Various Degrees of News

So, I was just randomly thinking to myself "I have this blog thing here… I should probably use it more." And lo and behold, I bring you news.

First, it's my birthday today! So I've just turned 19, nothing's particularly different and I'm still awaiting the start of school and trying to buy ridiculously overpriced books (If anyone has a spare Calculus: Early Transcendentals 7th ed by James Stewart lying around and they'd like to help an aspiring engineer/physicist/cellist/programmer out, that would make my entire month of August). I also redid my bio on my userpage to reflect my one year gain, both in age and in time on the site. It's a lot longer now. Also did some other userpage editing and moving around. Check it out if you want.

Now, on to other things. Bred for War is coming along, still slowly. I'm running into trouble with finding the right balance between description and internal thoughts while keeping the overall story coherent. I'm almost there though, so I'll get through it. Mind vs Matter is, well, not coming along. I'm contemplating a rewrite, though I don't think I'll go through with it. But Chapter 4 won't be out until I've greatly improved my writing. This is the story I really want to shine in the end, and it will have a lot of world building elements that really need to be solidified before I move on. Particularly, the fact that I'm trying to construct a draconic language for the MLP verse dragons, and to construct a wolf language as well. I might just go really unnecessarily overboard, and make languages for the Zebra, Griffons and Deer as well. And this is just part of the problem. There're characters of each of these species to flesh out. There are cities to conceptualize and describe, systems of government, a system magic to implement, backstories, plot holes to fill, etc. etc. So, don't be surprised to see Mind vs Matter go on hiatus if I can't reign all of this in.

So, we've had some good news and some serious news. All that's left to cover is the sad stuff. …My grandmother was recently diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer and she'll be going through chemotherapy soon. So, if you're looking for a much more concrete reason as to why writing is slow (even my proofreading has taken a hit), that's it. Wish her the best, and I hope to have more for you all in the near future, maybe even a new story or two.

~Lupo

There was going to be a random picture here, but it was too big and apparently knighty has a pretty non-comprehensive list of valid BBCode. I was trying to use the resized image tags [img={width}x{height}]{img url}. Didn't work. Also, knighty needs to allow the superscript and subscript tags ( ^{and _).}