The incredibly predictable outcome of the way I work... · 1:09am Dec 16th, 2012

Got a brace of prose pouting out under my fingertips. No, I tell a lie: three stories. Three that I'm working on anyway, which has kind of put a dent in the time I was spending on Xenophile's Guide.

You've probably seen the Lyra side-story I worked on by now (if you haven't, hurry up and read it already) which was a pleasure to write, simply because it got me away from writing quasi-non-fiction for a while, and it's inspired me to write more. Guiding Light I've probably already mentioned (but I'll mention it again!), and that's getting more work done to it as we speak, but I'm also working on not one but two more side-stories for Xenophilia. One I may never publish, at least in its current form, but the other - as the people demand - is about Star Sparkle, who is as close to an OC as it's possible for a semi-canon character to get, now, and who is also apparently quite popular.

I must art her...

What this means, though, is that work on the Guide is inevitably delayed again. It's a symptom of how I work, unfortunately. I tend to bounce between several projects at once just for the sake of the variety, because if I try and stick to just one I get bogged down and go a little loopy. Last time I forced myself to stick to a single project was when I wrote my epic Futurama cycle, Parallel Lives, which I managed to work on for a quite a while until I burned out and swore off writing entirely for nearly 5 years.

So here's the deal: I have quite a few chapters of the Xenophile's Guide that are almost finished. They will be finished. They're just not finished quite yet. Of course I'm off to Sweden on Tuesday, so it's unlikely that I'll be updating anything for a while anyway... so I suppose I could have hidden behind that. But I like to be honest.

So, to keep you all from murdering me in my sleep, here's a sample:

Lyra Heartstrings - Grand Master
It is said, many years ago, that the Unicorn, Pleasant Posture, discovered the truth of the Still Way whilst seated on the peak of a mountain, staring at the sun. Pleasant Posture would climb the mountain to watch the sun rise each morning, seeking the source of all things, the eternal centre to which all returned, until one day she fell asleep. And, as she slept, she had a vision of a great stone falling from a great height to the centre of a deep gorge, where it was worn away to a pebble by the eternal flow of a great river. On waking, Pleasant Posture was overjoyed, for she had realised that while she slept, it was she that had fallen from a great height and landed in a pile of snow at the foot of the mountain. “Truly,” said the great master Pleasant Posture, “the center of all things is Stillness, for once we are Still we must be at a place where we can fall no farther!” And from that day forth she sought to be still in all things, for it is in stillness that we find our balance and our place in the world.
History forgets that Pleasant Posture never climbed a mountain again, just in case there wasn’t another snow drift.

So, yeah.

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