Ishta’s Companion/Relics of War: Progress Report Sixteen

I am pleased to report that Chapter Sixteen has finally been posted — we hit the magic number at 10:15 last night. I hadn’t been expecting it, so I didn’t have the files ready to go, but they’re up now.

(I had somehow recorded three donations in the wrong category in my records, which I caught last night when I realized the totals didn’t match my memory, but it wouldn’t have much affected when the chapter went up — those three would not have put it over the top without yesterday’s contributions. But if I’d had them right I might have realized how close it was and had the files ready.)

Chapter Eighteen isn’t finished yet; we were on vacation last week, so I only got a single page written, and before that the holidays and illness were delaying things. I’m hoping that now all that stuff is out of the way I’ll be more productive.

Meanwhile, Tor has been reissuing my books in trade paperback. The new edition of A Young Man Without Magic has been available for a month, and I’ve received my author copies of the new edition of Dragon Weather, which should be out next week.

Hope all of you who were in the area affected by last week’s “polar vortex” are okay; we missed it. By pure luck, our Caribbean vacation took us away from all that record cold.

(For those of you overseas, or who live in the unaffected portions of the U.S. and somehow weren’t paying attention, last week brought most of the U.S. and Canada several days of arctic conditions, with record low temperatures.)

Anyway. It’s a new year, and it’s started well for me; I hope it’s as good for all of you.

Ishta’s Companion/Relics of War: Lack of Progress Report Three

We’re still $61.00 short of posting Chapter Sixteen, and what with the holidays, house guests, and health issues (I’ve had a series of colds and bugs for almost a month now), I’m still only partway through writing Chapter Eighteen. This is further complicated by the realization that the ending in my original outline (there’s half a page of outline left to cover) isn’t very good, and I’d like to devise a better one.

But I’m going to finish this, and it probably won’t take too much longer. Posting it all… well, we’ll see, but I’m not optimistic.

I’m going to be doing some traveling, and while I’m taking my computer with me, I probably won’t have time to get all that much work done. If we do get that $61.00 in, I still may not get Chapter Sixteen posted until I get back on the 12th. We’ll see.

A minor bit of Ethshar news: The new edition of Ithanalin’s Restoration is scheduled for June.

A less-definite bit of Ethshar news: I’ve been plotting the next Ethshar novel, Stone Unturned, when Ishta’s Companion is being uncooperative. It’s beginning to feel as if it wants to be three or four separate stories instead of one big one. There would still be a novel with the main plot, but a couple of subplots don’t seem to want to merge in and might wind up as separate novelets, novellas, or even novels in their own right, though they’d still intersect the main story for a couple of chapters. It’ll be interesting to see how it all works out — but this means I probably can’t do it as a serial, even if I wanted to.

And I need to finish Ishta’s Companion first, anyway.