Friday the... 17th! update (plus a story!)

Hello, all you lovely people! It’s been too long since I provided any kind of update, although honestly time seems to be moving much faster these days also, so… maybe that meets somewhere in the middle. I hope your summer is going alright, and that you had a safe and happy Fourth of July, or Bastille Day, or both.

Just to catch you up on some general updates over the past month:

• A new chapter of An Iron Road Running has been posted, leaving one left. I’ve made some changes, although most of them are minor; I’ll propagate them back to SF when the final chapter is up.
• Two new chapters of Terra Nova are up, again, leaving one left. The final chapter is going to take a little bit of cleaning up as I think it ends too abruptly even for me, so… I might post the dieselpunk story in the interim.
• I’ve created a new template for handling stories with multiple chapters so they don’t clutter up the library so much. Next step is to build some kind of table-of-contents into the stories themselves so they’re properly interlinked, but I think I can see how I’ll do that already.
• Rukhat is now on a new version (if languages can be versioned), with reflexive pronouns clarified (a few new words in the dictionary, also, but the pronouns are the important bit). I’ve also, finally, added a primer on pronunciation. Going forward maybe I’ll amend that to reflect different dialects?
• In related news, the Hatikvah sequel is now at about 40,000 words. It is… very rough; if you are particularly fond of “very rough,” a sample chapter is appended here for your edification. The goal is that every “chapter” is more or less self-contained, although a few characters will have more than one story in the collection.
• I have started the process of updating the Jericho map for the new Hatikvah story, which will entail a new feature for the map engine: using the same map to show different time periods. That’s proving… thorny. But I hope to have something to show in the next couple of weeks.
• Notwithstanding, I fixed a bug with terrain shading in the map engine, as well as cleaning up the coastline for the continent on which Hatikvah takes place and in which its sequel will also take place.

Something in what I’ve done has completely screwed up the labeling algorithm I use. And I guess I would also consider this an open request: if any of you are good with, like, the mathier bits of programming and would be willing to let me pick your brain, there are two problems I’m trying to solve but am not really smart enough to manage on my own. I’ll break that into a separate post :P

In terms of outlook for the next few weeks, I have some neat ideas from you for new stories, so I’m going to try to outline those. The last Star Patrol episode is also now outlined and about half-written, and you will either like it or really dislike it so that’s an exciting thing to look forward to.

I would also like to call attention to “Voice of Dog” Khaki’s podcast over at thevoice.dog, which has been doing a truly lovely job of spotlighting good furry fiction, with Khaki’s inimitable voice besides.

And I would finally like to call attention to: you are absolutely lovely people, and if there is more I can do for you or ways I can improve I am open to it because y'all have kept me writing in the midst of, uh... *waves vaguely* you know, all of... all of the everything. I hope the everything keeps you safe, though, and that you're also able to relax at least a little bit this summer :)

Take care of yourselves, and of the people around you, and continue to be delightful because the world needs more of it.