Happy New Year (>.>)

Hello, lovelies!

Happy New Year, uh, belatedly. I hope that it has been treating you well enough. I have been quiet, and I have not posted anything on SoFurry either, so: this serves as confirmation that I am still alive, and here are some updates as to what has been going on in the background.

First off: hopefully writing.dog is working for you. My webhost was (quite understandably) unhappy about the outdated version of PHP I was running, and so I've wound up both updating to a version of PHP that is still technically being supported, and to the latest version of concrete5. That took... longer than I wanted it to. I believe it is working. If all is well, you will not even notice that anything has changed :P

Content updates:

• I have updated the way the map rendering engine works, such that it can now support multiple versions of a map. This was created for the new moreauverse novel, although it's also now implemented on the Brave New World map.
• Both of those maps are "works in progress," but contouring continues for the Kashkin map and most of the cities are now in place. As I edit and post chapters of the novel, my intent is to include inline maps to help keep the geography in place. I guess.
• The novel in question, which has no name, is finished. I do not like it, but at least a draft exists and is being edited.
• The second half of a new dieselpunk story is now about 30% finished. The first half was written last year and never got posted.
• I've added a new mood to Nakath-Rukhat, the preferential mood (standing in for the modal phrase "would like to") which can be combined with the other moods to make Rukhat increasingly synthetic. It's part of the conjugation tables for all the verbs in the dictionary. There are some new words, too, although I'm trying to make "random digressions into conlang" less a part of the new novel.
• ...If for whatever reason you are interested in the other experiments that occupy my time, here is a map tracking ICU availability, per state, updated when I sync data from the CDC, and here is a visualization I put together to show political polarization over time. Both of these represent the most on-brand of my coding decisions, which is "something that should be d3, but isn't." But in case you find them interesting!

Non-content updates and future plans: to be very honest with you there are a couple of major projects, most notably the sixth Star Patrol season, that I would like to write but I have not had the gumption to plot out. Instead I've been focusing on a couple of "commissions" (as noted before, please feel free to suggest things! I will write things for you!) to at least continue putting words to paper.

Because I do not know when those words will naturally be published, and because I do not want to go completely dark, I'm putting finished-but-draft-content in a Dropbox link, which I hope works? Contained therein are the first three chapters of the new moreauverse novel, the dieselpunk story mentioned above, and a novel I wrote several years ago and have periodically gone back and edited with the aim of maybe posting it on SoFurry.

If Dropbox doesn't work or if that's not how we do things around here or if you'd rather me just... throw them onto my website and post a link to the folder here, I can do that, too. I was aiming for something frictionless :P and perhaps one that notifies you when new content is added so that things do not remain completely dark.

Finally, there will be a writing contest on SoFurry beginning in the next couple of weeks and running for a month, aimed at ~5,000 words. There will be prizes! I know some of your are writers—some of you are quite good writers!—so I will post again when the contest launches, but just as a heads-up, it will exist, and... I will judge you? But not in a mean way.

I could never judge you in a mean way <3