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The Purpose:

The primary purpose of this wiki is to give me a place to write down all the irrelevant information on my characters that I don't want cluttering up my writing. (I find it hard to resist sometimes.) The secondary purpose is to create something somewhat interesting for the people who've read my writing. The tertiary purpose is because I can.

Current News:

The Great Fear Sweeney Rewrite of 2007 is just beginning. I plan to expand on it significantly and change the tenor of the ending somewhat. Then I suppose it's back to the querying. Sometimes I wish I could just have been happy with what I had and never tried to sell it in the first place, but that's not really my style, I'm afraid.

The second draft of Downworld, which is a complete rewrite, is expanding by leaps and bounds. Very soon now I'll be at the biggest turning point of Randa Crowley's life. I'm finding it very easy to work on Downworld and virtually impossible to work on anything else right now, though I did expand several projects last November, and in fact started a new one. It's a mystery, which is a first for me, about a cop who became a private detective to fill what he saw as a gap in the justice system—where the police force's job is to figure out what happened and who did it, his role is to determine why crimes happened. It's a good premise, and the opening is strong, but I haven't done any work on it lately. But that's okay—it'll grow when it grows.

I've done very little on the Eleventh Volume in ages, with the exception of some fairly substantial expansion of the History of the Downworld series. (Still a good deal more to go there, I'm afraid.) I plan to put a bit more time into the Volume now, so I expect it to do some more growing soon. And maybe some slight tweaks to text formatting. That's always fun.

Favorite Articles:

An interesting source of information on the Downworld is History of the Downworld, which summarizes the main differences in that alternate timeline caused by the failure of the USS Maine to explode in Havana harbor in 1898. Every country in the world was profoundly affected; even little Haiti, which is in our world the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, is completely different—as part of the Downworld confederation called the Allied Free States, it's an economic and military powerhouse fighting the Caribbean slave trade and the expansion of the New Spanish Empire. Or take an example more relevant to the Downworld story: the East Coast of the United States became Avaddonia in 1970, a dictatorship so all-controlling that it even developed a brand-new state religion, the Avaddonic Church. It's impossible to reach that world, of course, unless you're one of those four known humans capable of phase-shifting—who are also the only humans capable of performing the "Vulcan neck pinch".

Shakespeare fans might be interested to know the truth about the English Pucks, while those familiar with the Ramayana might be intrigued by the parallels between Hanuman and the Consequences Monkey, and of course those who prefer the graceful prose stylings of Dan Brown will surely be excited to learn about the nature of Angels and Demons. And, as always, everyone expecting to die some day would do well to learn about what they should expect from their Last Conversation.

Conlangers might be intrigued by the ancient Mathurian language family, especially the Maindérwo and Neshuwo languages. According to the 8,000 year old Mathurian Scrolls, the town where Neshuwo was spoken, Neshuyu, was run by a family of witches called neshrathyos, who played a major role in the Shúyu ke Fássesyu legend. One of the most intriguing stories in the Scrolls relates how a neshrathyo once turned the entire nation of Marshav into the monsters known as kagh-ogh-laen. Even today, some neo-Mathurians and Zhuwusians are trying to find modern-day descendants of the neshrathyos, in the hopes that they will have the same magical powers.

Last major update 28 January, 2007.

Articles:

There are 268 articles in total.