TLY — Argh, I hate having to work on Saturdays, and I really really can’t wait until my three newest co-workers are trained so they can have their turns. By the time I got home on Saturday after working, getting a late lunch with my parents, and grabbing the grocery order from Wal-Mart, it was 5:00 in the evening.

And you know what else I hate? That Poe-damned emergency phone. I was sitting there trying to work on story and wondering whether I oughtn’t to call it quits and just hang out with brother and maybe watch Steven Universe instead of trying to write in an after-work mood that wasn’t really working for me, and then the emergency phone rang and it turned out I had to go back into the clinic.

I got one paragraph written on this story this weekend. One paragraph.

Admittedly it was actually a pretty crucial paragraph, functioning as a very important transition and setting up the narration for the return march, which will end in a return to detail after the summarizing bit. So of all points in the story at which I could have written no more than a single paragraph over the weekend, this was probably the best. Moving on.

Heretic’s Reward chapter 22 — Because I didn’t get my usual sleeping-in-to-recover-from-the-exhausting-week time on Saturday morning, I was groggy and kinda stupid on Sunday. Therefore, I didn’t edit this chapter as thoroughly as I would have liked. In particular, because I was too dull to come up with a new description, I left in that reference to Sano’s emotions as a maelstrom that I’ve used in, like, every story ever.

That’s the beauty of internet publication, though — especially internet publication you’re not sure anyone’s reading: you don’t have to worry quite so much about getting a perfect edit at time of posting, because there’s really no such thing as a “final draft.” I can (and will) fix up problems with future edits.

And that said, I still really like this chapter.

The Test — There are some spoilers I don’t mind giving and some I really do. So I can only really vaguely say that it was extremely appropriate that I worked on this story on Halloween. I got to, shall we say, the Halloween part, and got pretty excited about it. It didn’t even occur to me, when I rearranged my weekend story-working schedule, that this would turn out this way. Awesome times!

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Aku Soku Zan(za) — I’ll be posting the next part tomorrow, and it will probably be the last beginning-of-the-month-on-the-dot installment. After this, ASZz will join the rotation, and parts will go up when they’re finished.

The previous part marked the end of the first file; I tend to work with files of around 25 pages, and I think that’s a good length at which to cut off the posts as well. So tomorrow’s part will be in a new post, which means I have to decide how to label the things. For some reason I really dislike the look of the “1/?” format, even if it’s accurate, so I’m not going to do that… but it looks weird to just title the post “Aku Soku Zan(za) 2” as if it’s the second part of the story when in fact it’s opening with the sixth. I’m thinking I’ll go with some parentheses and see how I like it.

Now I’m going to hand out Halloween candy to cute childs as an optimistic end to a rather frustrating weekend.