Weekly Update - 8/21/24

Well, this is a joy - our internet is out and has been for the last hour or two, so this will probably go up on 8/22 rather than 8/21. Bleh. I'm already halfway through QT2:30 so that'll go up Thursday or Friday, and it looks like C.A.R.P.  will het another chapter Friday, Saturday or Sunday. I didn't expect Neon Stonehenge 11 to take so long for alphas until I realized we're nearing the back half of that book, and I needed to start maneuvering pieces in towards landing. Rough guess, there's probably another 6-8 chapters in that story before I move on to "Have Totem, Will Travel" for that commissioner. Modern urban fantasy novels clock in at somewhere between 70k-100k words, and NS is currently around the 55k mark.

CARP is even closer to its landing spot, with only 3 chapters remaining. I suspect the last CARP chapter may end up being bigger and taking longer than the usual, so I'll keep that in mind when its' number is up. Until I get a few stories wrapped up, I've put a self-impose moratorium on starting any new stories, simply because both CARP and Morgana's Gift are so close to the finish line. I probably do need to get a new chapter of The Threadbinders out at some point relatively soon, though, considering I think the most recent on is now public and I haven't touched the story since then.

It felt like a lot of people liked Smokeland Slumdance and it even got a handful of votes in its very first You Decide! which is good, because I've tried using a very different writing style for it, one with a lot more descriptive than I often use, painting more details in. I only have so much writing headspace in a month, and with QT2 taking up at least two spots given any month, that means not everything gets to come out and play all the time. Artie's fun to write, because while he used to be a hot shit merc, he's past his prime, and has been making his living as a fixer for so long, he's forgotten what it's like to be dumped in the thick of it.

I spent so much time playing Cyberpunk 2077 over the last few years that I wanted to get back into writing cyberpunk-style fiction again, something I hadn't really done much of in, oh, a quarter of a century or so. Shit, the last time I was writing cyberpunk stuff, it might have been even thirty years ago, and my skills weren't anywhere near as sharp as they are now. I grew up reading William Gibson, Walter Jon Williams and Steven Barnes. I also found myself turning far more critical of other writers as I grew older, with some of the people who were considered luminaries in the field bouncing off me, for whatever reasons (usually stylistic ones).

When I was glancing down at the word count for QTB2, I was more than a little nervous, because this thing is an utter monster of a book. It's approaching a quarter of a million words, and that means, when finished, I'm looking at B2 approaching 400k words. For reference, that's about the same size as everything in the print edition of Book One, including all 5 parts of Piper's Prelude, and the preview chapter 1 of Book Two. Adding in the Intermissions is still one of the things I'm most glad I've done for B2 but they certainly do add up over time. I feel like the outside world building is important, and the next one, oh MAN, I cannot tell you how long I've been waiting to write it. It's not at all what you think it's going to be, and it's going to blow. Your. Mind.

But the internet light has just turned back on for our cable modem, and I see all my various Always On apps clicking back to life with new information, so I'm going to wrap this up and get back to getting a bit more of B2:30 done, and I promise you, it's coming as soon as I can. I've outlined, which always helps, and we're still well in the midsection, so I don't have landings and conclusions to worry about. As requested, there will also be two versions of the PDF for 2:30, one with just that chapter by itself, and one with EVERYTHING up to this point in Book Two, including a more up-to-date cast of characters.

And for those of you who just read stuff as it drops publicly, there's only one release hitting this week, but that's because it's QT2:20, which, as is tradition for QT and chapter 20s, a biggun. It's the Rook wedding! It was one of my favorite chapters of the book so far, so I hope you folks love it as much as I did.

Here's what'll appear on public sites in the short term:  8/24 - QT2:20; 8/31 - QTAA9, Quaranteam: Unbroken Mold 1; 9/7 - Before The Storm 10, QTB2:i4; 9/14 - QT2:21, Pack 10; 9/21 - QTPT 19.

It's been a wild time out there for all of us, but autumn's starting to roll in, and it's my favorite season, with the possible exception of the Pumpkin Spice Invasion that I could definitely do without.

Hang in there. You know how to get through this, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.