alexanderwales posts
Posts: 495
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Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition
Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition has started posting! One exclusion will be posted every day for the next 67 days, starting today with the Publican Exclusion Zone. This was a long-delayed Patreon goal, partly because the final word count has ended up at ~70K words, which I hope you'll agree is very long for a worldbuilding document.These "chapters" (each ~1K wo...
Thresholder, ch 38, Celestial Changes (Corrected)
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkThis should be the correct links/text, my tabs got messed up and I pushed the wrong one. Definitely reminiscent of nuking a test database on accident. Sorry!~~~~At the end of their first week at Silver Fish Moon Gate Temple, and with the special permission of Master Shan Yi, Perry stayed outside during the arcshadow.All of the members of the second sphere, save for Zhan...
Thresholder, ch 37, Academics
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Perry did, in fact, have questions for Maya, lots of them. He’d tried to be quiet while she told her story, saying ‘uh huh’ or ‘wow’ or whatever, which was what he always did when listening to a story. If he’d interjected with all the clarifications and questions and things he’d wanted to relate to or debate, they’d have taken a fortnight.A wizard wh...
Thresholder, ch 36, The Seven Worlds of Maya Singh, pt 3 (Bonus)
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkI believe this will be the last "bonus" chapter for a bit, in part because I really do need to get the Worth the Candle exclusions doc out, and in part because the backlog has been appropriately shrunken down.Early Birds are now 5 chapters ahead on Thresholder.~~~~Look, it’s late, but I want to get through these, because I promised I would.It’s been a little...
Thresholder, ch 35, The Seven Worlds of Maya Singh, pt 2
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkI'm still planning on another bonus Friday chapter, the last of this set, which will bring this set of three to a close.~~~~It was the long, slow, end of the world. Humanity was huddled around dying stars, trying to make the most of the waning light, knowing that unless something changed, every day was going to be dimmer than the last.The stellar government, Rampart...
Thresholder, ch 34, The Seven Worlds of Maya Singh, pt 1
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~My first world, my home world, I’m not going to tell you about. It’s painfully boring, and kind of personal, so we’re skipping that one, thanks. I had a career there, the kind of job that people say ‘oh, that’s a good job, you’ve done well for yourself’, but not the kind of job that parents brag about to the other churchgoers. I had a life there, a boy...
Thresholder, ch 33, Good News, Bad News (Bonus chapter)
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkThis is another bonus chapter, putting Early Birds four chapters ahead of RoyalRoad readers. Enjoy!~~~~Three days came and went. There were no more altercations to speak of, and the days were largely filled with instruction. The Silver Fish temple was big on silence, and took gender segregation fairly seriously, which meant that there were only limited times when Perry ...
Thresholder, ch 32, Handshake Protocol
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Maya came to his room with him, which Perry wasn’t entirely thrilled with. He was, after all, still naked and trying not to feel the burning shame from that, nor the intense vulnerability, and he caught her looking him over more than once in a way that he thought probably would have gotten him in trouble if the genders had been reversed. He felt better once he was...
Thresholder, ch 31, Hitting the Beats
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Perry wasn’t entirely sure of the nomenclature. The first sphere members of the temple were students, disciples, or possibly something else. He was going to have to nail down the terms, given how much they seemed to rely on honor and respect. There was no need to insult someone by using the wrong term.Whatever they were called, they were gathered in the courtyard ...
Thresholder, ch 30, No Master, No Credo (Bonus Chapter)
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkPlease note: This is a bonus chapter which puts Early Birds three chapters ahead. The intent is that this will be permanently moving it forward.~~~~Dinner was rice porridge with pickled vegetables, just as Luo Yanhua had said it would be, and Perry ate with Maya in relative silence. The pickled vegetables were unfamiliar, and there was a thick slice of something that Pe...
Thresholder, ch 29, Tea Time
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkSchedule Note: Due to a large backlog, there will be a bonus chapter on Friday, which will permanently put Early Birds three chapters ahead of the normal schedule.~~~~“Last world, there was a wizard,” said Maya. “He had a theory, that sometimes it might not be one-on-one.”They were sitting at a short-legged table on top of what Luo Yanhua had called ‘tea pillo...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 177 + Temporary Hiatus
Normal TextEdit/Comment TextAs alluded to in the title of this post, TUTBAD is going on a temporary hiatus, probably just a week or two, with Thresholder having chapters on those days instead. Writing TUTBAD is going a bit slowly at the moment, so I'm mostly taking a break to recharge, and possibly to reassess the "final" book, which was always a matter of "extra innings". It w...
Thresholder, ch 28, Counterpart
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkI am still in Washington D.C., so will be a little slow on typo corrections and such. Thanks for reading!~~~~“Who is this?” asked Perry. His hand had gone to the sword at his hip. The woman’s needle-sword was still pointed at him. People in this world had a tendency to point weapons at him, except that she was pretty clearly from a different genre. His eyes were s...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 176, Life of the Party, pt. 1
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkI'm on vacation this week, there shouldn't be schedule disruptions at all, but if the times are even more wonky than normal, that's why. (I'm in Washington, D.C., my nation's capital, seeing the sights.)~~~~When they had said there would be a party, they had really meant it. The house had settled into place in a meadow, and strings of lights had been...
Thresholder, ch 27, Digging Graves
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Luo Yanhua was treating him like a child. Worse, she was treating him like a child she was uninterested in, some brat kid her mother had told her to look after. He asked questions and she didn’t answer them, or gave only curt, cursory answers. Perry had no idea whether this was an annoying test, a cultural issue, or if she was holding back so that he would speak m...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 175, Bursar
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkAnother late-in-the-day chapter. Technically, chapters are "Monday", but ideally I would want them to consistently come out at the same time each and every day. I will try not to stress too much about this, so long as the words are actually reaching the page.~~~~Mizuki hadn’t even known what a bursar was, but apparently he was the guy at the school who was in ...
Thresholder, ch 26, Reflections
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkAuthor's Note: I totally meant to put this at the end of last chapter, but yes, this world is something approaching xianxia, which I'm writing with the benefit of not having read much, if any xianxia. In theory, this isn't actually xianxia, it's a reconstruction of the genre from someone who has only contact knowledge of it and isn't attempting to st...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 174, Honeymoon Minutes
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkSorry for the later chapter today, I got way ahead on Thresholder and had done less work on Dungeons than initially thought.~~~~“I should skip school today,” said Mizuki.She was laying against Alfric’s chest, early in the morning, in bed. They weren’t sleeping in the same bed, but Mizuki had made it a habit of being in his room until the moment she was about to ...
Thresholder, ch 25, Curved Horizon (Start of World 4)
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~The first thing that Perry noticed about the new world was just how green it was. Teaguewater had been a dingy place, with even the trees seeming weighed down and discolored by the air pollution, hanging on for dear life. Everything had been in shades of browns and grays. In this new world, there were trees all around him, tall grasses beneath them, moss growing in ...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 173, Answer to the Nebulous + Ad Read 3
Normal TextEdit/Comment TextAd Read 3 will be posted tomorrow, and can be found after the chapter, if for some reason you want to read an ad accompanying the release of WtC Book 3.~~~~Pinion had mixed feelings on the dress. The party had, in practical terms, gifted it to him, but he wasn’t sure that he actually wanted it. It allowed the wearer to slide between feminine and masculine, and he was ...
Thresholder, ch 24, World 3 - Epilogue
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Flora had stayed up through the night, mostly watching Perry, but also poking around at Marchand.The technology was so advanced that having it wouldn’t have done anything for the scientists and engineers of her world, except that it contained copies of millions of books and an ‘artificial intelligence’ that was a capable engineer in his own right. After some i...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 172, Negotiables
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Mizuki sat on her bed with her hands folded in her lap. She’d said ‘five minutes’ but it felt like she should have said more, because she’d hardly had time to look in the mirror and straighten her hair, and her fingers were still pruny from doing dishes. She wanted to look professional and put-together, which was a difficult thing for her. She didn’t have ...
Thresholder, ch 23, We're All Going to the World's Fair, pt. 2
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkSorry for the delayed chapter, I was sick again this week, but am now back up to about 90% with just a cough and a runny nose to work through. It's always surprising to me how hard it is to just power through a cold, how quickly the body just gives up and says 'yeah, we've got no energy for that'. This was, I think, preferable to having norovirus, but it...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 171, Of Calm Skies and Salt Shakers
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Alfric had checked the chest over carefully, and satisfied himself that it was probably going to be fine. Entads had a ten percent rule, which was that an entad could lose approximately ten percent of its mass and still be completely functionally fine. The chest hadn’t even lost anything, only had some damage to the lid and one corner. The extradimensional space i...
Thresholder, ch 22, We're All Going to the World's Fair, pt 1
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkThe return of Thresholder! I'm feeling much better, should be on a normal schedule going forward, thanks for the patience.~~~~It was the night of the full moon. The next day, they would be going to have a big old fight at the fairgrounds in the shadow of the huge tower, which would hopefully be finished by then. The schedule had looked good until it didn’t. The pi...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 170, Halls of Power
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkTurns out I got sick with norovirus, which I also had three or four years ago. It was much less bad this time around, but I lost about a day on being sick, then another two days on recovery or something like it. I'm about back to normal now though, so hopefully there will be no further schedule disruptions.Thanks for reading!~~~~Mizuki had the helm of flight. Realis...
No Thresholder this Week + Of Witches and Wizards Preview
Hey, sorry, but there won't be a chapter of Thresholder this week. I got what I'm pretty sure was norovirus, and spent an unpleasant ~36 hours that I'm still recovering from.In its place, here are two chapters from something that I might be writing once other projects have run their course, (WIP title) Of Witches and Wizards.Chapter 1Chapter 2Synopsis: Of Witches and Wizards is intende...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 169, Now Museum
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Vertex went in first, as they’d discussed the last time, and the Settlers followed after. As before, they had Bib and Pinion waiting outside, though technically speaking there was nothing for Bib to do, and he’d have been free to run off about the countryside, as was his way.Hannah hadn’t told the others yet, but it was very possible that this was going to be ...
Thresholder, ch 21, King's Castle
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkHey, sorry for the late chapter, my son had a stomach bug that took up a bunch of my time. I think hands down the worst part of being a parent is dealing with sickness, especially with all the crud that he picks up from school, but this one was something different and worse.~~~~Perry had never been all that heavy into videogames. He’d mostly played one or two AAA titl...
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 168, Sugarweed Lake
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkSorry for the relative lateness of the chapter today, I took a trip out of town for my dad's birthday and was much less productive than normal.~~~~The boat marched down into the water on its many hands, and walked, for a moment, with its fingers in the silt and muck. The boat didn’t quite move of its own volition, instead working on the ‘collective will’ of th...
