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I am working (once again) on “MEDUSA: a Tale Of Vengeance”.

Possibly, I should have taken a longer break after the nightmare of format-foo that SALTARAE turned into at the end. But, I found myself with the energy so I re-wrote parts of the Prologue, and a bit near the end…and wrote the actual ending of the story, to my satisfaction.

Okay, some background: I started this book shortly after publishing my first novel (LEONTARI: a Polemic Romance) in early August of 2010. I thought it was Book Two of my Alternate History series set in the 13th Century of the Christian Hypothesis.

AS it turned out, I was wrong. One of the major characters in MEDUSA is a 15-year-old named Selos, son of Xenos and Marisi. About halfway through the book I began to wonder: “Given that he survived the sack of his hometown when he was eight and he’s the son of two high-achievers, and that ‘kids’ in the Commonwealth are way mature by our standards due to their superior upbringing…even given all of that, this guy is a badass. How’d he get that way?”

One day I wrote an outline. Then I was working on “VIASMAE: an Intrigue” which is ACTUALLY Book Two in that series. For a while I worked on both books, but that got harder and harder to do, and I put MEDUSA ‘on the back burner and finished VIASMAE. That book I published in early 2013, final edition in May of that year. Whew.

I went back to work on MEDUSA, and by January of 2014 I was feeling pretty good about it: maybe 90% finished.

HOWever: Shortly after the second book went live, Chris Watts asked an innocent question: “What would people from that Timeline be like in a time parallel to ours?” It implied a question about what would such a culture be like after 800+ years without Church or State. How much faster would they have advanced technologically? (A lot faster, as it turned out.)

So thoughts about that were swirling around in my brain when Erika Milo said something about how hard it would be to write a description of the Oregon Country Fair, especially at night, that wouldn’t seem utterly unbelievable. Then I remembered talking to Marleda Jones about how if aliens or time travelers *were* using the Fair as a crossing point, no one would ever notice. Which meant that all that mixed together in the salad spinner of my mind, and out popped the idea for SALTARAE: an Adventure Across Timelines.

It turned out that I had to write that (and serialize it) and then publish it, before I could finish MEDUSA.

NOW, however, I AM gonna finish it, and before I write even ONE WORD of the Sequel to SALTARAE!

So there.

Now I’m gonna post this, and then go to Sam Bond’s Garage for some booze. I hope to see you all there: every damn one of you!

Gotta go. See ya!

The little red needle is pointing to 'E', and while that's always stood for excellent in my book... Okay, the little blue calendar says I haven't posted anything here since July 7th(!). So, here is what I wrote on Monday: not even quite 'first draft', but it has a bit of insight into Eleni and some sociology stuff about relations with Churchtown.

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