Weekly Update - 12/4/24

December keeps on Decembering, and I'm starting to mentally gear up for my yearly five days of Artic Midwestern deep freeze. Don't get me wrong - I love seeing my family and old friends back there, but I could do without the snow and the ice and the cold.

Hope folks enjoyed the most recent Before The Storm, and I wanted to point out something that sprung up from the comments - the protagonist Storm Miles "Sketch" Walker has an ethnic background that's a combination of Middle Eastern and African, but I have been trying to call that out without using those specific reference points, being that the story is set thousands of years in the future. I wanted BTS to have a very diverse and unique cast, including aliens, and I'm trying to grow my descriptives to be more generalized and less referential. (Also writing a sex scene between a nine-foot-tall alien and a six-foot-tall human makes you think a bunch about scaling, lemme tell you!) This most recent chapter should also make it clear that I'm aiming for BTS to be less-haremy and more-polypod.

When I was briefly in a polygamous relationship almost a decade ago, I found myself fascinated by the sorts of weird internal narrative conflicts that came pre-built into one of those things and always wanted to try and explore that in-depth. If that's not your jam and you choose to stop reading BTS because of it, I get it. But I also think it's going to continue to be one of my better on-going stories, and I think the poly element will help add to it, not detract from it. So stick with it for a while, see what you think.

I'm hip deep in the next chapter for Quaranteam: Book Two (about 4k words in) and I'm hoping to have it done tomorrow. It's got some big world stuff in it, so I'm making sure I'm looking at maps, checking lots of notes and our shared world timeline and making sure there aren't any conflicts, and getting ready to drop another hand grenade into the writer's room.

I realize there hasn't been anything showing up on the public sites for a few weeks now, and that's on me. I bundled up everything promised for the last few weeks and fired it off, so it should be showing up soon enough, with my apologies. Things always get weird this time of year. Those of you who've been with me a few years have probably noticed that. I'm going to do what I can to do my last few bits of catch up over the next few weeks, so if you're waiting on something from me, I haven't forgotten - I'm just gearing up for Christmas.

The kittens have started settling in a bit more with me. They're still very clearly my flatmate's kittens - they follow him all around the house whenever he's home - but I'm earning my place as 'the spare,' giving out pets and scratches, not so much that they hop up on my lap all the time, but when both the flatmate and I were out for lunch and I got home first, both kittens were sleeping up in the little cubby hole I'd cleared out for them on my desk.

It is very hard resisting that much cuteness.

Public release is like such: 12/7 - FG5, QTUM3, QT2:25, BTS11; 12/14 - Captains' Day 2, QT2:i5; 12/21 - Before The Storm 12; 12/28 - Turn At Sin River 1.

In terms of music for the week, if I haven't convinced you to listen to the new Cure album yet, I'm not sure how much more I can do, but the band did a free livestream of them playing the new album (and a bunch of other stuff) live to coincide with the new album, and you can see that on YouTue here - THE CURE :: SONGS OF A LOST WORLD :: FULL LIVE STREAM 

It's insane to me that a band nearly fifty years into its career has put out one of what I would call their Top Three Albums (in a discography with 14 of them) this late into the band's development. Honestly, "Disintegration" and "Wish" set insanely high watermarks for the band, but "Songs Of A Lost World" slots in VERY confidently at #3.

Anyway, one of the gifts from my family for my birthday was a new set of very high-end headphones, which I've been giving a good use the last couple of days, getting caught up on a handful of other stuff, and I'll see what I can do for a hard push the next few days.