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.

I made some more progress on Chapter 24 of TWH and am almost finished with it, so that bodes well for next cycle. It shouldn’t take long to wrap it up and hopefully I can get a decent head-start on Chapter 25 as well. Stay tuned.

I spent a fair bit of time in the peripheral materials getting an estimate of Hecate’s forces and then fiddling around with the world map in a continued effort to try to sort out the scaling issues, location relative to the climate bands, etc. I did do a little more writing on Chapter 24 of TWH, so that’s something. Going back to the map thing, I’ve found some tools I’m going to try fiddling around with more. Stay tuned.

After all that fiddling around in the peripheral materials, it ended up taking all of two sentences to finish Chapter 23 of TWH. To be fair, I needed a better idea of the population to get more plausible numbers. For instance, I was considering modeling Hecate’s Palace Guard after the Praetorian Guard, which was said to be nine cohorts under Augustus, of which three were kept in Rome at a time. However, the population of Rome at that time was around 1.25 million and Gottestag is no Rome. Generally speaking, human populations on Tellus are considerably smaller than human from the equivalent time period anyway, and I figure the population of Gottestag at this time would be around 60K (still the most populous city in the Allied Kingdoms). I then cross-referenced police per capita ratios to make an estimate for the number of the City Guard, and from there make an estimate for the Palace Guard, which would naturally be smaller. A lot of work for those two sentences.

After that, I did some work on Chapter 24, which I might actually be able to finish before the week is out. If I can build up some lead time, I might actually get on track to finish things out on schedule (relatively speaking). Stay tuned.

It took me some digging, but I was able to sort out the issue with the T3W spreadsheet. The problem was that there was an offset in the entries of the private forces to account for neutral parties that threw off my formula. Well, now that that’s fixed, maybe I can actually turn my focus back to TWH. Stay tuned.

Usually the review update is enough to keep me busy on Sundays, but I did make a little more progress on Chapter 23 of TWH. I got stuck, though, as I was wanting to make a comment about the size of the Palace Guard at Engelsberg, but because TWH doesn’t feature any big campaigns, I hadn’t detailed the forces at play in the story. I was looking at information from other stories for comparison purposes and I was noticing an error in my worksheet for T3W. I have a separate column tracking overall Loyalist and turncloak numbers, but things weren’t adding up. I was trying to root out the problem, but it was already creeping into the wee hours and I had work waiting for me. I’ll try to sort that out while getting that chapter of TWH done. Stay tuned.

The lateness of yesterday’s post should have indicated that something was up. Actually, by that point I could’ve given you today’s entry as well, but there’s an order to things, you see. I had work in the morning, then I spent a couple hours at the mall, came home to take a nap, then in the evening I went out to catch the 40th anniversary showing of Do You Remember Love?, so there wasn’t a lot of time to focus on writing on Chapter 23 of TWH, even though I didn’t have a lot left to go. I did try to finish it and get it out the door, but Maus decided to put his thinking cap on and that’s dragging out the end of the chapter a bit. I could still get it out by shifting the release schedule, but I’ve decided instead to just push it to next week. That gives me time to properly review the chapter before it goes out and get some lead time on the next one. It’s the responsible decision, but I admit to being a little annoyed that I was so close to an on-time release for a change. This book as really bedeviled me, which makes me feel all the more disinclined to jump right into The Penitent Priest after this. Maybe I could do Broken Vows. That might be fun. The best case scenario has me finishing TWH around May or June, so I’ve still got some time to think about what comes next. Stay tuned.

I had more time than usual to focus on writing and I very nearly stayed on task for most of it. I made some good progress on Chapter 23 of TWH but fell short of finishing it. The trick I’ve been using the past couple of weeks of finishing up Saturday morning and posting in the evening won’t work for reasons I’ll mention in the next post, but maybe something can happen. Stay tuned.

It turned out that I didn’t need to change as many references in previous chapters as I thought. In fact, I only needed to shorten Gunrok’s forced march to Grau from four days to two, as Grau didn’t end up to be all that far from Milon after the recalculation. However, I did have to move Chapter 20 to Chapter 18 and then push up Chapters 18 and 19 to 19 and 20. You see, after the recalculation, Lys’ party crosses into Gotland the day before Lord Shahazz’in decides to go probing around in poor Prince Rickardt’s noggin. The effect of Sir Burkhardt’s moment touching his native soil for the first time in years would’ve lost a lot of it’s impact if they’d already been in Gotland for a day or two.

How about Chapter 23? Well, I ended up getting distracted by working out Gotland’s units of measure that I didn’t actually make much headway, but now the path should be clear and hopefully I can power through. Stay tuned.

I inched along a bit more in Chapter 23 of TWH, but progress was gummed up when I needed better information on where everyone was, which led to me recalculating all the distances travelled and the time it took to cover those distances. To get everything to line up, I had to push the final battle back eight days. Now I need to go back and adjust all the time references, so that’ll be fun, but once I’m done with that, I should be able to sally forth at a decent clip and get the daggone chapter done. Stay tuned.