Category Archives: Another Inaccurate Forecast

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issues but I am slowly moving past those by simple expedient of ignoring the ones who think I am a bag of money to be withdrawn from.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.

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.

Next chapter of TWCD is about 30% done.

Unfortunately, I may be somewhat occupied over the weekend, so it’s unlikely (but not impossible) that it will get more done on it to the point of publishing before next week.

I’m looking over the side stories and wondering on what would be best to work on. I’ve started a forum thread if you’re interested in discussion.

http://logicalpremise.org/?forum=discussion-about-the-series/side-story-discussions

 

Next chapter of TWCD with Editing Gang

I’ve been out of commission for a bit. A mix of writer’s block and severe personal issues did that. Back pain was so bad at one point that it hurt standing, walking, sitting, or even laying down.

Right now I’m stable (sort of) but still have a lot of issues on the plate to deal with. Not sure when I’ll have this chapter ready to go as it needs a lot of work still, but its the last one before everything goes to hell.

Website under attack

Either my website specifically or the host is under extremely heavy DDOS, SQL Injection, bruteforce login spam and comment spam attacks right now and has been since early this morning.

I have pretty good defenses, multiple firewalls and security backlogs, but if the site goes down and doesn’t come back up in a few minutes, please email me. Same goes for the forums.

Still working on next chapter. Progress is slow but steady.

8300 words into the next chapter.

I don’t know if I’ll finish up tonight or not… if not I’ll do so when I go on vacation Wednesday.

Editing Gang: I’ll probably throw something up anyway tonight, at least for a first pass on what’s already written. I may go ahead and push the current OSABC chapter out as well and get the next one ready for edits.

 

Off to eat lunch.

The Cerberus Manifesto and updates

cerb2

I worked with Aberron (who writes my favorite fic about a time-reskipped Illusive Man) to create the nominal document that gets tossed around so much. Why Bioware didn’t actually write it up I don’t know, but I hope our version does justice to the concept.

I’ll be off starting October 12, and doing a lot of work on TWCD to get the next chapter or two out. I’m sorry for the delays, but there have been a lot of stupid happenings going on in my life, on top of the whole iPhone 7 mess and now exploding Note 7’s that have to be replaced, so work is hectic.

I’ve finalized the first slate of images I want done: Ahern, von Grath, Dragunov, Tetrimus, and Delacor. I’ll probably move on those before the end of the month.

Current Progress, Ranting, Whatever

I haven’t been on much, because work went insane with the full launch of the iPhone 7 and the problems with the Samsung with exploding batteries. Things are finally starting to calm down now so I may get some writing done.

I have a bit done on the next chapter. I know everyone is eager for me to get to Ilium to start the Angstrofuck of Doom(tm) but as usual I’m intending to have all the pieces moved into the correct place first.  I have several outlines of how to proceed that range from Crazy Awesome to the deaths of several main characters (and needing to redo / re-plan some later stuff to adapt to said deaths).

Currently the only people — the ONLY people — with absolute plot armor that are guaranteed to SEE ME3 are Shep, Liara, Garrus, Tel, Ahern, Grunt, and Anderson. Everyone else is (at least theoretically) on the chopping block.

Only Liara and Shep have plot armor to see ME4. (Well, and Vigil, but he’s a troll so fuck him.)

I also have a chapter of Lions about ready to go, although I’ll probably rewrite it. We’re coming to the end of the first Arc — once its’ done, we get to the second arc where Dalthos Fortress occurs. Not sure how long that will take as there’s a lot of things to go over.

The Kai Leng / Kahlee Sanders drama-trauma and what happens to Rachel comes after that part.

Finally, Aberron (the guy who writes Living an Indoctrinated Dream) and I have been working to write up the actual text of the Cerberus Manifesto, which I plan to put out sometime this week if you’re interested.

In other news, as soon as one of my artists gets back to me, I’m going to start having some of the OC’s drawn up.