Weekly Update - 6/29/22

So little to do and so much time to do it in. ... Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it.

This is going to be a pretty brisk update, since I have quite a lot of work to get done over the next week or so, and I'm still dealing with all the mental baggage bullshit that comes across with the Supreme Court and over a dozen states defying the will of the people in overturning Roe v. Wade. It made dropping Piper's Prelude 3 last week particularly hard, but hopefully we make this just a momentary blip of stupidity and not the new normal. The Jan. 6 hearings have given me a little hope that some of these morons are going to go to jail, and that would be a good start, but I'm also a little sick of everyone in politics asking me for money all the fucking time. 

I'll try and keep this spoiler free for those who aren't Patreon subscribers and haven't read Quaranteam 46, which dropped yesterday, but I can say that this particular twist has been long in development and planned since early on in the story. At this point, I have rough notes from what happens in each chapter from 47-50, which is definitively going to be the Book One finale, although I fully anticipate everyone eagerly wanting me to start Book Two the moment the Book One finale drops in September, but there will be a break, with Book Two starting up in late November. But in October I will have a full epub version for Patrons, as well as a longform PDF. Also in late October or early November Book One will go on sale over on Amazon. That version will also include some of Phil's Tale and all of Piper's Prelude. I'm thinking about including the bios I've been writing for the $10 tier, but I want to get their feedback on whether or not they're okay with that before I do it. It's going to be a hell of a large book, too, for those who buy the physical version, since with this recent chapter, we crossed the 300k word mark. The book is also going to be available well before the last few chapters hit the public sites, but the last chapters will still hit those sites eventually.

I have a lot of commissioned work to get done over the next week or so, and to my commissioners, it's entirely possible I will be a little bit behind again and it may be a few days into July when you get your June delivery. Everyone's been incredibly understanding about those delays, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate your patience. I think just about all of you have written me messages saying you'd rather have them good and late than rushed and on time, and that helps a great deal. With all that in mind, however, I'm going to be heads down working on them all along with the next chapter of Brewster's Brood, which is likely to be Saturday instead of Friday, but we'll see. I'm just going to start writing on everything I have and we'll see what happens.

Of the commissions, I can tell you that one of them, The Devil's Details, will start being made available to Patrons in August. I'm probably not going to put that into a regular slot, so maybe I'll just randomly pick one day each month to do an extra drop, or I will use it if I need to buy myself a little bit of space and will push everything else back one slot when that happens. I wanted to be a few months ahead for that commissioner before I started making them publicly available, just so I was getting the tone and feel right. It's quite a bit different than anything else I'm writing, so I'm glad I'll be able to let everyone else read it as well. It has a female protagonist, and delves into Judeo-Christian mythology, as well as some other mythos, but is set in modern times.  I'm currently anticipating that running somewhere between 12-18 chapters, based on the commissioner's notes.

Also of note, let me now mention that the commissioner of Piper's Prelude is commissioning another five part mini-story in the Quaranteam universe that I'm calling McCallister's Madness, and will be about Adam McCallister, the dark hand in the creation of the Quaranteam serum, and I guarantee you that whatever you think is going to be coming in that story, you are going to be surprised and shocked, because it will not go where you think it does. The first chapter of QTMM will drop to Patrons in August, as the commissioner has been insanely helpful in keeping my continuity in check with PP and so I go through a couple of drafts of those before they make their way to you. QTMM, like QTPP, will eventually be made available to everyone, just a while after Patrons have it.

With the uptick in commissioned work, the schedule will be getting a little more wobbly for the next few months, but the long and short of it is that if I'm performing ahead of expectations for the month, then the commissioned works will pop up on extra days, and if I'm performing behind expectations for the month, they will be posted to guarantee a content drop on a given day. In August, they're being used to cover for my time traveling, even though I expect to be writing a lot while I'm in transit from one place to another. Sometimes I get a lot done; sometimes I get very little. We'll see how it goes this time around. It's been a couple of years since I was taking transoceanic flights.

The public release schedule? Yep, it's here. The next month or so looks like this: 7/2 - Quaranteam: Piper's Prelude 1, 7/9 - Quaranteam: Phil's Story 6, 7/16 - The Seven Secrets of Mr. Magpie 1, 7/23 - Quaranteam 43, 7/30 - Quaranteam: Piper's Prelude 2. It's a little bulked up on QT content because If I'm Honest 10 was published in three parts, but will be combined into 1 massive part for public release in late August.

God, I'm fucking longwinded, aren't I? I was going to do a quick in and out update, and instead I went and wrote a full length one. Crazy.

Oh! Last thing - right after this post, there's going to be a poll open to all Patrons, about the direction of Quaranteam Book Two. It should only take a minute to read and vote, and it isn't binding on what I will do, but I want to see what the dedicated audience prefers here...

Music? Sure, here's a live version of one of the songs I love dearly that apparently nobody's ever heard...

The Lemonheads - Rudderless - YouTube