PirateFest this weekend was a blast! Several blasts!
Having fun by taking silly cartoon ponies way too seriously.
Because I am obsessive about those sorts of details, I had to know if the captain's gig could plausibly fit on Nebula's main deck with her gasbag fully inflated. I wrote a scene where that happens, and a little voice at the back of my head kept nagging at me to make sure I wasn't describing something that couldn't be done. Turns out after a morning of modeling and measuring, the gig can fit—just barely.
Here's a side-by-side comparison:
As expected, sharp-eyed readers have spotted several errors and typos in the glossary for The Cadenza Prophecies and I have gone about fixing them. Nothing noteworthy there, but I also made a major overhaul to one of the illustrations that only served to explain one term. Now it is much more useful:
I decided to append the glossary to the end of the story. Turns out it's longer than any of the chapters.
It will remain the last chapter even as new chapters come out. As I recall, that created some issues with quoting comments or something like that in The Skyla Pseudonym, so be aware of that if you want to comment on the glossary itself.
Enjoy!
Still working on the glossary and diagrams. It turned out to be a much bigger job than I'd anticipated, what with having to get the 3D model into much better shape than the "noodling around" stage it's been in for years. The ability to produce illustrations specific to fantasy/steampunkish airship equipment will be worth it, I think. I might as well include other terms pertinent to the story, such as phylactery, taewidha, interstitial vortex, and thaumochromatic detonation
I’m trying to spin a fun little air-pirate fantasy here, and on the day the chapter where my characters have a little “debate” about swordplay releases, some lunatic with a katana goes on a murderous rampage in London. In order to keep the comment section of the chapter (mostly) free of things unrelated to pretty pastel ponies, I'm directing people to this post, where they can discuss, debate, or just plain rage if they want.
Captain Blackmane visits Surprise, and finds her very familiar.
(Nebula's plan, despite lacking a foremast, is very close to Surprise's.)
I gathered many reference photos while aboard, some of which will show up as explanatory illustrations in the author notes of TCP. Then Twi, my wife, and I took a little jaunt aboard a slightly (300 years) older ship.