alexanderwales posts
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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 115, Autem Mort
I said I was going to do shorter chapters this week in the interest of having a backlog, then I decided that I needed these particular chapters to be longer. This one is almost 7K words. So, maybe next week.Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~There was a part of Isra that felt good when Verity was gone, and she didn’t particularly like that part of her. It was a feeling that was hard to put into wor...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 114, Plating
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~The Pedder farm was a sprawling green place, and the smell of hogs floated in the air. It wasn’t as bad as Hannah had expected, being sweet and musky, though there was an undercurrent of grassy smell that wasn’t quite pleasant. The pigs were far away though, traveling as a herd, their snuffling and grunting a distant cacophony, and there were a number of fences ...
This Used to be About Dungeons, Chapter 113, Weird Pot
Just a note on chapter length: I keep trying to get ahead on chapters so I have more of a backlog, but then I also keep writing longer chapters. This one is more than 6K words, and if I'm to build up a backlog, I need to stop doing that. So the next two or three chapters might be more on the 4K side of things just so I can get in a place where I'm not burning the midnight oil too much.Norm...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 112, Stones and Tones
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Removing the stone turned out to be a bit of a problem, though mostly because there was nowhere to put it. It wouldn’t eat entads, but it would eat anything else that wasn’t held or worn by a person. In fact, they had discovered some structural instability that the stone had been causing, and even before their excavation efforts had properly begun, a part of the...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 111, Swift Death
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Alfric was slightly on edge. Their escape had been cut off when they’d been fighting the huge lizard, and he had done his best, but there had been a real risk that with their retreat blocked off, they would be killed. He was the only one who seemed to be thinking about the close brush with death though. The lizard had been terrifying enough, so large that it was d...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 110, Slop
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~The words ‘poop monster’ kept going through Mizuki’s head. The smell was surprisingly not terrible, maybe because it was herbivore poop, or maybe because they were in a self-cleaning dungeon. She was also sure that there was a good joke in there somewhere, but she was having trouble finding it, and the opportunity for it to be a good joke was quickly passing.S...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 109, Dung + A discussion of the future of TUTBAD
I realized yesterday that it had been some time since I had made a State of the Serial address, so I thought I would do brief off-the-cuff one now.When I started TUTBAD, the plan was to go 200K words and then see how it was doing, whether it could justify more from either a creative or business standpoint. Patreon was doing well enough, and I liked what I was writing, so I pushed on. The second ch...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 108, The Warehouse
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~“We’re still working on paring it down,” said Grig. “Obviously there’s a ton of stuff here, and a lot of the certifications have been stripped off, and there are other problems, but just ask and I should be able to tell you whether it’s up for grabs or not. Please no testing.”“What do you mean certifications stripped off?” asked Mizuki. She was loo...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 107, Testing
I've always thought that the worst thing about having a body is the knowledge that it can just stop working for no reason, and there's pretty much nothing you can do about it aside from maybe some medicine, which is a crap shoot. I've been sick for like three weeks now, and it's just been because of a cold followed by a sinus infection, but it's been making me think that the gl...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 106, Strange Moods
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~<Hannah, please tell me that you have that mapping entad with you,> said Alfric.<Ay, I do,> said Hannah. <Not on me, but in the trunk.>Alfric paused. <Did we test that it worked while inside the trunk?><No, I don’t think we did,> said Hannah. <But why wouldn’t it?><Extradimensional space,> said Alfric.<Would that futz with it?> asked Hannah.<I don’t know,> sai...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 105, The Summer Dungeon
About twelve hours later than normal, sorry! I'm going to the doctor tomorrow and will hopefully get some antibiotics for what I'm pretty sure is a sinus infection.Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Alfric was eager to be going back into the dungeons, but worried about whether Verity was in a good state for it. She wanted to not be a bard, or to be only half of a bard, and while it would be g...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 104, The Pucklechurch Gardening Club + WtC Book 2
Sorry for the slight delay on this one, I'd recovered from the bad cold, but then it turned into what I'm pretty sure is a sinus infection, so I'm still not tip top.Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkAlso, Book 2 of Worth the Candle is now available for pre-order!~~~~Over the course of her absence, Verity said exactly five sentences in their party chat. These were:<The concert went fine. I’...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 103, The Waiting Game
Normal Link (note: had some trouble with this one this morning, should be working now)Edit/Comment Link~~~~“But I don’t think I understand,” said Mizuki. “What you’re describing is a caretaker, or a custodian, or something like that.”“No,” said Hannah. “Because they don’t necessarily do any caretaking at all.”“Then what do they do?” asked Mizuki.“Nothing,” said Hannah...
Schedule Slip, pt 2
Normally when I get sick it's for two or three days, but this one is just now letting up eight days in, and this is the first day that I've felt like my brain was working above 80% capacity. Mostly I've been sleeping 16 hours a day. So, no chapter today, but there will be a chapter Wednesday, and ideally I'll work to build up a buffer of three chapters or so and not have to skip on...
Schedule Slip
Sorry, there will be no second chapter this week. I've been taking care of my son, who is sick, and am now sick myself. Hope that you have a good day anyway,
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 102, A Bowl of Tea
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Verity was home alone for the third day in a row, and feeling it.She hadn’t actually received the Full Orchestral Lute in the mail, because as she’d predicted, it was too valuable to transport and far too precious to sit around in a place like Pucklechurch. Instead, she’d received an entad, one that created an overlapping space. She had cleared a spot in the l...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 101, the All-Seeing Eye
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~The whole thing was pointless, and Alfric knew it. Running their own investigation of the missing people parallel to the one that was being done by actual professionals back in Plenarch was never going to bear fruit, not even if they found a single thing that the investigators had missed. He would go back to Plenarch and report what he could, but he didn’t expect ...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 100, Universal Truths
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Mizuki felt proud of the garden stone and what they’d made of the place. She had been Alfric’s carpentry assistant, which she continued to insist was a totally real thing, and she’d helped him move things around, though her strength was no match for his. Still, she had put in a huge amount of work, partly to make up for the fact that she hadn’t helped with t...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 99, Moving Mountains
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~“What do you mean missing?” asked Alfric.Penelope was smoking a long pipe with something sweet-smelling, and didn’t seem terribly concerned. A breakfast spread was laid out in front of them, served so that anyone could take what they wanted.“This is my seventh time through the day,” said Penelope. “So you’ll have to forgive me for giving the terse vers...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 98, Deals
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Hannah was finding Isra to be a bit distracting. Their druid looked like a different person, and it was shocking how well the transformation had gone, removing every trace of her Tarbin heritage and completely feminizing her. It wasn’t as extreme as what Alfric’s mother had done to them on the night of the opera, but it felt more complete, less like a temporary ...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 97, Flight of Fancy
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~The most disappointing thing about flying was the clouds, and it wasn’t even close. Clouds always looked so light and fluffy, like giant pillows in the sky, and through her life, Mizuki had often lay on the grass looking up at them, wondering what it would be like to land on one of them. She had pictured them as being springy and soft, pushing gently back against ...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 96, Square Meals
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Alfric had thought that his aunt Penelope might want to talk about the so-called ‘bastlefolk’, but he hadn’t realized just how much she had to say on the subject. She was one of those guild members who didn’t comment on guild messages all that much, and from what he’d reviewed before coming to Plenarch, largely just posted minor encouragements and other cu...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 95, Thinking Outside the Box
Normal TextEdit/Comment Text~~~~Alfric had said that being a dungeoneer involved a lot of travel, and Isra supposed that this would simply be her life now, going from place to place. Dondrian had been fascinating, a place with thousands of owls whose eyes were easy to see through, teeming with people, perpetually warm with the winds of the vast ocean coming in at every hour of the day. There had b...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 94, Bridges
Normal TextEdit/Comment Text~~~~Hannah found Isra and Verity mildly annoying as a couple, but at least some of that was because her very good advice seemed to have been silently ignored. And it was going well now, at the start of things — or continuation, given that in practical terms they’d been dating for weeks without admitting it — but when the trouble came, they wouldn’t have given th...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 93, Catching Up
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Alfric was overwhelmingly happy to be back in the house. They hadn’t taken quite as much as they might have from the dungeon, but leaving meat on the bone was a classic dungeon issue, and you did eventually end up with a lot of unsellable junk if you took everything. The trick was taking only the best junk, which Alfric thought they probably had.And coming back me...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 92, Frank Discussion
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Verity hadn’t been prepared for how long clearing out the theater would take, and when the scope of the work became obvious, she didn’t want to be the one to say ‘maybe I’d rather not’. She did think those words though, repeatedly, especially when she began to develop calluses on her hands in the places where she was gripping the crowbar. The gloves helped...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 91, Liferaft
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Mizuki was so incredibly bored, and it was only the first day alone.On a normal day, the full house allowed Mizuki to bounce around and see what other people were doing. Sometimes she helped (or ‘helped’) with Hannah’s baking, or with Verity’s gardening, or she sat down for yet another impromptu lesson on dungeons with Alfric. When no one was up for anything...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 90, Cloister
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Isra was surprised, at the end of the day, how little progress they had made on disassembling the theater. Alfric had tested the doors to make sure that there was nothing hiding behind them, and found that the majority of them led nowhere, being purely decorative. The two that weren’t had been hastily and thoroughly barricaded. There was a backstage area, but it w...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 89, Theater of Mind + Map
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkMap by the wonderful Robert Winslow. If you want the full readable map, it's attached, since apparently Patreon likes to downscale.~~~~It felt good to be back in a dungeon, though part of the reason that Hannah had said yes to it was a smidge of guilt. She had been spending time with Marsh, probably too much. He was a distraction from what she was trying to do with ...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 88, Stewing
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Too long had passed between dungeons.It was getting warm, proper summer weather in Pucklechurch, and Alfric was surprised by how much heat there was. He was used to Dondrian, which was always a bit on the warm side, and he’d thought that Pucklechurch in the summer would be the same, but no, it actually got hotter, perhaps because it was inland. He found himself sw...
