I put the finishing touches on Chapter 5 of CoP and, as you should already know, I got it out on time. Didn’t get to any other story-related work. Although it’s generally my policy not to bring work-work home with me, I have a deadline I need to meet. Yes, I was graciously offered an extension, but I wanted to get it sorted. On the one hand, I almost pity my students being pitted against a former teacher of college-level composition, but hopefully my efforts make their writing stronger. I will say, though, seeing these young things write about social issues really highlights the naivete of the young on the one hand and what a horrible, bitter old cynic I am. Fortunately for them, I’m not the sort of teacher who believes his purpose is to indoctrinate his students, so I let them think what they’re going to think (as long as they’ve got their facts straight, as this is a research paper, after all) and just make sure that whether I agree with their propositions or not, it’s going to be well-written, dagnabbit.

Anyway, we’ll see what I get done tomorrow. Stay tuned.

This day was every bit as brutal as I had anticipated, so it was little surprise that once I finally got home, I was out like a light regardless of my intentions. However, in the window I had before I dragged my carcass to bed for some proper sleep, I did make a little more progress on Chapter 5 of CoP, so what I’ll do is put on the finishing touches in the morning, then post the chapter in the evening.

Man, Fridays are so brutal. Weeks where I have to work on Saturday are really going to be a taste of Hell. Such is the life of the Japanese working man. (Actually, my burden is only a fraction of that of the average Japanese worker, but I wouldn’t last a month going full salaryman.) Anyway, while I work to manage my work-life balance, I’ll also be working to continue a regular update schedule. Stay tuned.

I wasn’t afforded a lot of time to work on writing, but I did make some more progress on Chapter 5 of CoP. I feel like I’m pretty close to the end, so even in light of my Friday gauntlet, I should be able to finish on time.

Ugh… I’m only two weeks into the term and I’m already pining for August. Well, nothing to it but to power on through. Stay tuned.

Believe it or not, I didn’t even touch the WttW peripheral materials today. I just did some writing on Chapter 5 of CoP. I might’ve even finished the dang thing if I hadn’t conked out in the evening. (I guess I need to simply acknowledge that I’m getting those hours of sleep in one way or another.) Anyway, I’m well on my way to finishing on time. If only I can manage the same with all my tasks at work and a certain other extracurricular project I don’t intend to reveal here just yet. If I could finish the chapter after just one more day of work, that’d be great, so let’s see if I can get it done. Stay tuned.

In the WttW peripheral materials, I added a few more Demon types to make the Legions of Hell all the more fun to deal with. I also decided to change the category from “Devil” to “Demon” to better encompass the range of infernal beings. Either way, there are Monsters labelled simply as “Demons” and “Devils”, so there’s going to be overlap, but I figure it makes more sense to classify all of them as Demons and save the “Devil” label for the upper echelons of the hierarchy. As far as common parlance is concerned, it’s a distinction without a difference, but so it goes.

I made a little more progress on Chapter 5 of CoP, but not all that much as Tuesdays are very busy for me. Also, I spent a fair bit of the little time I had trying to better sort out the organizational structure of the Holy Catholic Church, naturally modelling it after the Roman Catholic Church. Not being Catholic myself, a lot of the information was new to me, so it was interesting digging into ecclesiastical governance. Of course, very little of it is going to be apparent in the text of the story itself, but you know how I like to make the whole iceberg.

I’ll see if I can’t get farther in the next round. Stay tuned.

As you not doubt expected, I did more work in the WttW peripheral materials. Now instead of just three varieties of vampires (Ghouls, Vampires and Vampire Lords), there are eight (the previous plus Dhampirs, Vampire Offspring, Lesser Vampires, True Vampires, and Elder Vampires). I’ve also added Elder Liches (with the idea that there will be dummy boss rooms in the 19th Trial with enemies nearly as difficult as the actual Trial Master) and Alchemic Ogres (which will be a real pain to fight, I’m sure). To clarify on the latter, some Monsters appear in progressively stronger incarnations. The three types are Chromatic (green, blue, purple, red, yellow, black, white), Metallic (bronze, iron, silver, gold, platinum, orichalcum) and Alchemic (albedo, nigredo, citrinas, rubedo). And, yes, it’s deliberate that the last four grades of Chromatic Monsters are in the opposite order of the Alchemic ones. The World is mean like that.

While I was working, I saw some calculation errors in the stats of a few entries and went back through the list to correct the errors where I found them. You see, character levelling follows a consistent pattern whether you’re a Player or an NPC. You start out with a base distribution of 20 points and then gain six points per level. Players have an advantage because they get a 10-point bonus at the start plus a 10-point bonus when they make Tier 2 (Level 21) and Tier 3 (Level 41). In other words, a Level 80 Player will have the same amount of points as a Level 85 NPC. (Players cap at Level 80, and People of the World at 40, but Monsters can reach as high as 99.) Anyway, there was about a dozen or so that needed fixing, so I took care of that.

Lastly, I did actually do a little work on Chapter 5 of CoP, but I didn’t get all that far as I was running out of steam and then what energy I did have was devoted to constructing and stocking my newly arrived bookcase. (I’m actually feeling settled enough to buy a little furniture and I got tired of my increasingly unstable stack of manga toppling over.) I hope to get more done later, naturally, but we’ll see how things go. Stay tuned.

I started off by working on that calendar error that was giving me the dickens the day before and now everything should be square from BE 382 to 355 (and by extension, the 262 to 235, 142 to 115, and 022 to AE 006 segments of the subsequent three cycles as well).That’s 28 years out of a 120-year cycle. Amazing. (Then I think about the remaining 92 years I have to eventually deal with… -_- )

I then switched gears to get to work on RttW. I made a bit of progress on Chapter 12, but then I got hung up on figuring out how much Pawel and Zofiya would have to spend to get their ten kiddos decently equipped before leaving Axios and then I realized that I hadn’t done character sheets for the seven kiddos besides Fedor, Zsazsa and Arjun. (Actually, nine eventually, as we need to round out the two parties.) When I do the character sheets, I chart their stat growth all the way to Level 80 (whether or not the character actually makes it that far) and as I do it, I try to get into the character’s head and think about what’s important to them, what they actually need for their Job and how all that comes together. For instance, Spirit rating wasn’t a priority at all for Pawel as he was running a Fighter build, but then in Tier 2 he decided to cross-rate to Mage in order to become a Mage Knight in Tier 3, so he had to focus on building up stats that he had completely ignored the previous 30 Levels. Among the new kiddos, there’s this girl Elishavet who’s a Fighter who insists on steadily building her Intelligence stat, not because she needs it that much from a gameplay perspective but because she doesn’t want to be seen as stupid compared to her party members. (Though the INT stat only really applies to intelligence in a meta sense, as a very grouchy Oscarius will tell you if you ever try to make fun of his 4 points of INT, and if that doesn’t work, he does always have his 189 points of STR to fall back on, as that poor table had to demonstrate back in Chapter 5.) Anyway, these are all things I’m thinking about as I work.

As I can expect rather hectic days back at work Friday and Saturday and probably on through July, I really need to get the chapter finished in the next couple days. We’ll see if I can get it done or not. Stay tuned.

I’m not sure why I decided to do it, but I was going back and checking the Korushi Calendar. I was worried about errors having crept into my work, so I decided to change the layout to make it easier to check. Instead of 12 rows of 10, I switched to 10 rows of 12 and finally five rows of 24 to more conveniently display the leap year cycles. (Remember that because I’m a loony, I created a system where there are three different cycles of leap years that all have to be accounted for in a 13-month year that doesn’t follow the same easy to remember pattern as our calendar.) Sure enough, errors started to be found out, but as I would make one round of corrections, I’d find new errors. It was driving me crazy. I was wanting to preserve the year the story takes place, so I’d have to make changes backwards and forwards through each pass. I’m still in the middle of the third pass and will probably at least finish the six years I have to go back. The funny thing is that the particular error I found was occurring at convenient 10-year intervals, where I mistakenly had the month of Arn at 28 days instead of 27. I’d probably just copied from the previous month and forgot to delete the “28”.

With this driving me right up the walls, going to the encyclopedia to write about different governmental systems and such. I’ll spare you the details for now, though. One day I’ll get the wiki up and going and you can read all about it there. Anyway, as I said, I want to at least finish my corrections to the calendar back to the starting point and then I think I’ll actually try to get some writing done on RttW. Stay tuned.

What little time I had for any story-related work was devoted to continuing in the peripheral materials from yesterday. You see, with the formula I was using, the religiously unaffiliated are calculated by subtracting the total population from the sum of those with some religious affiliation. The way I had distributed the numbers didn’t quite work out in some places and trying to move stuff around proved to be more of a hassle than it was worth, so I ended up adding to the total population to make the formula work and get the final number to the original figure of 0.32% of the population. Why such a low percentage, you ask? Well, in the Kiennar Federal Republic, the Holy Catholic Church (known elsewhere as the Church of Kien or the Church of St. Crispin) is the state religion and all citizens are registered as members of the Church by default. It’s a bit difficult, but certainly not impossible, to change your registration later in life, but few do because there’s nothing much to gain by it and only the most dedicated atheists bother. You do have some activist groups like the Freethinkers Society that have agitated to eliminate the automatic registration (and more ambitious goals such as the abolition of a state religion and the Cabinet-level Ministry of Religious Affairs basically being the Church’s direct hand in the government), but they haven’t found much success.

While Crispinism is the predominant religion in the KFR at 62.29% of the population, Ahorazedism and Sabaotism have significant shares at 11.57% and 10.43% respectively. Ahorazedism is most represented in the coastal states, where there’s a strong influence from the Midland Magrebi states in northern Kartia, and Sabaotism is strong in the eastern states bordering the Principality of Velian (where Sabaotism is the state religion). The northern state of Elwyn, which was originally part of neighboring Glamwyg, has a plurality of Tairists, and if you combine the Fordists, the “heathens” have a majority. In the case of Elwyn, and also Grenik to the south, maintaining traditional religious affiliation is more a matter of ethnic identity than actual faith for the most part. (Consider it similar to the Quebecois retaining their Catholicism in a mostly Anglican Canada.) Another case worth noting is the agrarian Brodnar with its significant minority classified as “other religions” (28.07%) is mostly traditional Mennonites. (And before you start wondering how so many Mennonites poofed into existence, we’re talking about less than 28K people. Brodnar only has a population of about 98K.)

This may or may not be of particular interest to the average reader, but I’m sure it comes as no surprise to you that I love the worldbuilding process and so much story potential comes out of this stuff. However, we’re at the point where I need to switch gears to RttW and actually work on the story and not be figuring out the habitat range of stag beetles (which does need to happen at some point). Stay tuned.

To better put things together for Chapter 5 of CoP, I was working on encyclopedia entries, particularly about the government of the Kiennar Federal Republic, which prompted me to do a more detailed map of the country and a demographic breakdown by its 24 states and the federal district of the capital city of Fedelis. That work is still underway, as I have to take the data I already have for the country and make it fit with the sum total of the aforementioned states. Yes, because I’m just making up numbers, those numbers aren’t set in stone or anything, but I don’t want to throw off the proportions I’ve cited earlier too much.

Once I finish the demographic breakdown, I can figure out the number of congressional representatives each state has to better visualize their relative political sway, the regional power balance, etc. You may wonder how all of this is relevant, but it does play a role in the C Plot. (The A Plot being the Protectors getting Ellis to Ahorazed and the B Plot being Sarek and the Shields’ efforts to stop them.)

As a bit of a side note, as I was going over the manuscript for Chapter 4 before posting it, I was really liking that I gave Ellis a smart aleck side that makes for some fun banter with Rio that will hopefully serve as a counterbalance to his whining. Without that aspect of his personality, even with character development, he might just come across as Aurelius from Tzipi’s Garden. (Aurelius did serve his purpose in that story, but in the back of my head I had been considering having him go on more of an arc in the course of the story and part of me regrets not doing that, but there is a thematic element of having both the protagonist and the reader question the cause being fought for.)

I expect to continue that work on Kiennar, but maybe I can also squeeze in some writing while I’m at it (and dealing with the update). Stay tuned.