I didn’t feel that writing a couple sentences to finish off Chapter 3 of CoP was quite enough to warrant a post (though I know I’ve done it for such minimal work before). I did go ahead and do most of the work for the review post, so it wasn’t like I was spending the day idly. Anyway, we had a rather sharp contrast with all the work I’ve done on the Tellus Arc peripheral materials since. I’ve been focusing on the houses of the Eight Stars, especially House Leon, House Crucis and House Wulf. I decided to have House Leon belong to a line of rí túath (a sort of tribal chieftain/petty king), so I ended up creating a thousand-year line of succession for it. However, the main line eventually gets excluded, which explains how they ended up in Gladius. There’s a similar story with House Wulf, where the family ends up splitting into the half that carries on the Conqueror’s mantle and the half that rules the freehold granted to Wulf by the Emperor after the War of Ban. If this was not enough, the Gladian lord Ingwald of Glasford (a fiefdom in the area of Stormtree) provides the glue to bind the two houses together.

You see, Gearalt the sixth Defender was not chosen to be the tanist to succeed his father as rí túath, so he ventured out to seek his fortunes abroad. He spent a spell in Titan as a mercenary before returning to his homeland of Fodla to be rejected a second time, so he then went to the Greater Gotland Empire, where lent his sword to the faction supporting the future Emperor Reinhardt III. This faction also included Ingwulf the sixth Conqueror. Ingwulf was already connected to Lord Ingwald of Glasford and when he and Gearalt forged a marriage pact between their grandchildren, Gearalt was added to that connection. This was what led his son Leander to participate in the Gladian War of Unification, which brings us to the status quo you’re familiar with from the Gladius Cycle stories. In fact, Percival’s maternal uncle Ingwald (the grandson of the previously mentioned Lord Ingwald and the head of the cadet branch of House Wulf that took possession of the family’s Gotland holdings) was the one acting as his proxy as head of House Leon during his minority. You might find it ironic that the two families are so closely knitted together given what happens in the stories, but this sort of thing wasn’t all that uncommon in real world history, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise in fictional history inspired by the real thing. For some real fun, did you know that House Hassani has married into House Crucis not just once but twice? That’s a story for another day, though.

I’m having a lot of fun with this, of course, but I really do need to redirect some of this energy. We’ll see if I manage it or not. Stay tuned.

You know how I said I was going to get Chapter 3 of CoP wrapped in the morning and posted in the evening? Well, it didn’t happen that way. I was working on the Tellus Arc peripheral materials all day and didn’t start on CoP until the evening. I didn’t take a nap in the afternoon like I was intending, so you can imagine how the evening went, yet somehow I managed to make enough progress that I’m just about done, so I’ll just shift the release schedule by a day and we’ll go on from there.

In case you were curious about my work in the peripheral materials, I was primarily focused on the royal family of Titan. You see, it turns out that I hadn’t made a family tree for them yet, so I corrected that oversight. Some changes cropped up along the way because some encyclopedia entries were less detailed than others, causing me to lose the connection. For instance, during the reign of King Halfdan, his first wife was unable to produce an heir for him, so he was pressured by the jarls to divorce her and was given a child bride in the thought that the younger the bride, the more fertile she would be. (No, that isn’t how it works.) However, King Halfdan opted to wait until the girl grew up a bit first, only to die within the year. This little widow was then carted off to the convent to live out her widowhood, only to leave her cloister after some years and find herself a new husband in the form of Sieghardt the Conqueror, only this time the age gap went the other way, with her being 22 years his senior. This was Asta Ingisdottir, only I never mentioned her by name in King Halfdan’s encyclopedia entry, so I ended up making an entirely different character to serve the role of his second queen (now an age allowable by canon law), who ends up murdered after the King’s funeral. I stumbled on Asta’s entry later and realized my error. Rather than delete the new storyline, I simply changed Asta’s story so that she was betrothed to the infant son of King Halfdan by this new Queen and then was sent off to the convent for her protection, lest she end up like her little fiancé. (Yes, the baby was murdered along with the mother, because succession disputes are brutal.) This managed to tie up things nicely, but there’s bound to be more instances of me coming up with new stories and having to either retcon the old ones or rework the new ones. However, I really like it when I have a good idea, only to find out that I already had that good idea years before and made provisions for it.

I intend to switch over to RttW next week. We’ll see how much time I spend working on the chapter that needs to go out and how much time I spent detailing which insects are native to each of the Trials. I’m sure it’ll be all sorts of fun. Stay tuned.

I said I was just going to do a little bit of work on the Tellus Arc peripheral materials and then focus on finishing Chapter 3 of CoP, but it was the opposite. I spent most of the day on the Tellus Arc peripheral materials and only got a sentence done in CoP before I entered my phase of variable consciousness in the evening. That doesn’t bode well for my deadline, but I think I’ll try to get the chapter finished in the morning and get it posted by evening.

Besides adding more regnal years, one thing I was doing to improve the encyclopedia was adding labels for kings and such, something I’ve done in other, more recent encyclopedia files. For example:

Rudolf V (III 3653 – 3718)

53rd King of Bergeny

However, in the course of doing this, I was thinking about additional titles and such. For instance, one of the honors bestowed on the Elemental Knights was a global peerage, the equivalent of a count, but some would go on to gain other titles as well (or they already had titles beforehand). I wanted to account for that and just House Aran alone kept me busy for a couple hours, as I was accounting for lines of succession and stories would spring up as I worked. Fun, fun, fun, but it doesn’t get me any closer to meeting my deadline. I’ll see what I can get done and then go from there. Stay tuned.

I completely threw myself into the Tellus Arc peripheral materials, continuing to add regnal years to many of the different domains across the Planet’s 15,000-year history. At least with the Dragons, they rule for centuries at a time, so there are only fifteen Kings of Dragons to account for (not counting the Xarid pretenders, which I of course have also recorded). While doing this, I was adding and modifying a lot of entries in the encyclopedia and timeline. The history of the two Black Dragon dynasties have gotten fleshed out quite a bit more now. There are a lot of things that had been left incomplete for years that I’ve started filling out more, such as the list of Kings of Ban, the predecessor of Byrn. In fact, I was in the middle of filling in the regnal years for that dynasty when I had to find a stopping place. I really do need to be getting back to CoP, but I anticipate that I’ll at least want to finish with the Kings of Ban first. Stay tuned.

I did some writing on Chapter 3 of CoP, which was good, but rather than stick to this, I ended up going down a rabbit hole in the peripheral materials. I believe I was checking out the conversion of dates in the different calendars in the Tellus Arc the other day and ended up making some adjustments, which then spun into a whole things where I was adding regnal years for different dynasties and such, and as stories were developing from this, I had to dig into the timeline and the encyclopedia, and I’ve only managed to scratch the surface. I do need to go back to writing on CoP, but I’m definitely going to spend more time on this. Stay tuned.

I only got a few sentences written Saturday, so I didn’t feel like it warranted a post. Honestly, I didn’t do much better this go-around, but here we are anyway. I only managed to inch along a bit in Chapter 25 of TWH. I might’ve gotten more done if my office productivity manager didn’t insist on occupying my time. So it goes. I’ll be switching over to CoP, but I may still try to get some of the ideas I have for TWH onto the page. My work-work load for the week is rather light, but there are a number of ancillary tasks that may be taking a decent bite out of my time. We’ll see what gets done. Stay tuned.

I managed to make some respectable progress on Chapter 25 of TWH. Brainstorming the dialog the day before definitely helped. (I have to do something when I’m biking to and from the station, after all.) I potentially could finish the chapter by the time the weekend’s out. I can’t guarantee it, but it makes for a nice goal. Let’s see what I get done. Stay tuned.

I did just the barest amount of work on Chapter 25 of TWH and a more respectable bit of progress on ColoFlip, doing a bit of exposition on the crew’s behavioral programming. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m really enjoying this opportunity to explore the ground level on the fringes of the Empire. So far in the Cross Arc, our view of the Empire has been skewed by the fact that we don’t get to see much outside of Project Reclamation and the Expeditionary Fleets. As fun as Reclamation stories are, I want to explore more of the post-Union universe. I really need to kick off The Æther War Chronicles as I’ve dived into the aftermath of the Æther War without digging into the war itself. Things to consider as I move forward in the Cross Arc.

What’s that? I said I was going to be focusing on TWH this week? I really do need to do that, don’t I? I’ll see what I can do. Stay tuned.

I was doing more work in the peripheral materials, focusing on Bergeny yet again. In particular, I was working on related encyclopedia entries. Loads of fun. I might do a little more fiddling around before switching over to CoP for next week. Stay tuned.

Although I mostly worked on the peripheral materials, dealing with stuff both before and after the events of TWH, I also made some progress on the main story itself, finishing Chapter 25 and starting on Chapter 26. Speaking of the peripheral materials, for some reason I was spending a lot of time with the family lines of the Princes of Bergeny. I don’t know if I mentioned this elsewhere, but Bergeny originally had a fairly typical royal line until the end of the reign of Arnolf III. Rather than simply have his eldest son succeed him, he divided the kingdom among his seven surviving sons and instituted a system where the seven Princes and their successors would elect the new King from among them. Ultimately, the first King elected was the eldest among the brothers, but from there, a fairly stable arrangement of rotating kingship developed. Anyway, I got to try to account for seven lines of rulership to keep track of it all. Oh, what fun it is. Anyway, we’ll see what other fun I get up to over the weekend. Stay tuned.