Pierced 6b is done!

Or nearly. I've given it the mandatory second edit, so I can send it in to Simon this evening and it will be ready for this weekend's update. Huzzah!

I'll aim to give it another polish this evening, depending on time available. Uzobono has caught up to me with the CORE #10 rendering, so I badly need to send her the next scenes for that as well.

Also, I think I may have resolved a years-old problem I encountered while writing 'What Has Been Lost', a story I set in Iago's Middle Urth universe. I published the first part on the MC Garden lo these many years ago, then never followed up with the rest.

Be warned, there will probably be what some consider spoilers in this part. These are the Tabico Secret Files, you have to expect that there are going to be some secrets here.

I'd come up with this nifty story structure for 'What Has Been Lost'; the protagonists are in 'present time' Middle Urth, and they discover an ancient ruin with an olithoi in it. (If you don't know what an olithoi is, go read my Middle Urth stories.) They interact with this olithoi and in the process, experience some of the olithoi's life from hundreds of years before.

So the story was going to be one 'present day' chapter, one historical olithoi past-life chapter, another present day chapter, another past-life chapter, etc, for a total of seven chapters, three of them set in the past. I've written (as in, they're actually done) the first, second, and third chapters, and I know what's going into the fifth and seventh (the present day chapters). I even know the dramatic ending! (Which has been my problem with 'Pierced', really, aside of course from real life taking away all my time.)

BUT I got stuck on the other two past-life chapters! I tried multiple times to start chapter four and just never got anywhere. If I had stuck to my advice which I gave Callidus ("don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good") I could have just dropped the two past-life chapters, written the rest, and no one but me would have ever known.

But somehow I couldn't do that. So the story has hung around, half-finished, for... four years? Something like that.

Happily, I think I've figured out how I can crack that fourth chapter! And the key is: noble houses. I'm writing about the rise of the Witch Queen, and I have to provide enough resistance to her for the story to be dramatic and not a forgone conclusion, but not enough that she would lose. And the way I'm going to do that is: noble houses. The political structure of the city is so factionalized, so riven by infighting, that although they could overpower her (fairly easily) in a straight-up fight, by the time they recognize the threat that the WQ poses, it's too late. She's knocked them down one by one.

So where am I now? Gotta finish 'Pierced', gotta finish CORE #10, and then maybe I can get back to Middle Urth. Oh, though I want to put out the final chapter / epilogue of 'Seed'. And Uzobono would really like for me to do the same for 'Compromise'.

Oh, and I would like to get back to 'Winter Flesh'...