Easter Monday (I hope that you are well)

Hello, everyone! It's been... well, a bit too long since I've updated you on anything. The reasons are probably unsurprising; needless to say, I hope that you and your loved ones are doing well. I am incredibly thankful for your continued to support, and for what it's worth I want to make clear that I'm also completely understanding if you need, want, or decide to stop. I will not be rigorously policing user accounts or anything.

That said, to catch you up on where things are at and what I have been doing:

• The first half(ish) of the new Dark Horse season is now posted, and uploaded to writing.dog; another 4 or 5,000 words have been added to the encyclopedia
• The third chapter of An Iron Road Running has been writing.dogified, and is uploaded. Accordingly, the setting map now includes train routes. These routes are a work in progress, but they're there!
• The map engine now allows for any map option to have a defined legend, instead of the one-off case used to show the cultural subdivisions.
• I have redone the way rivers are handled, to make it less aggravating to add them (this point and the last one are, admittedly, really mostly useful for anyone using this for their own projects, which is... nobody, I think. But! If you want!)
• That particular setting map has additional detail around Issenrik, and the Meteor Islands and some of the Shrouded Rocks are now included to support the upcoming (I hope) publication of Terra Nova. To this end, the Tiurishkan dictionary has been updated.
• The Python word generator is updated with a new leveling feature, which I'm still playing around with. Basically, because probabilities are effectively based on the size of the corpus, if you try to build words that are a combination of words from two other languages and one of the two has a smaller corpus, it will weight those letter clusters more heavily to try and compensate.
• The list of Cannon Shoals names is updated and also has a column for when people died, courtesy of an upcoming story that is set well in the past. I changed some of the logic in the way tables are built, but that's all fairly minor.

I know a lot of these seem fairly structural :p again, for whatever it's worth, if you are ever interested in playing around with these experiments, I will provide whatever help I can give you in making them work for you. Otherwise, they're just things to occupy my locked down mind.

Anyway. Upcoming projects in addition to Terra Nova, which I've decided needs more work and/or reviewing:

• "Shore Leave," a Casey & Dev story that continues them being on the wrong side of a new gang (done, being edited)
• "Through Great Cloudy Skies," a standalone Cannon Shoals story set in 1922 (done, being edited)
• An as-yet-unnamed standalone dieselpunk story about breaking out of a zeppelin (most of a rough draft)
• An as-yet-unnamed commission set in immediately post-war Europe (most of a rough draft).

This latter is probably the most relevant one. I don't know how I want to handle this going forward, but it was suggested I could tie this to Patreon. The commission in particular is a one-off, but I'm not averse to writing ideas from y'all, since you have good ones and otherwise I'm just gonna write more stories about jackals. But I'm still turning it over in my head how that would work, functionally. Like, have y'all vote? Pick randomly?

If I can figure out how to make that work, I may also try to tie that in to which projects I work on more generally. Trello snapshot below, there's plenty of stuff to do and all :P

Anyway! I have rambled enough. Let me know if you have thoughts on the user-defined stories thing. And also, I guess, if I should suck it up and post WIPs here if it's going to be too long before they get uploaded to SF or writing.dog.

And, most importantly, please take care of yourselves and your friends and loved ones. Stay safe, and stay healthy, because you are wonderful people and I love the hell out of you.