Recent Updates

Don't know if anybody noticed, but I recently posted an update to chapter 10. The changes were very minor, so I didn't show it as updated in the table of contents, but even so...

For what it's worth, basically the changes were to remove the John Biles/Wombat references. They may have been amusing—I'm of two minds about that—but I was always slightly uneasy about them. So instead of sentencing Iku to be nibbled to death by wombats, Dhiti now sentences her to walk the plank. Trivial, right?

This wasn't the first time I've quietly changed story elements. The first time, I think, was over Miyo's brothers, Ichiyo and Fujimaro. Initially Fujimaro was the elder. Then I found out that "Ichiyo" means, more or less, "number 1 son"—so I quietly switched the two. Serves me right for just picking names from a big list, instead of researching them properly.

Updates planned ...

At some point I need to go back and do another general review of the early chapters of SM4200, to clean up some of the more painful bits. For example:

• Find a new title for chapter 2 and probably chapter 1 as well (the existing ones being fairly silly).
  
• Revise the 'P' Division encounter in chapter 3. It comes off looking like most of the police are either Church of Serenity members, or just plain lunatics. (Only one of them was meant to be a CoS member. The rest is simply bad writing.)
  
• Eliminate some of the worst examples of purple prose and/or outright melodrama, in chapter 9 and others.
  

My priority right now is to get chapter 11 done, but the rest needs to be looked at someday.