I made some more progress on Chapter 21 of TWH, getting set up for the main event of the chapter. Something to get excited for, though I haven’t decoded how far I’m willing to go to resolve the situation that’s developing here. I guess that’s something I’ll discover as I go.

In other news, I recently had a burst of inspiration and so I spent a fair bit of time jotting down the ideas I’ve come up with. It actually ties into an earlier idea I had that I started developing further and I’m thinking of tying into a repurposed DnD scenario I was making for my niece that I never got around to using (as we never got past the character creation stage) and an alternative game system I developed when I was trying to make a simpler one than the system I’ve been putting together for the Welcome to the World series. Basically, it’s growing into its own cycle of the Else Arc, but it’s still in an embryonic stage at the moment. I’ll post more as it develops, but I really do need to be focusing on my primary task at the moment. Hopefully I can continue to make steady progress. Stay tuned.

I’m really close to having the epilogue of EM3 finished. I probably just have another sentence or two to tie a bow on it and be done, though I imagine I’ll want to give it a couple passes before I post it. I also did a little writing in RttW while I was preparing the story update.

What took the bigger chunk of my time was some work in the peripheral materials I was doing with regards to juvenation and life extension, something that isn’t that well reflected in some of my materials. It was a big part of my calculations when working on the CeleKing series, but in the overarching narrative of the Cross Arc as a whole, I hadn’t really factored it in when I was doing my early genealogical work. I considered not making life extension much of a thing until the Fifth Empire period, but that didn’t jibe with my work on CeleKing as Emperor Wuzu of the Hua Dynasty made it to 266 years and life extension treatments would have had to have started no later than the mid-5th Century for him to have made it so long. We do have about a 50-year period for the Æther War for life extension to develop and we can argue that the Skyfall Calamity caused disruptions in its application, but that didn’t change the fact that I wanted it to be reflected in the main Imperial line and major pretender factions.

One example of a major change was changing Emperor Michael I Neologos’ birth from NE 541 to NE 461. This meant that rather than being the great-grandson of Emperor Victor Alexis I Neander, he’s now that Emperor’s brother-in-law with the two of them having married sisters. I had to move around the family tree to reflect this change, which is a bit of a pain when you’re just using a text file for this sort of thing. (I really should consider upgrading how I do my genealogy work.) With Emperor Michael’s lineage now majorly altered, I had to fill in a couple generations up so that he doesn’t just spring up out of nowhere. I ended up with quite the little soap opera story brewing in House Goldbaum. (I always love how stories come together as I make family trees.) Anyway, that kept me busy a good long while. Got to see the sunrise, so I guess you could call that a perk.

Anyway, Monday I’ll be switching over to TWH, but in the meantime, I’ll probably fiddle around with this stuff a bit more. I’m sure you all find it thrilling. Stay tuned.

I won’t bore you with excuses, but I haven’t been able to get to working on EM3 like I was hoping until now. I didn’t get it too far, though, but at this point I might as well stick with it until I either finish it or I need to switch over to TWH.

I also spent some time on the peripheral materials for the WttW trying to standardize the system of weights and measures. That doesn’t get us any further in the story proper, but these details are all part of the worldbuilding iceberg. Maybe I can get some actual writing done sometime before the weekend’s out. Stay tuned.

I was running a scene from PMGtK in my head on my way home and wanted to commit it to the page. This was time that probably should have been devoted to TWH. Now, I was going to get some writing done there, but by the time I was ready to do that, the mascot had decided it was bedtime and there was no negotiating with her for more time. Well, so it goes. I’ll see what I can get done tomorrow. Stay tuned.

I didn’t make any story progress, but I was working in the peripheral materials for WttW. I was adding a bunch of stuff to the item list and this has prompted me to think about giving details to the enchantment system, but that’s a task for later. I, of course, need to buckle down and get the chapter of EM3 done, so I should probably prioritize that. We’ll see what gets done. Stay tuned.

Warning: The following contains spoilers for Welcome to the World: Return to the World.

I’ve commented before how my protagonists tend to be less and less good as people as I’ve progressed in my writing career. There’s a line I haven’t crossed until now, but that line gets crossed in RttW. Let’s be blunt about it. One of the first things the main character does when he returns to the World is rape a young woman. The natural question is, “Why would you do this?” It’s not for any prurient interests, not for myself and not for the audience. It’s not some gimmick to draw people in. If anything, it’s going to be almost impossible for me to garner any sympathy for Pawel. It’s not a gamble you want to take with your protagonist, so why risk it? Well, let’s talk about that.

One of my inspirations was Westworld. I was intrigued by the idea of people’s moral code breaking down in an environment where they can let go of their inhibitions with little or no consequences. Also, consider the sort of cruelty players can engage in when they play video games, or even the random, thoughtless acts of cruelty in real life you see from children (or older folks who never developed a functioning superego). I wanted to explore the psychology behind this in the WttW series. The World in the WttW series summons children between the ages of 10 and 12. Mentally and physically, they are not yet fully formed, putty in the hands of whatever force guides the Game. It is quickly established that Players are a different breed, essentially demigods. It doesn’t take much for power to go to your head and bad things follow when that happens. Mix in a cruel world that gives you little choice but to fight and kill to survive with odds quite heavily stacked against you and it’s a recipe for some very broken people who will perpetuate the cycle of abuse.

At this early point in the story, I’ve only begun to hint at Pawel’s own experience and the nature of the World. I’m not excusing him in the slightest, but he is a thoroughly damaged individual whose tenuous sense of restraint didn’t hold up when presented with a convenient outlet for a variety of pent-up frustrations. If it’s any comfort to the more delicate reader, there will be log-lasting consequences for this lapse. This only scratches the surface of the ugliness of the World, but I’m not here to fetishize that ugliness. I want to dig into how characters face that ugliness, when they’re strong and when they’re weak. Will I succeed in crafting a compelling narrative in the process? We’ll see.

Anyway, I’m not the one who decides whether or not this little experiment works out. That’s for you, the reader. I may well have to have another one of these chats before things are all said and done. Stay tuned.

While not making much in the way of progress, I was at least going through RttW and doing some editing from around Chapter 2 to Chapter 7. Regarding Chapter 2, here I am so close to the moment of truth and the temptation to chicken out is really strong, but I’m going to bite the bullet and go for it. I plan on having a little chat with the readers after I post it and we’ll see where things go from there. Sometimes I wonder if I’m too conscientious or not conscientious enough. One of life’s many questions. Anyway, I’ll be back in a bit for that chat. Stay tuned.

It doesn’t count for much, I suppose, but I did some genealogical work for PMGtK. It’s more than nothing, but not quite story progress. Can I turn things around? Maybe. Let’s find out. Stay tuned.

I did some more writing on PMGtK. I’ve got these big confrontation scenes in my head, but once I put the story into production, I’ll have a lot of connective tissue to make. Anyway, I do need to focus on RttW, so I’ll try to switch gears to that. Stay tuned.

You may recall me talking about a random project that I started developing but hadn’t really decided where I was going to place it. Well, for the time being, I’ve decided to place it in the Else Arc and I’ve given it the tentative title The Poor Man’s Guide to Kingmaking. I was making some edits to what I’ve written and the peripheral materials behind it. I was considering some adjustments to place it in the Aurean Empire of Merkab from Tzipi’s Garden, but I’m not doing that for the time being. The Else Arc affords me considerably more flexibility and I’m thinking about integrating a number of other ideas I have lying around while I’m at it. Nothing is definitive just yet. It’s not the progress on RttW that needs to be happening (not that I don’t have considerable lead time there), but it’s enough to at least warrant a mention. We’ll see what follows. Stay tuned.