Celtic Bard: Blog

Having grown up in the military, I spent a good bit of my childhood around all things Army and playing soldier with my friends. So imagine my chagrin when I get an e-mail pointing out my rather idiotic misspelling of "rappel" by using "repel" instead. For those reading that at the end of Chapter 12 of In the Darkness Falling and then again in Chapter 13, I have fixed it and resubmitted. All I can say is that I was a bit rushed in editing (and writing for than matter) this chapter thanks to my muse's effort to help me write the end of this story before I have even gotten there.

I just got Chapter 13 of In the Darkness Falling submitted so it should be up later toady, tomorrow at the latest. I wanted to have it posted yesterday but I ran out of time and energy to give it a last read-through before submitting it. Give it a look and enjoy.

I have just submitted a belated Author's Note that occurred to me as I was writing Chapter 13 of In the Darkness Falling. I was writing up the next chapter and I got to thinking about the scene in Chapter Twelve where Alice talks to the Russian Foreign Minister. I realized I have been rather free with the characters of actual people and that got me to thinking about the credits in movies where they have the disclaimer that the film does not reflect real persons. So I wrote up my own disclaimer, somewhat insincere though it is, just so people reading know that I did as little research into those characters that are actual historical figures as I could get away with to satisfy my own historical nitpicking. If you are into that sort of thing, enjoy. If not, you can ignore it.

As for Chapter 13 of ItDF, I have it written but I need to type it into the computer and that might take another couple/few days. I will endeavor to get that done and edited as soon as possible and then posted. Your patience is appreciated.

So there I was, lying in bed, trying to get to sleep for work in the morning when all of the sudden the end of In the Darkness Falling plays out in my mind in exquisite detail. Not the climax but the after-action stuff that ties a novel up. Needless to say, I was almost a zombie the next day at work but I had enough wherewithal to start writing it down before I lost it. Why do I tell you this? Because I was planning to try to wrap up Chapter 13 this past week to ready for an end of the month posting and instead I have been working on what will become either the last chapter or another part of the epilogue. My bloody Muse seems to be giving me inspiration at both ends of this one and I find myself writing towards the middle. This has never happened to me and I find it rather frustrating. What does this mean for you? It means I might be a few days late posting Chapter 13. Given how things are playing out in the storyline and how the ending is shaping up, I am thinking we will have another three or four chapters plus the epilogue. I know I have already said this either in another post or elsewhere, but brace yourselves for a rather tumultuous ending for this one. I don't usually like foreshadowing, but I felt some warning was warranted.

Hopefully I will get back on Chapter 13 this week or early next and you can look forward to that late this month or as early next month as I can get it edited. For those in the mood to propitiate my Muse, you might ask her to stop this bookend inspiration nonsense and keep it chronological. By the way, with the end of In the Darkness Falling I will get back to Future Distorted and Anomaly of the Fates before starting on the sequel to ItDF. Barring, of course, intervention by my contrary muse.

I was looking at some of the scores I have posted on my stories and decided to look deeper into the numbers and I am beginning to think the math algorithm being used has a bug or two in the code. As a for instance, the story Death and Love in Marjah has 414 total votes. Of those, 287 are 10s. For the rest I have to guess because the graphic the site uses is really bad. I am guessing another 70 (give or take) are 8s, 25-30 are 9s, with the rest being mostly 6s with maybe a handful or so of 5s and a few 2s. Using conservative estimates and making sure the number of votes comes out to 414, that story's score should be somewhere above 9, not hovering below 8. Now I am sure, given the crappy graph authors get showing the breakdown of the scoring, that my counts were off slightly. Slightly. Certainly not off enough to produce a 10% difference between my math and the math the site winds up with. Now, I have never been very score-conscious when writing and posting my stories but I have noticed something a little screwy about this site's scoring over the last year or so. When I saw DaLiM once more below 8, I thought I would blog about it and see if any other authors or readers noticed similar things in the stories they post or read.