How did I miss this? Someone's trying to produce a cable-TV production of The Black Company with Eliza Dushku in the Lady role. I'm not sure why the emphasis on the Lady, since the actual protagonist is, y'know, Croaker, but that's interesting.

Ah, IM Global's a new player in television. Could be that they went too heavy on options and are inactive.

And there you go, it's finished. The story of the Annals is complete. The Company goes on, and life moves on, but the play is over.

I've got some further ideas, and certain characters were threatening to break out on their own towards the end there. In fact, they may break out of protective custody at some point, and start up their own story. But I'm making an executive decision that those stories aren't a part of the Annals' story.

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It turns out, I was wavering between two capitalization schemes for my chapter titles, and I decided this morning to fix on one single standard, however wrong it might be.

Also, found a continuity error I just committed in the most recent chapter - addressed, lamely. Oh, well.

But first, totallynotabrony's version of dreamwalker Cherie., getting ready to pounce on Woona or da Captain

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I need to stash a batpony for a couple hours until the heat's off, man.

So, I've been leaning hard on certain models while laying out my story, and cheating as the needs of the narrative dictate for the details. Nobody needs to get the exact layout of, say, Bison Country, or how much of a Western Sea there is out past the far west. Especially since the way the story's been breaking, we're never going to lay eyes on an actual bison.

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So, I'm trying something new, a layered story-within-a-story, narrator-within-external-narration sort of affair. Trying to see if I can't get some good old fashioned Equestrian harmonic ideology injected into the rebellious heart of my little war-epic. Via allegorical foal-stories told in the kitchen by a captive baker.

So, one part Scheherazade of Tambelon, one part Pony St. Patrick.

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It's like Black Lagoon and Gundam Wing had a drunken one-night stand and nine months later Black Lagoon gave birth to a pretty, pretty little bishounen. And then dumped it on the front steps of the Rip-off Church to be sort-of-raised by mercenary nuns. ("Oh, stop bitching, kid. At least I didn't abort you.") I haven't watched all of the Gundams - Sunrise craps out one every other year like clockwork - but as of the first half-dozen episodes, this is the best one I've

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What are folks' opinion on what the Equestrian equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency is named? I'm going to go ahead and say that SMILE is a more pugnacious variant of the FBI crossed with the Marshall's Service, if only because I loathe the name and the general attitude as described in canon. Not a great fan of what they did with "Agent Sweetie Drops". So, rival agency for foreign service and proper intelligence-work. Chengar Qordath calls them "EIS", or the "Equestrian

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So, I've been calling Dance Hall a 'star fortress', which isn't strictly accurate. Star forts are massive post-gunpowder fortifications which hide their low curtain walls behind heavy sloped masonry and earthwork glacis to keep siege artillery from knocking over the vulnerable walls. Dance Hall, despite its glacis and (not yet described, but totally implied by the term I've been mis-using) projecting bastions, is explicitly not designed to withstand artillery fire, but rather, to provide

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About thirty-forty chapters back. This story really needed a Corporal Carrot, and the lack of one has made my narrator and protagonist far too action-hero for his role. I now have a better idea of how Marty Stus develop - conservation of characterization can pull you over cliffs if you're not careful, and I wasn't, not sufficiently.

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I'm suffering under the nagging suspicion that I re-used a name on that new corporal I introduced in this morning's chapter, so it's time to take character inventory and make sure I have a full listing of the quick and the dead. I've come across a number of errors and problems in the first twenty-some chapters, including a *third* name for Tonnerre, and the fact that Rime started out being called Rame. D'oh!

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So, I made some trouble for myself in a recent chapter by mentioning, in the course of a discussion of the dubious characteristics of thestral genetics, that the natural reproduction of ponies within the Company caused the recessive-gene thestrals to disappear from the rosters by the operation of bizarro Mendelian genetics. This means that there *is* natural reproduction within the Company, which presents me the problem that these are mixed-sex ponies of peak physical condition and a culture

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Second time this season the bootleg stream I use crashed my computer partway into the new episode. I will have to wait until morning to catch the rest of it on Amazon. Damnit. I'm going to have to avoid half my follows until morning unless I want to be spoiled, or track down a youtube bootleg.

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Gut-check time: should I re-tag my Black Company crossover fic "Comedy"? I mean, I'm trying my best to not make it unleavened grimdark blood-and-mud-and-heretics-and-exterminatus-bleargh. I may be a terrible comedian, but at least a third of my chapters are attempts to tell jokes. Coal-black comedy, mind you, but jokes. And I use more stage-accents than a vaudeville revue practicing for a run in the Catskills.

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So, you may or may not have noticed, but I'm not really a visual writer. It's a strain to keep the narrative from floating in a grey mist of intentions and actions; I hope I've kept down the weeds in that lot, but one of the victims has been pony description and (shudder) cutie marks. There's a number of problems with the mark - if I could rank them, they would be as follows: 1) tone, 2) fanon, and 3) inclination.

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Faginism, like referring to loan sharks as "shylocks", is colorful, evocative, pungent, and anti-Semitic as all hell. (Check out Will Eisner's Fagin the Jew for a decent treatment of the history of Dickens' character.) But I honestly can not think of a modern slang equivalent to the concept - the idea of criminals recruiting guttersnipes to extend their petty criminal empires. If I'm to take The Wire as

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Sherp? What the hey is that?

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I've tried writing fanfic before, now and again, but never anything published. A couple silly short stories for the occasional 'zine. This will be the first long-form thing I've done other than some non-fiction. So, In the Company of Night. Almost exactly what it says on the tin, a quadruped Black Company from dubious and occluded origins, wandering down a Glory Road through the horsier reaches of the multiverse, finding trouble and leaving heartache behind. They've mostly forgotten

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