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NEWS AND VIEWS - OCTOBER 2025
I got a good amount of writing done this month -- I wrote eleven chapters of Hardcore, got a good start on a new Signalverse short, and added a ton of new material to the new edition of The Complete Guide to the Signalverse. I'm almost 55,000 words into Hardcore now. Stu's adventures in Meku City -- what you might call the first "volume" of this story -- have come to an end, so I think what I'm going to do now is set it aside for a while while I catch up on some other projects. (I'm trying to avoid what happened with Lillandra -- I got stuck working on that one, exclusively, for almost a year, and it kind of burned me out.) Anyway, I'll probably start writing the next "volume" of Hardcore in early January. Personally, I'm pretty happy with how Hardcore is shaping up, even if, as I mentioned in last month's update, it hasn't exactly taken off over at Royal Road. Shrug. (Big thanks to my patrons for supporting this project, by the way, and for those folks over at Royal Road who have taken a chance on it.) As for the Signalverse, well, like I said, I started writing a new short, which takes place in Signal City in the 1920s, but most of my energy this month went into the new edition of the Guide. I finally finished writing and updating all the character profiles (713 entries), finished up the last of the essays covering the decade-by-decade history of the Signalverse, wrote some new pieces about some famous Signal City landmarks, and finally got around to writing summaries of some more important incidents/events, like the Big Bash in Big Sig, the Cyber Crisis of 2022, the Mudmen Invasion of 1957, and so on. The 2022 edition of the Guide ran about 60,000 words; this new edition is over 121,000 words so far, so it's a substantial update. I've also been learning how to use some professional design software, so it should look a little more appealing than the last edition as well, as far as layouts and all that. I've also been thinking about including a few new short stories for this book. Might as well throw everything I've got into this thing. I do feel kind of silly, pouring all this time and effort into a world-guide for a book series that very few people have actually read, but hey. Everyone needs a hobby. Oh, and the eleventh Signalverse novel, Signal Solutions, also came out this month. You can grab it here. And that's all I've got. Excelsior! |