Weekly Update - 5/24/23

How's your week been going? Pretty good? Me? Oh, the usual chaos and carnage, but it's all good. I went and saw Fast X over the weekend with a friend of mine that I've seen the last five with (6, 7, 8, Hobbs & Shaw, and 9) and, well, I really wanted to like it, but it mostly felt like a cover band doing somebody else's greatest hits album. There wasn't a great set piece to hold it together and I felt like almost everything that happened was basically a retread of stuff we'd seen previously. There was one great fistfight, but I go to a Fast movie to see borderline superhero stuff with cars, and this one felt like they'd abandoned practical effects almost entirely in favor of CGI. I mean, I'm probably going to see the remaining film (films?) in the series, but my expectations are even lower now than they were after 8, even with the resurgence I got after the silliness of 9. It just didn't really have as much fun as I wanted from a F&F film. 

There's been quite a bit of talk about QT2:9 on the Discord, and some of the things I've been subtly layering in the chapters have started to be picked up on. More of that to come over the next couple of chapters!

I'm partway through the next chapter of Breakpoint now, and while I'd like to have it up tonight, it's very likely it'll roll to tomorrow, and Friday's update will roll to Saturday. Speaking of which, the next thing will be a brand-new start (as chosen by the tier 4s), and I've obviously been kicking around the idea for quite a while, since it's been an option on the polls for over a year. I've written about a page of that already, although I haven't settled on a title yet. It's about an AI that decides to play matchmaker and is very much steeped in current technologies. I'm trying not to map out the whole story in advance, so that I can adapt it to feedback as it goes along. I have the core concept, the protagonist and the AI itself sort of figured out, but I want to leave the plot more open-ended and we'll see how the story develops.

I'm sort of going to leave my schedule for the next few weeks mostly floating while I try and hammer some stuff out, but I'll be sure to hit 2 updates a week at the very least, as I've been doing for the last couple of years. I appreciate all the support people have been offering and encouragement. There was also a massive collection of people who were extremely happy to see Quaranteam Book 2 start to appear on public sites. The second chapter isn't that far off for you folks, and you'll have it in your hands early next month.

The public schedule for the next month or so looks like this: 5/27 - Morgana's Gift 13, 6/3 - Seven Secrets Of Mr. Magpie 3, 6/10 - Quaranteam 2:2, 6/17 - Devil's Details 6, 6/24 - Morgana's Gift 14.

Also, there's been a bit of scuttlebutt about a collaborative project that a number of us erotic fiction writers working together on, and I can confirm that a number of us are putting together an anthology that I'll talk about more when we get closer. It's going to be a fun project with a lot of us involved. You'll hear more over the coming months. It'll be a self-contained story, a part of the Modern Mythos pantheon but not featuring anyone we've seen before in my other works.

And because I should probably leave you with some music, so I've been really getting into this band called Sleep Token lately. The whole schtick of the band (being masked/anonymous, claiming to be 'vessels' of a 'god,' etc.) is ridiculous and unnecessary, but man, are they talented...

Sleep Token - Take Me Back To Eden - YouTube