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.

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.

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.