspective of King Coel Hen, says that he can trace his lineage all the way back to the legendary Brutus of Troy, the first King of the Britons. I hadn’t planned on doing that tracing myself, but it came as part of the deal. Interestingly, you have these two branches with the same descendants, only one flattens them out, making siblings children and grandchildren. I suppose it’s not impossible to have successive generations named after the kings in the main line, but I’m pretty sure the source just got the information wrong. Given how some of these alleged kings conflict with other information I have, the whole thing may be rubbish.

I was able to clear some things up with the lines of Conan Meriadoc and Ceneu ap Coel, which I consider accomplishments. I also managed to trace out Arthur’s descendants as Arthwys ap Mor. My original trees may have to be scrapped as a quicker alternative to trying to fix what I have. I already had to revamp the main tree once, so I guess it’s not much of a surprise I’d have to do it again. I need to spend some more time with the Arthurian legends and not just the pseudo-historical genealogies. While I am telling my own story, I’d be doing the legends no justice by leaving out some of the best material. There’s a whole lot of stuff just on Gradlon Mawr I want to explore further.

In short, no story progress to speak of, but since I did almost 12K during the week, I’m not hurting by any stretch. I think by the end of next cycle I’ll have come to a decision on when I want to start serialization. In the meantime, it’s on to TBP. With TTWC3 wrapping this month, it’s going to have to get ready for prime time. I was thinking about a biweekly schedule, but if I can finish at least two chapters a cycle, I won’t overrun the work in progress publishing a chapter a week. I like having at least one story on a weekly schedule, so we’re going to try that and if I do fall behind in my progress, I’ll switch to biweekly. Stay tuned.

I haven’t really made any story progress to speak of. Why am I posting then? Well, I was just going over Chapter 9 of TSoA1 to round out the narrative when I got stuck on something. I knew Budic I of Brittany was a kinsman of Ambrosius Aurelius (part of the reason he takes refuge there after the assassination of Constans), but I didn’t exactly know how they were related. Cue me spending hours on end (and still going) trying to sort out the royal/ducal family of Armorica/Brittany.

I’ve complained before about the contradictory information that I have to sort through, which isn’t helped by me trying to shoehorn the (pseudo-)historical chronology into the timeline I have set for the story. When family trees start getting recursive, try sorting that out. For instance, I have Prawst ferch Gwrgan as her own great-great-great-great-great-grandmother and Ionas ap Deroch marrying his great-great-great-aunt. >_<

I use plain text files for my family trees, which is fine so long as they aren’t too complicated and I don’t have to make a lot of insertions that throw off the spacing. When I have to realign entire generations, my system starts to fall apart. I’ve now resorted to slapping together hasty trees that ignore dates and such just to try to get the structure in order. I’ve put tons of hours into the work I’ve already done, but a lot of it almost needs to go back to square one.

You might ask why I bother with all this when I should just write the story. Besides the fact that doing a lot of work under the hood is part of my method, the interrelation of all the characters is critical for the political situation and navigating the complex spider web of marriages is a major part of understanding the dynamics of the world. When I’m making it all from scratch, I obviously have a lot of control compared to me trying to make sense of what hundreds of people have cobbled together over the past 1500 years. I must enjoy the abuse or I wouldn’t subject myself to it.

Anyway, expect more of the same before I transition to TBP. Stay tuned.

I managed to pretty well finish Chapters 14 and 17 of TSoA1. I’ve added a couple chapters, so it’s going to mess with the numeration a bit relative to previous posts. At the moment, I’ve made a new Chapter 18 and 28. The former shifts everything after it up one. I’m probably going to be adding more, so for posterity, when you look at the older posts, you aren’t going to get a precise relation to the finished product, not that it’s much of a big deal. I plan on adding more because I do some pretty big jumps in the timeline and want to flesh it out more. I’m already about halfway through the current layout and only have about 23K words, so I may want to add somewhere in the vicinity of ten new chapters so the final tally’s somewhere in the ballpark of 60K. There’s a lot of characterization that’s been glossed over, so it’s not like the new content would just be padding. Now that I’m finally getting into the story, I want to make the most of it.

I’ll probably spend the weekend fleshing out the chapters I’ve worked on and spend time with the genealogies. I’ve almost made enough progress this week to make up for my shortfalls the past several cycles. So two more days of TSoA1 and then I move on to TBP. Stay tuned.