I spent another day focused on the Tellus Arc peripheral materials, primarily focused on House Wulf, but I did a number of other things like significantly rework Mark’s encyclopedia entry. In case you were wondering, I intend to put this material out in the wiki once I start to put it together. In fact, I may start adding entries there in the very near future so I can officially launch it.

I do have to share one story that came out of yesterday’s work. (Warning: Spoilers for Knight of Gladius: Volume III) You remember Claudius, right? Randwulf’s kid. Mark’s half-brother. (Or would it be three-quarter-brother?) He rode off into the sunset after KoG3, but what happened to him? Well, up until now, I’d said that he returned to the ancestral homeland of Gotland, had a son Roderic and most likely escaped the Planet during the Great Crossing. (I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but the Great Crossing is a mass exodus of humanity from the Planet. The events of KniTwi are some of the foreshocks of the calamity to come that drives humans away.) Well, now he not only returns to Gotland but specifically to the family’s holdings in Wulfbach and reunites the two branches of the family by marrying the Radwinda the daughter of Friedhardt, the head of the Gotlander branch of House Wulf at the time. (If you’re inclined to get squicked at this, I should note that their common ancestor is six generations back, so don’t get your banjos out just yet.) I expanded his family so that he now has three more children in addition to Roderic: Antonia, Rodwinda and Friedric. The idea was for Claudius to take over the newly unified House Wulf, but you know how he’s not quite built for a fight, so when Lord Friedhardt died, his half-brother Adelhardt took over instead. (Claudius is still listed as a claimant to the title of Lord of Wulf, though.) If Claudius had actually inherited the ancestral gear of the Conquerors, he would’ve had a stronger claim, but Randwulf took it with him.

A fun bit of trivia is that I have since given Claudius a Gotlander name, Rodwulf, which happens to be the same as the eldest son of Wulf the Conqueror. (It wasn’t a coincidence, of course.) Also, his full Roman name is Lucius Claudius Antonius Lupinus. Randwulf’s idea was to have his son start a new branch of House Claudius to maintain standing among the patricians. (I may not have mentioned it elsewhere, but when Nyssa married Randwulf, she called herself Claudia Antonia, posing as a daughter of one of the patrician families of Eagle, hence Claudius’ name.)

Anyway, I continue to flesh out my world. I dipped my toe a bit in House Hassani, but there’s a lot of work that needs to go into that. My sources over 20 years ago for Arabic names weren’t great, so it’s a bit of a mess. Also, dealing with fecund polygamists is, oh, so much fun when building genealogies. As fun as that prospect is, I really do need to turn my attention to RttW and I’ve got some other stuff to deal with as well. Let’s see what I can get done. Stay tuned.

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.

I’ll admit to slacking off majorly, making poor use of my abundant free time as far as story progress is concerned. I didn’t do much better last week, but I did inch along on Chapter 17 of KniTwi until I finally got it finished. I’ll be back at work this week, so that may actually prove beneficial to my writing progress. It’s time to get back to JJ2. I don’t have that much further to go on the chapter that’s coming up, but it’d be nice to build up a bit of a buffer. As always, we’ll see. Stay tuned.