Category Archives: Organizational

July Update

I’ll be brief:

  • My back has not improved, and due to some complications, surgery is … risky. I will need to wait until my vertebrae heal to have that done.
  • Until I have the surgery back pain will get worse along with possible nerve damage
  • Finances are not good enough to risk taking long leave periods and work is … unstable.

As a result, it is very unlikely that the next chapter of TWCD will be out before August. I’m sorry to have to put things off at a cliff-hanger, but that’s the facts.

The fic is on hold, not dead. Even in the extremely unlikely event that I cannot finish it I would find a writer to continue it and provide ideas and support.

(Liethr: Medical details are in the chat, Cat can tell you, I’d appreciate your opinion. )

Art Update

After several… misadventures, I’ve decided to go ahead and simply have Armesan (original artist who did the Shepard, Benezia and Liara artwork) to do a set of colored art prints for iconic characters in the PremiseVerse.

The first lineup (already paid for by the kind donators of the Patreon) would be Ahern, Dragunov, and a re-do of Galen Minsta as some were not … pleased with the result.

The next ones would probably be Pel, Admiral Vandefar, and either Uressa T’Shora, Maxwell Manswell, or possibly Richard Williams.

All previous artists are either not taking commissions, no longer available, or unsatisfactory, with the exception of LuckyFK who is simply busy, I think. I may reach out to him if he has time to perform another commission later in the year.

As I have mentioned in the chat, if you know any artists or animators who are available on commission and do sci-fi type work I would be interested in them.

Please make sure they do have an active DeviantArt account, as I have now had multiple run ins with people attempting to use other’s art as their own, and the DA community routinely seems to rat these types out.

 

The machinery creaks slowly once more…

Things have finally calmed down.

I’m back in an office again instead of living out of a box in a meeting room. The chaos at work has died down (after reaching clownshow proportions) and volume is down since this is not a time of the year people buy a lot of phones.

Medical situations of myself and my mom have stabilized, although finances aren’t so hot anymore. Meh.

I just put up remastered chapters for OSABC 24 and 25 (thanks to the Editing Gang) and they are working on 26 and 27 right now. If you haven’t reread OSABC you might want to give it a whirl, as the first 25 chapters have been overhauled quite a bit.

I’ve also gotten 4.4k words done and vetted in TWCD, and I am writing it slowly and having the editing gang fix as I go. It should be hilarious educational for them to see how badly I fuck up when I write the writing process I use is implemented.

Pause for sustained, hollow laughter

I have bits of a Cerberus file update on the Batarians and the Drell (finally). Co-author Jacob has a new and truly fucked up opposing forces document on the batarian SIU while I’m working on doing one for the salarian League of Zero. (No Jacob, you cannot write that one.)

I may or may not have a possible Tech Guide update out this month. All in all, I plan to at LEAST get the next damned chapter of TWCD out, so people don’t think this is abandoned.

Vacation, and ramblings.

So, I’m now on vacation.

Given that even after crashing most of this weekend that I’m still in a five or six hour sleep deficit, that my blood pressure and blood sugar are up and I’m tired all the time, I don’t expect to get a lot done in the week I’m off.

That being said, I’m certainly going to take a stab at getting something done, if only to reassure people that things haven’t stopped. While the next chapter is outlined fully, writing it up is somewhat of a challenge due to the way I’ve structured things.

I’m not 100% sure what the timeline will be for additional stuff. Once I get past the big mess at Ilium it will be easier to write the intervening chapters, but there’s some very ugly consequences for the changes I’ve made to canon and I have to figure out how to write stuff in about them now, not later. We’ve all seen in ME3 how a failure to lay groundwork blows up on you.

I’ve spent some time playing ME:A and had several people ask me if I’d be writing anything about it. So far, I’m very pleased with the much more realistic tone, the mystery of the setting, the focus on exploration, and what not. The aliens are also far more … believable than previous efforts. That being said, anything I would do along those lines would be even more out of phase with canon than OSABC, and frankly the Scourge looks like out of control Godpower, so…

We’ll have to see.

I’d like to reiterate a call for artists — even if you are not one yourself, if you personally know one who is active on DeviantArt or has a public display of their works for view, i would be interested. Please note that due to some issues I’ve had with previous artists, I would prefer they have a public showing of their work on a widely trafficked site.

 

Busy at work & other stuff

I haven’t been around much (or gotten any work done on the next chapter) due to some busy stuff going on at work due to the re-org — moving offices, changing certain work schedules and on-call schedules, and longer hours.

I’m typically a ‘my company right or wrong’ kind of guy, and I’m certainly not complaining per se — but it does cut into the whole ‘time off’ thing. IT and CS should calm down next week so I hope to kick off Arc II of Lions and the backdraft explosion of the Angstrofuck of Doom by next weekend, with (hopefully) a new Lions chapter out by the end of the month at the latest.

I did (finally) get a pair of books and a set of microfilms I have been waiting on to do some more work on the tech guide and the batarians, but those are pretty low priority.

A new Cerberus File : Opposing Forces and new art

I’ve held off several days because I’ve been waiting for two projects that complemented each other to complete. I’m happy to report both are done now — the debut of Dr. Tiffany Minsta, arrogant rich girl daughter of Dr. Galen Minsta and even more racist than her father.

She is the point of view of the latest Cerberus File, covering the volus’s special network. This piece was 99% written by Jacob and he should get all the credit for it. Along with this is the portrait of Tiffany done by Kerri Lynn. 

Tiffany Minsta, by Kerri Lynn

Thanks to both of them for expanding the Premiseverse.

Current Status (2017 State of the Premiseverse)

Hey folks.

So, here we are in 2017. When I started there was only Abyssal Shadows and AD Lewis and Sherry E cheering me on, and my writing was… not so hot.

I’m now at the 2.5 million words mark. So, given I did not achieve my 2016 goals, where do we go from here:

  1. Medical Crap: My mother is over both cancers (both in remission for more than six months). I still have back and knee issues, although I haven’t had a flare up in a while.
  2. Financial Crap: My job still seems secure, although we just underwent an internal reorg in IT and things are still shaking out. Unfortunately, my unit is entirely focused on the Verizon account — if something bad was to happen to that I am not sure how I would end up. The Patreon donations have given me the funds to start work on the original fiction story and to pay off the artists for work being commissioned now.
  3. Personal Crap: I am continuing to deal with some family issues but I am slowly moving past those by simple expedient of ignoring the ones who think I am a bag of money to be withdrawn from. I have had some minor altercations with friends of mine who think supporting Trump or hating Trump is somehow more important than friends you’ve known for fifteen+ years, but that is fine — I rarely if ever react to such things.
  4. Mental Crap: It’s been six years since Alysha died, on the 11th of April. I’ve continued to distract myself around that time as best as I can with writing. I’m glad the Andromeda game comes out in March, as I expect my mental stability will be shit from late March to early May as it is every year.

The plan for 2017:

That Which Cannot Die: currently being worked on. I doubt the new chapter will be ready this weekend, the earliest I would expect it, given writing difficulties I am having and the Chief Editor having hospital duty, would be January 28 — and that would be for the Editing Gang to begin their work, which will probably take at least a week.

ETA to completion? Very hard to say. You will notice that my writing speed has dropped — this is due to both my work being more demanding and the fact that now I have to carefully interweave things with what I’ve already written in a dozen documents. I would guess TWCD will be done by this year — probably towards the end, as none of us is going to be writing shit for a while when Andromeda comes out.

The Cerberus Files : Humanity is nearly completed. There are only two more pieces to go over — Corporations and independent colonies.  Also an OOC chapter, but that’s easily written. The biggest delay was in figuring out how to handle the AIS and with that out of the way the rest is much easier.

It should be finalized and marked complete by no later than mid year.

The Cerberus Files : Badass Nutjobs (i.e., Special Ops) is currently being worked on. One of the Editing Gang is doing the Volus section, while I am doing the finishing touches on quarians based on the idea of another team member. That only leaves the Salarians, Hanar and (the most complicated) the section on N7’s. I already have notes on the Salarians so that shouldn’t take long and I may end up using an idea that I discarded from my original fiction for the hanar.

Not sure when it will get done though — it’s one of my projects I work on when I get writer’s block or bored.

Ahern’s Guide to Shit You Shouldn’t Be Fighting will get updated very irregularly.

The Cerberus Files : Outcasts (Batarian/Quarian/Krogan) is up for being worked on. I have the research done on most of it, it’s just sitting down and writing it. I’d like to get it done and out of the way so I can play around with other concepts.

The other Cerberus File, Separtists (Hanar/Drell/Vorcha), will be done later in the year. I don’t have most of the drell research done yet.

The Fluff Stuff (Memories, No Single Raindrop, ANN Media Report) will get updated as I get around to having ideas. Sometimes, like with Dragunov, it just hits me.

The Tech Suite (Guide to Tech, Biotic Encyclopedia) is probably NOT getting updated this year. It takes too much research to get anything done in the Tech Guide, and I’m not sure what I want to add to the Encyclopedia yet.

The Analysis Pieces (The STG Report and STG Files) are always irregular. I’ve put off finishing the Benezia Report until I’m done with the OSABC overhaul and the STG Files will come out as needed.

The crackfic Of Serendipity and Balance WILL be getting a REGULAR (i.e., not Editing Gang) update later on this year, if possible.

If at all possible, I’d probably be writing up the entire text of the Message, Sarah William’s transmitted plea to the galaxy that got the asari (well, Uressa) to stop the turian decimation of Earth. I’ve always wanted to write a story about it, but it’s both very depressing and very emotional, the kind of shit you write while listening to sad remixes of the Imperial March and having spent the past four hours reading every TV Tropes entry under Heroic Sacrifice.

As for the Naruto stuff, it might get touched this year, but probably not.

Artwork  currently lined up includes:

  • The marriage scene
  • more OC portraits (Dragunov, Ahern, Rasa, Pel, probably some of Garrus’s team)
  • Mech and Battlesuit designs
  • The three battles (Benezia vs Aethtya, Shepard vs. Okeer and Shepard/Garrus against Tetrimus
  • Maybe more.

 

What can you do to make sure the Premiseverse continues?

  1. WRITE: The main thing that drives me to do more is knowing that people get into writing (anything, not just fan fic or ME stuff) due to reading what I wrote. I will happily showcase and mention your stuff on here or on FF.net if you let me know.
  2. LEARN: I will be expanding the Links of the Now Section a lot in the coming days, as well as a bunch of links on cultural anthropology, physics, biology, and more. The main thrust of what I write is hopefully to make people think — and if possible, think critically.
  3. JOIN IN: While I certainly did not expect the chat room to be of that much interest to anyone, I’m pleased with the results and amused at the strange cross-section of people who like my work. If you have questions, use the forum or the chat room to ask and I’ll do my best to answer — you can also email or PM on FF.net.
  4. DONATE: no, not to the patreon. If you are good at art, or music, or have a specialty skill (medicine, math, and physics), or if you are a pilot or something else unusual, your opinions, experience or contributions are invaluable. I am a best a dilettante in many fields,  and true expertise is always useful. Likewise, if you are good at art and want to give your take on something, please do — the wonderful portrait of Matriarch Trellani was done by someone volunteering, as was the piece on Victor Manswell.

 

For now, assume things will continue to move forward. There are no new projects planned at this time and the only outstanding works remaining would be the Cerberus Files covering the Geth, Yahg and Collectors (which I probably won’t even do, TBH) and the possibility of the Fall of the Inusannon Empire piece which is still in vague outlines.

Editing Gang Inquiries

I have had two people ask if the Editing Gang is willing to review works that are either directly set in the Premiseverse or draw on it’s lore / background.

Since the EG is slave labor valorous and unpaid volunteers, I though I would charge for your services ask you guys if you thought that was something you’d be interested in or not.

 

New ANN Video and TWCD Delay

I’m having a few personal issues this weekend, and some pushback in where I wanted the fights in the next chapter of TWCD to go. Therefore I don’t plan to release it this weekend.

I’ve added another chapter to the ANN Interviews piece with Dragunov. And I may have updates to a couple of other small pieces soon.

No, I don’t have a good ETA until when the next chapter of TWCD will come out. Much like the Horizon chapter, I want to take my time on it.