Oh God, It's Winter?

Hello, lovely people. It is… well, judging by this week in Berlin, it is thinking about being winter here, and I have been too quiet in providing updates. I’m very sorry about that, especially if it’s given anyone the impression that this project is abandoned. It’s not abandoned, but the regular content updates to writing.dog were not ones that I thought, generally, warranted a full post here, and then… that got away from me. You are a wonderful crowd and I’m incredibly thankful for your support.

Excuses aside, two quick updates on what I actually have been doing, one of which will pay dividends immediately and one of which will not.

The non-immediate one is I’ve been undertaking a lengthy rework of the map used in Hatikvah, particularly around increasing terrain detail and reducing some of the dumb shortcuts I used when first building out the map. I intend to use this for some more interactive stuff in the sequel novel. Compared to the old version, total geometry complexity has increased by about 600%; I have not yet finished reworking the terrain, rivers and town placement comes next, but by the time it’s finished to accompany the novel the road network will also be updated and I will work on cleaning up any new errors. This will always be a work in progress—I’m not dealing with areas of the continent that never come up, or at least not spending much time on them—but the core area should be much cleaner now.

The immediate one is I’ve also finished refactoring how I produce the annotated stories available on writing.dog. This was in response to a patron asking if it would be possible to make stories available as ebooks for download, which was always technically possible but did not work super well with how I was handling the export process. So, going forward, stories on writing.dog will also have a download link for an epub version. I can do Kindle, too, if that’s helpful. Attached is the ebook for An Iron Road Running, with all writing.dog annotations available instead as footnotes.

Somewhat related, I have about 70,000 words of stories that I have drafted but have not published because they still need cleanup. I’m not averse to sharing those with you all, especially as otherwise what happens is I go completely silent. I haven’t posted them because they are part of larger projects and, as you have noticed, I have a bad habit of creating inadvertent cliffhangers. For those who are interested, what is the best way to share… I mean, honestly, just a big bunch of RTF files?

Given that a big chunk of them are, uh, “Adult,” I do not want to post them here directly. Is this something Dropbox would be useful for? Should I figure out how to actually create a Discord for stuff like that? This is an area at which I’m… kind of at a loss.

Most of that content is wrapped up in the Hatikvah sequel, which I’d say is probably 70% complete, and the chapters that are finished so far are pretty linear, so it does tell something of a coherent narrative. The other is the first part of a two-part dieselpunk story, for which I have not yet started writing the second part.

Anyway. Let me know! I hope you all are staying safe and healthy, and I hope November treats you well enough. Germans do not really do Thanksgiving but I am, honestly, incredibly thankful for my readers and the support you all have given me over what is, let’s be honest, one heck of a year.

(This is also your opening to throw story ideas at me because the novel is going to hit the Needs Motivation To Write stage pretty soon)