(I have to confess, I basically didn't write this week. This update was close to done last Thursday, but I couldn't focus and get it over the line because I had too many little things I needed to think about or deal with piled up and distracting me, and also had lost my vision for this part of the story overall a bit. I feel a lot more clear-headed now.
The demo of the VN is very close to done. My current idea is to share it with a few people privately first while the final...
2025-08-20 17:25:42 +0000 UTC
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(If you follow the discord, you know I wanted to make some edits to the previous draft before it went live, and I still do - but I just haven't had time to figure out exactly how to do it. Something I never really expected I'd have to think about so much starting out with this story is how much I end up thinking about how to avoid wasting reader's time - giving information that's misleading in such a way that leads to fun speculation rather than just dead ends. Even a red herring has to b...
2025-08-06 17:54:43 +0000 UTC
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(My hard drive died! Fortunately everything is more or less okay. I lost a bit of progress on this chapter, but nothing serious.
I'm worried this one might be a bit too worldbuilding heavy and dry for a return from a 2 week break, but it can't be helped. I hope you guys enjoy it.)
10:15 AM | Anuem Suburbs | March 28th | 1403 COVENANT
Lilith, grasping the piece of thin, sharpened wood she'd found in the garden tightly, slowly scraped ...
2025-07-30 18:15:40 +0000 UTC
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(I said last week that the chapter was a little short because I wanted to get things strictly back on the proper day, and here I am a week later a day late again, and with an even shorter chapter... Not an amazing start for the several new patrons who joined this week. AI work has been very rough lately, and I also spent a bit more time on the script. The heat hasn't helped either.
The next couple chapters will depart from the back-and-forth within the chapters to focus exc...
2025-07-17 16:55:09 +0000 UTC
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(I originally planned for this update to be a bit longer, but I decided to prioritize sticking to the right day after being unreliable with that recently. Well, it's still decent, even if it's a little uneventful.)
7:55 PM | The Ninsirsir, Deck 3 | December 31st | 1608 COVENANT
Someone - a tan-skinned man who could have been either Saoic or Viraaki, with his hair shaved save for a strip down the middle of his scalp and a tiny but well-groomed beard...
2025-07-09 17:04:15 +0000 UTC
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(This one didn't come easily. I had a death in the family and, even though we weren't close, they live internationally and the whole process was drawn out and unpleasant. So I've been off-kilter. I like how this one turned out otherwise, though.)
"I'm impressed, Kasua," the woman declared. "I suspect you have the truth of it precisely. The Uqartul is a cunning beast with far more versatile powers than even the locals believe, and certainly would have been attracted to a ...
2025-07-03 12:09:31 +0000 UTC
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(Sorry this one's a bit late. I got a bit delayed by bad sleep, and then I figured I might as well add a bit more to it since it was kind of short. The plan is for this arc to be told a bit differently, with regular cuts between two different perspectives. Please let me know if you think people will find this obnoxious.)
Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day
Gudrun asked the obvious conclusion. "What for?"<...
2025-06-19 11:47:01 +0000 UTC
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(Shorter chapter this time around again after last week's long one. I worked a lot on the VN script though! The part that'll become the demo is almost done.)
M-Imyrakat: It's impossible to verify without the ability to perform an external test, but I believe that Poriyalar and I have finally created a theory that explains the problem.
Y-Serdar: Well, don't keep us in the dark.
M-Imyrakat: I'm... afraid it's n...
2025-06-11 17:42:54 +0000 UTC
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(It's probably a good thing I didn't try to combine this with the previous chapter in the end, because this is one of the longest I've written in a fair while. The total would have been about 14,500 words.
As I said, this marks the end of the current arc, and also leaves us about ~65% to 70% through the train murder generally. Circumstance demanded I crunch pretty hard on this one, so let me know how it reads.)
Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM |...
2025-06-04 18:01:04 +0000 UTC
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(Things did not go super well this week. This needed to be a long chapter to begin with, and I realized I'd created a bit of plotting error in this segment, throwing off the rhythm of my usual schedule. Then I had a bit of a dental emergency and had to do something stressful right in the middle of when I'd normally be crunching.
It hasn't come together. This is only the first half the chapter I wanted to make, and honestly it feels much flatter than I intended. It's just on...
2025-05-22 17:26:01 +0000 UTC
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(Penultimate chapter of the section. It's probably possible to solve a few things about this mystery now, though since there's been no murder yet, obviously not the full thing.)
Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day
I almost wrote my real name by accident, but managed to avoid it. To my surprise, the body even gave Kasua a unique style of handwriting. It was a lot blockier than what I normally did.
"Make sure you fold...
2025-05-14 17:18:01 +0000 UTC
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(Managed to catch up with a lot of VN stuff in the past week, and make some progress to revisions on the Dilmun stuff. I'm thinking of making a few changes to try and make it feel a little easier get invested, into, including 1) emphasizing the hourglass threat and Su's fear of death more without casting so much doubt on it and making the situation so ambiguous, 2) shifting Kam's journal entries so everything so far is part of one big arc, and 3) reordering a few of the secondary events, ...
2025-05-07 17:29:46 +0000 UTC
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(I got into a very weird state of this mind this week and almost missed this update due to being bad at juggling different types of work, but somehow managed to scrape through. Still, this one's a bit on the shorter side.
I probably will end up missing another update soon... I'm still trying to find an alternative to my awful AI training work to scrape together more money, but at the moment it just doesn't feel completely realistic to maintain it 100% alongside everything e...
2025-04-23 17:05:32 +0000 UTC
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(Felt very sleepy today, so pardon if there are more typos than usual. I was expecting this chapter to be one of the boring ones of the train sequence, but it actually came out okay - hopefully you all enjoy it.)
Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day
I was being forced to re-evaluate my opinion on Tuthal. Not in the sense that he wasn't supposed to be an asshole - that point was being driven into the ground harder than a mi...
2025-04-16 17:15:32 +0000 UTC
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(Three or four more chapters after this one before we get to the fun part of the train mystery, depending on the word count I manage. Incidentally, the rejected title for this arc was 'Pareidolia'.)
Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day
Proving it, though, was another matter. Setting aside the fact that half of my reasoning was predicated on metagaming and thus would be very difficult to justify my character having reached ...
2025-04-09 16:59:16 +0000 UTC
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(I feel like I've got back into the habit of apologizing too much on these again, but sorry for the missing week. I'm a bit overwhelmed with too many different types of work at the moment, and have needed to spend a lot of time with my mom for personal reasons. Hopefully you all enjoy the update.)
Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day
It was two figures, one of whom was in the process of being showed in, and a second who wa...
2025-04-02 18:24:16 +0000 UTC
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(I'm still not sure about this, but I couldn't really come to any contrary resolution over the past week, so I decided to just try and drop my doubts and go for it with this one. I still might pivot if people dislike it.)
Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day
Including myself, there were supposed to be 10 members of the cast, though the amount of foreknowledge I was given about them was wildly varied depending on 'Kasua's' ...
2025-03-20 17:52:17 +0000 UTC
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(So I wish I could return from this past missing week with a meaty chapter as often happens, but things have gone a little awry. So to give a little background, since basically I started this project, I've had this idea of writing a smaller, pseudo-self contained classical mystery story within TFTBN. My original thought was just to give myself and readers a 'break' from the extreme complexity of the main narrative to chew on something more tangibly solvable for a bit, but as I stewed on t...
2025-03-13 11:33:58 +0000 UTC
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(Well, this one was a bit of a mess. Once again, I had something keeping me busy on my primary crunch day, and so tried to squeeze out the last portion of this chapter between doing other things. I managed it this time, but it took a lot longer than I intended for a pretty short one.
If you missed it, I gave a preliminary announcement regarding the visual novel adaption I've talked about a few times on tumblr, and I'd be lying if I said that hasn't been taking up some of my...
2025-02-28 14:14:15 +0000 UTC
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(Still a little ill, but getting back into the swing of things. I wished I'd had a bit more energy for last week's chapter - Su's speculation didn't quite capture the frenetic energy I'd hoped for originally. This one came out decently, though.
Will probably be some VN-related news this week; watch this space.)
Empyrean Bastion Depths | 4:41 PM | First Day
--int, 'CIVIL SERVICE IS SLAVERY'. Beneath, in somewhat smaller font, the auth...
2025-02-19 18:26:39 +0000 UTC
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(I'm having a really lousy streak lately! Even though it hasn't even been that long since the last one, I was hit by a nasty cold this week, and have been in and out of bed since Sunday. I wanted to avoid yet another skipped week, but I can't say I'm completely confident in this chapter, since I've been drowsy all day. Hopefully it's okay-- Lemme know if anything seems strange or incoherent.
After seeing people's responses to the previous two chapters, there's a little more...
2025-02-12 18:01:00 +0000 UTC
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(Please excuse me for last week, I totally psyched myself out of being able to write the chapter for no real good reason. The longer this story has gone on and the more different angles the themes have been addressed from, the harder its become to write a lot of the more introspective parts in ways that feel like they encompass the existing scope of the ideas. I probably need to make some changes to how I'm doing my note-keeping in that respect.)
I burst in through the d...
2025-02-05 19:20:26 +0000 UTC
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(Sorry for the delay. This was a chapter that very nearly ended in a skipped week - I just couldn't get into the right mindset. A problem I'm finding happens repeatedly with the Dilmun chapters is that, because the sequence of events isn't as strictly defined as in the conclave/gala segments, I have to be in a bit more of a relaxed and thoughtful mindset to write them properly, which is difficult to achieve when trying to push myself and crunch.
Even though it was definitel...
2025-01-23 11:27:01 +0000 UTC
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(I'm really having a run of bad luck in terms of migraines on update days lately. Managed to push this one out to an acceptable length regardless, though I can't speak to how many typos it'll end up having compared to usual. I'll try to give it a review tomorrow.
I hope people don't find the ways the Kamrusepa sections are being inserted into the text annoying - I might end up shifting it to something more standard, since it's another part of the Dilmun section that got rev...
2025-01-15 19:05:21 +0000 UTC
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(Couldn't get into a decent flow state this week, and so didn't have time to update the previous chapter and also add enough new content. It'll just have to do.
There are a couple interesting moments in the main conversation of this chapter that I sort of wish I'd had more of the juice for, but all things considered it worked out okay. Next week we'll be back into the meat of actual plot movement.)
Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞...
2025-01-08 18:40:31 +0000 UTC
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(Happy new year! I didn't get the chance to make this one as long as I might have liked, so I might add some to it later, though it does work as it is even if it's somewhat liminal; mostly just making explicit information the reader already has. But there was a revelation I wanted to end on that would have taken another 2000 words at least, so... we'll see.)
Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day
Every moment I continued to ...
2025-01-01 19:05:49 +0000 UTC
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(Still getting a weird amount of brain fog and migraines, but it's got reasonably better so it's unlikely I have a brain tumor. However, this improvement has been offset somewhat my the advent of Christmas, which may well cause update problems in the coming week. I'll keep you posted.
This update actually underwent some more significant structural revisions than normal, with me cutting part of the midsection that didn't feel like it was working. Let me know if it feels too ...
2024-12-18 18:50:03 +0000 UTC
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(Unfortunately, despite not really working any harder than usual, I hit some kind of weird energy wall this week and have been going between migraines and being in a brain fog haze for the past 4 days. I'm not making connections well; I can write, but I just don't have the sauce.
I managed to write this recounting from Neferuaten's perspective, and if it were still Wednesday I'd be tempted to just shove it out the door as a short update, but honestly I'm not confident that ...
2024-12-06 18:30:15 +0000 UTC
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(I seem to be getting sick and experiencing brain fog as a result, so I apologize if this chapter feels a bit off, either on sheer typo quantity or something more fundamental. I'll see what people say and revisit it later.)
Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day
'Made it'? I thought. What does she mean, 'made it'?
"...what do you mean, 'made it'?" I asked, in a rare instance of actually acting immediately on my own int...
2024-11-27 18:20:31 +0000 UTC
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(Mostly setup in this particular chapter, but from this point forward I'm extremely confident in the structure of the story. We've passed the introduction-heavy part of post-loop segment; from here, things should quickly get pretty wild.)
Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day
I have two favorite echo games, depending on your definition of the word 'favorite'. The first, if you take 'favorite' to mean 'the one I like th...
2024-11-20 18:27:47 +0000 UTC
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