I didn’t do any work on the website, so I might as well talk a bit about what I did instead. You may recall that I mentioned doing some reworking of the House Wulf family tree. Of course, if I did it for one of the Eight Stars, I’d have to do it for the others, and some were a lot more effort than others. I was just kinda picking at it until I just went in full-bore and devoted a whole day’s efforts to it.

One of my dictionaries, one with encyclopedic material, included a section on the etymology of names and that was my first reference when it came to naming characters. I would go on to transcribe by hand a dedicated dictionary of names and compile numerous other sources as well. That being said, when I was first naming characters, I was only looking at the meaning of the name. I wasn’t thinking about the heritage of the character, whether the name was anachronistic or not, etc. I’ve gone through one or two passes of revisions over the years, but amid the reconstruction efforts (and my earlier campaign of proofing my manuscripts), I started thinking about these things even harder and working to amend incongruencies where I found them. While doing this, I was also painting a clearer history of the families. For instance, House Wulf was originally based in Gotland before moving to Skadia and later Titan (then to Gladius and ultimately back to Gotland). Despite the heirs of House Wulf ultimately becoming more Northman than Gotlander, they nevertheless maintain an old Germanic naming convention. Claudius is actually the first exception (which shows that Randwulf regarded his queen more than family tradition).

Anyway, it’s been a lot of work and the results are going to reverberate throughout the Gladius Cycle. Instead of making piecemeal changes here and there, I’ll just wait to fully implement the changes when it comes time to proof the manuscripts. Fun, fun, fun, but before that, I should get back to work on the site. I imagine other detours will crop up amid the slog of plugging in the remaining 1926 reviews, so I’ll be sure to comment then. Stay tuned.

I did pretty well for myself today. I got through KoG2 and 3, T3W and KniTwi, as well as adding a fair number of teasers. From here, I can focus on the remaining Cross Arc stories and any other odds and ends and that should wrap up the Stories section of the site. I should be able to get all that done by the time the weekend’s out. From there, I can start getting the reviews back up, and once all the content is restored, I can start fighting with Drupal so I can get things looking the way I want. By my estimates, it’ll probably take another two weeks. We’ll tentatively set our goal at being fully functional by Easter. Now it’s back to work for me. Stay tuned.

P.S. While working on T3W, I did get sidetracked a bit doing some renaming of characters for greater consistency. Ended up renaming about half of Randwulf’s family tree, and that’s just for starters. I still have the other seven of the Eight Stars to go, but I’ll save that for another time, and maybe explain things in a Commentary post.

I finished Chapter 8 of TWH for the update and made some progress on Chapter 9 as well. I was spinning my tires a bit mid-week, so I found myself doing a re-read of KniTwi and catching a few errors that slipped past me in earlier drafts. I’ll be shifting gears to NagaTen. As I’ve got a bit a lead time, I’d like to go ahead and finish Chapter 9 of TWH, but we know how those plans usually turn out. Stay tuned.

Getting back to work meant getting back to work… work on writing, that is. I managed to get through Chapter 21 of KniTwi and went on to do Chapter 22 and then finish the epilogue to wrap up the book. Maybe I can finish EM2 when its turn comes around next. Stay tuned.

I made a little progress on Chapter 21 of KniTwi, by which I mean very little, but I’ve at least started the dang thing. Now I need to actually push ahead and finish the dang thing. Stay tuned.

I’m running behind left, right and center, aren’t I? Well, let’s get you all up to date on my progress last week, especially when the end result was another release delay. So I picked up my work on Chapter 20 of KniTwi. All well and good. I made a fairly significant change in the sequence of events from my earlier draft of the story and was left wondering how to time the transition between Chapters 20 and 21. The end of the week rolled along and I still didn’t have it figured out, hence the delay. Rather than brute-force a solution when I got to that sticking point, I decided to move on ahead. Because of the ambiguity with where Chapter 20 should end and where 21 should begin, I skipped over 21 and for no particular reason, skipped Chapter 22 as well. I suppose I just wanted to write down the confrontation in Chapter 23. Well, I did that, continued through Chapter 24 and got about halfway into the epilogue. If I can swing another week this productive, I’ll have the book finished. Wouldn’t that be a treat? I’m still puzzling over the ending to Chapter 20, but I’ve got some extra time to figure it out. Stay tuned.

If I was on the ball, I would’ve finished Chapter 20 of KniTwi and maybe even knocked out one or two more chapters while I was at it. Instead I wrote a little bit, then wrote this unrelated chapter that I think is going somewhere in the Legend of Nell series, but I don’t actually know where at the moment. I then decided to reread Tellus and managed to uncover a couple dozen typos that escaped my initial passes through the story. Finally I got a tiny bit more done on Chapter 20. I’m going to have to buckle down as the chapter is due out next Saturday. Stay tuned.

I was supposed to be working on Chapter 20 of KniTwi. I started, but then was spinning my tires and switched over do Chapter 39 of JJ2 instead and once that was done, I returned to KniTwi and got a little bit done. I probably need to keep working on KniTwi, but I might end up wandering over to something else. We’ll see. Stay tuned.

After going a week with no progress, I put my nose to the grindstone. Didn’t make up for lost time, but I did at least meet my weekly quota. Now, I was supposed to be writing Chapter 16 of EM2, but the circumstances in the story drove greater escalation than I originally intended, so I’m thinking what I’ve got would work better in Chapter 24, but that creates its own set of problems. I’m going to have to work it over in my head some more and probably make some adjustments. I’d like to fiddle around with it more, but I also need to think about switching over to KniTwi. I’ve thankfully built up a bit of a buffer in the schedule, but last week has cut into that. There are no days off over the next three weeks, so that bodes well for progress. Stay tuned.

I didn’t get a word written during my days off, but I pretty well managed to make up for it by getting through Chapters 18 and 19 of KniTwi and starting on Chapter 20 as well. I need to be switching back to JJ2 after this. Stay tuned.