Oh look! A shiny thing!

So I've gone without posting a new chapter to Protecting Harmony for a while now. Yes, I know and it irks me that I keep having one delay or another come up. The majority of the delay was struggling to come up with something that felt right with Fancy Pants. I'm about as prissy and refined as an unmaintained adobe house after 20 years (huh, don't that make me sound lovely...), so trying to write in a manner which I think feels more refined and believable for him has proven a struggle.

Now I've gotten dragged into writing a three part story called Not A Dog that was burning in my brain and went to the top of the feature box the second day it went up and stayed there a couple days. I need to finish this so it doesn't keep tormenting me, but in regards to my adventuring epic this post is tied to, there is good news.

The process of writing Not A Dog has done wonders to teach me new ways of thinking about writing, new eyes to catch errors and see new opportunities to do something better than I had already. In essence, taking the time to work on that separate story has granted me a chance to step up my efforts with Protecting Harmony to new levels, and possibly even carry forward the surprising impact that Ch22: Make Us Proud came in with. Long term, this is going to be so much better than I would have otherwise done. Working on Not A Dog has also driven home the point of polishing more when I finish a chapter, then posting.

As for Ch23, it currently stands around 6400 words. Putting some of my new knowledge to good use, I am evaluating if I need to break it up a bit and turn it into two chapters due to some of the content potentially working better on it's own, instead of squeezed in because I thought a selection of snippets might have been insufficient for a chapter of their own. It's a bunch of short highlights of the week, both in and after the meetings of the Royal Summit each day. Some of it, namely the points that happened in the meeting, I think I'll leave, but the ones talking about events in the evenings are dynamic enough that I could grow what was prepared as mental musings into proper short tales as a separate chapter. This includes Vojin getting to chat with Spitfire, and also Cadence briefly teleporting off with Vojin because reasons (she's just too much fun).

That said, next chapter might be a month or two more, then I'll probably knock out two in quicker succession. One fun short scenes and one with ominousness before finally meeting with Fancy Pants. From there, it's one or two chapters and the first book is done. I have some big plans for those last two that, while initially not very attention catching, will set the stage from some major stuff later. To be a little teasing, cryptic, or annoying depending on opinion, one of those things might affect the squad that will be coming to help protect the Bearers. I've also got some thematic songs to several characters or the dynamics between them.

Protecting Harmony is very much in my mind, and two tabs for the story are perpetually open in my Gdocs (notes and next chapter). I will finish this sprawling tale, of that you can be certain. The journey has barely begun.

Also still wondering if anyone's going to figure out what the first attack was before the next one hits. And first attack is relative, depending on the character you're referencing, but it is there in the story.