Waking up around 1530 Tuesday threw me well off my game and I’ve been struggling to recover ground since. It’s been a bit of a mess and I’m under quota, but I’ve done some work on Orguz’s Chapter 5 of TTWC2 and started working through Rowland’s section of TTWC3. New offers for work on top of my current work and the rising tide of activity leading up to Christmas have kept me hopping.

In other news, I watched First Knight last night and that’s inspired me to go forward and post the teasers for my Arthurian Cycle. Look forward to that in the next couple days. Stay tuned.

Well, I missed a couple days. In my defense, I at least did a fair bit of work on the Erdi map Saturday, but as you know, the quota only applies to actual story content. However, going into the new week, I was able to get Orguz’s Chapter 4 of TTWC2 mostly finished and make a little progress on his Chapter 5 as well. The goal is to wrap up his section this week and hopefully make some headway into one of the others. It’d be nice to get TTWC2 wrapped up in the near future so I can move on to TTWC3. Actually, I may start working more on TTWC3 because I’ve barely touched it since starting in on Version 3 of the story. More to come. Stay tuned.

I did some work on Medusa’s Chapter 1 and 3 of TTWC2. In all truth, I wasn’t paying as close attention to the timeframe of Chapter 1 and had to do some adjustment to make events properly mesh with the timeline. It’s a good thing I mark the chapters with the dates or that would’ve been a lot more work later on.

Wanting a bit of a change of pace, I started playing around with the Celestial Kingdom books again, doing some light editing of what I’ve already written and trying to fill out the outline more and get the plot squared away. I still have very little sorted out for CeleKing1 and huge gaps in CeleKing2 and 3. Things to do, things to do. Stay tuned.

I did some work on Medusa’s prologue of TTWC2. I may be switching gears soon. We’ll see. Stay tuned.

I made a little progress on Orguz’s Chapters 4 and 5 of TTWC2. If I really worked at it, I could probably finish his section by the time the weekend is out. I don’t know if I’ll pull this off or not, but it gives me something to shoot for. Part of me feels tempted to reformulate The Trident War Chronicles into a more linear narrative, but I would necessarily have to lose most of the individual prologues and that would sacrifice a lot of background material. Also, the cast would probably become unwieldy if all three factions got full representation. For better or for worse, I think the current formula has to stand or else I’d need to do some major top-to-bottom rewrites and that’s not a terribly appealing idea. More to come. Stay tuned.

I’ve been rather busy the past couple days. I did a little work on Orguz’s Chapter 4, went through the entirety of Dox’s section (most of the work was minor tweaks, but there were a couple chapters that needed filling out), I tweaked Ophis Python’s prologue and mostly finished his Chapter 1 and epilogue, and I mostly finished Xorgoth’s Chapter 1, all of this being in TTWC2.

That’s some good headway, but at the rate I’m going, I’ll be lucky to make 50K words. Even though I’m not actively seeking publication at the moment, I try to think in terms of publications standards, so I really try to shoot for at least 70K with my novels. One of the joys of self-directed online serialization is that I don’t absolutely have to worry about this kind of beancounting, but it still sticks in my mind. Ideally, each book is as long as it needs to be and that’s that. Looking at how publication works in Japan, it seems you can get away with that more. For instance, I’m reading the Full Metal Panic! light novels and I’ve currently on the fifth book, which is rather thin compared to the others. It just happens to be the length of the story Gatoh intended to tell. However, you may need to have a certain degree of stroke to get away with that. I don’t claim to be an expert on the American publishing industry, so I definitely can’t make any significant claims when it comes to its Japanese counterpart. That being said, I have a feeling I’d have an easier time getting a publication run over there than I would here. Perhaps I’ll take that Japanese novel-writing course after all…

Here’s something you haven’t seen in a while. I’ll dispense with any excuses, apologies or empty promises. Instead, I’ll just say that I did a little work on Orguz’s epilogue of TTWC2. I swear, just clearing out the number of spam comments before they get out of hand is almost incentive enough to be meeting my daily quota. Hopefully there’ll be more to come. Stay tuned.

I went ahead and mostly wrapped up Orguz’s Chapter 2 of TTWC2 and then went on to more or less finish Chapter 15 of Tico4. Not a bad bit of work if I say so myself. You’ll understand what I mean when we get to the chapter in question, but I found it quite the pain to adequately portray synchronous audio and visuals, particularly when the latter is changing in the middle of the former. I may wind up doing some rewriting to streamline it further, but that’s a task for another day. Stay tuned.

I got close to finishing Orguz’s Chapter 2 of TTWC2, but I starting nodding off before I could get it done. So it goes. I may still go on to do the finishing touches before switching to Tico4, though. We’ll see. Stay tuned.

Those of you following my Twitter feed (and I know I haven’t done much posting there of late besides notifications of site updates) are aware that I downloaded the trial version of Smash for the 3DS yesterday. (Very barebones, by the way, but I guess it’s good that they’re whetting the appetite instead of sating it.) Well, that was a grand three-hour ordeal at McDonald’s, so during that time I did a fair bit of writing on TTWC2 is a bit of a switch-up for the week. I pretty well finished Orguz’s prologue, did some revisions on Chapter 1 and made some headway on Chapter 2. Also did a little more work on his family tree and updated some entries in the encyclopedia to reflect the developing changes to the scenario. We’ll see if I can’t wrap up Chapter 2 before I switch back over to Tico4. Stay tuned.