Grey Wolf: Blog

Hello everyone!

Those who are reading the comment thread for Book 4 (many, but by no means all, of the 'serialized' readers - the ones most likely to care about delays) know this, but for everyone else:

Based on feedback on the comment thread, I will be pausing the start of VoaT Book 5 for at least three weeks following the end of Book 4 on Friday.

Rest assured that I have no plans to shift projects before at least the late 1980s happen in VoaT (probably later). There are too many plot threads in progress that really can't pay off before then, and I don't want to shove them into an Epilogue or the like.

Never say never, but my plans are to carry the story forward. That said: as I said before, August was a rough month for productivity and I'm away from my house about as much as I'm home in September.

October can also be a rough month for productivity (I have a significant volunteer commitment in October), but I expect it'll be much better.

Mostly, this takes a lot of pressure off of early October, which is a good thing.

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 :)