Grey Wolf: Blog

Major posting glitch with today's chapter. The chapter currently up as 88 is actually 89!

I've considered my options on this. I don't really have enough buffer for a bonus chapter, and I don't like leaving readers chapterless on Wednesday. There's little to nothing in the real chapter 88 that would cause issues reading 89.

Therefore, I'm going to shuffle the order of the two on Wednesday so that chapters are in the correct order under the correct name, and 88 will come out on Wednesday.

And hopefully I won't do this again!

Apologies to everyone for the confusion. As always, thank you for reading, and thank you for writing to me as well!

Hi everyone!

I have a (fortunately rare!) content-affecting repost of Chapter 49 queued. In one of those really dumb moments, I completely forgot 'Dad's' (aka Sam's) birthday, which was at the end of the chapter. The added text is short, and to save readers the need to chase it down, I'm posting it to the comments for Book 4 (posting it here puts it out there for readers of previous books, and while there is at most only a tiny spoiler, I'd still rather limit it).

Variation on a Theme (as a collective work) is now over the three million download mark! Since everyone likes big round numbers, that's worth a bit of celebrating.

Of course, it's mostly over that number because I write lots of medium-sized chapters, but it still works.

Speaking of writing lots of medium-sized chapters, writing has been going well over the last week or so. The plan remains (and will remain) that, if I go below a twenty chapter gap between publishing and writing, I will drop to two postings a week. However, I'm several chapters further away from the edge than I was when I announced that.

A couple of bad writing weeks could shift the balance back the other way, but right now things are in a good place.

Just in case the previous blog was confusing (because clearly it was, based on feedback), the issue isn't that Northwestern is inconsistent with our universe, the issue is that it's inconsistent with how it's written in the story. The schedule laid out in Chapter 2 isn't followed in the rest of the story. Mock rounds, their tournament, and the last week are a week sooner than described.

It's that internal inconsistency that I want to fix, and the fix will be to update Chapter 2 and other 'seven week' references, not to add a week in August. Everyone has things to do in Houston over that week :)

There's an error (which some readers have already noticed) concerning the length of the Northwestern summer program. There are plenty of references to it being a seven-week program, but it's not, it's six weeks. In particular, the session introduction is wrong, but any reference to seven weeks is also wrong.

Totally my fault (obviously). I had it planned to be seven weeks and wrote a considerable amount of it that way, then managed to find out the historic dates and determined that it was six weeks. Changes ensued, but not all of the references were fixed, including some really important ones.

On a semi-related note (not really, because I had time to write Northwestern properly and just dropped the ball), I've blogged before about my 'buffer' between posting and writing shrinking. From mid-September to late October I've had a lot going on that's keeping me from writing at the pace I'd like. Nothing bad, but two trips (a short one related to volunteering and a two-week work trip) and an extensive and sleep-depriving volunteer commitment in October are to blame.

In theory, November and December should be better, but I have two more weekend trips planned and the holidays can always interrupt things (though I have no big holiday plans at all).

All this is to say that I've decided that if my 'buffer' drops to 20 chapters, I'm going to drop to posting two times a week until it gets back to the 30+ chapter level where I would like it to be. I rely on having that buffer too much, probably, but the story would really suffer if I didn't have space to backfill corrections, dropped plotlines, and so forth.

Given that, I'd welcome comments as to your preferred posting dates for 2x/week. Tentatively I'm thinking Tuesday/Friday, but could be convinced of nearly anything that people prefer.

As always, thanks for reading!