Today's Update

I've made a few typo corrections to some of the early chapters: removing unwanted spaces from the middle of phrases like "dark- brown hair".

The prelude has been updated to correct the inconsistency I mentioned in my previous post.

And I've updated appendices 1 and 4, adding a new name to the Who’s Who. It's for a character who first appears by name in chapter 16, so this is a tiny bit premature…but as spoilers go it's pretty negligible.

As regards progress on Chapter 16…I'm so, so close to the end now. A tiny bit of wrap-up work left to do on the big battle scene (in which I have finally written the climax of a plot-line that's been building literally since chapter one), and one more short scene after that.

Progress update: 32,226 words.

But wait, there's more. Last Wednesday night, I had quite a vivid dream of a scene from Chapter 17, a story development that I've been planning for quite a while, but which—in my dream—didn't go anything like I'd been expecting. But I love it so much that I started writing it. So, long story short, there's about 1600 words of Chapter 17 written now, too. Spoiler hint: Sailor Uranus goes on a spirit-journey to the planet Uranus, and meets the ruler of that world. Why? She's looking for the Space Sword.

As part of researching this bit, I had a long dialog with ChatGPT, trying to decide on a title that Uranus should use to address the ruler of Uranus.  We came up with 蒼穹大王陛下—Sōkyū Daiō Heika, Great King of the Firmament. (I didn't just take the AI's word for it, I've also discussed this with a native Japanese speaker, who saw no problem with it.) If you're a Japanese speaker, and see any problems, do let me know!

An Inconsistency Found

This is quite annoying. Way back in the Prelude, I see that Artemis remarks to Bendis that she should have been able to recognise a member of the Serenity Council because “The uniform should have been a big hint.” And immediately after writing that, I simply forgot that Serries wear uniforms.

Well, I have a couple of choices here.  I can start putting uniforms on Serries when they appear. (My initial thought is something with an embroidered rationale worn around the neck…but maybe that's over-fancy.) However, if I do that then I really ought to tweak some earlier chapters to show that uniforms are being worn, even if I don't describe them fully.

The other choice is to tweak the Prelude and remove the reference to a uniform. A lot simpler and probably the more sensible option because, in a Japanese environment—even a pseudo-futuristic one—sharp business suits seem a lot more likely.

I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts, though.

Progress update: 28,769 words.

More updates

All chapters have now been updated to the new style, which I hope you'll find more readable.

While I was at it, I did a couple of very minor tweaks to the Interlude chapter (I'll be amazed if you spot what changed). Plus I updated the Appendices; mostly adding new entries to the Timeline.

I should probably do a revised edition of the ebooks, sometime, and actually put links to them on the web page. (I've only ever mentioned them here in this blog, so far.) As ever, I'm held up by not having any decent cover art for them. (Maybe I should see what an AI can manage?!)

Minor update to Chapter 15

 Hi there,

I've just posted a minor tweak to chapter 15. (Note, this update is only on my website; I haven't gotten around to putting it on FF.net). There's a scene in the chapter where Iku appears to be sharing a room with Dhiti—whereas other scenes, in both chapters 14 and 15, make it clear that Iku is staying in the guest room at Dhiti's house.  So I've rewritten a couple of paragraphs to fix that.

As part of the update, both chapters 14 and 15 now have an entirely new look—they use a different stylesheet which I think is a lot more readable than the old one. (Chapter 14 doesn't show on the SM4200 page as an update, because there's no actual story changes—just style changes.)

Let me know what you think of the new look!  If people are generally favourable, I'll update the earlier chapters as well.

Chapter 16 update: now at 9169 words.

Minor Update to Chapter 15

Thank you to the anonymous Fanfiction.net poster who caught a couple of continuity problems:

During the scene in which Sese is listing the problems with the Council the name of the Chairman is wrong, it should be Fukuda Ikemoto. Takeda Ryobe is Number Three.

When Suzue and Keiko go from the airport to her house they take a bus but in chapter 12 they took a train. I suppose that it is possible that there could be more than one way to go from one place to another, the train service be stopped or inconvenient or in chapter 12 they weren't going to her house, but still it caught my attention.

Good catches, both.  I have posted a corrected chapter 15 today, both on my website and on Fanfiction.net.

A slight update

My web-page has probably been offline for a few days. This is due to my having some difficulties with the company that hosted my web (and also email)…namely, that the company went totally belly-up.  However, I have now (I hope) got everything working on a new hosting platform, and all should be working again.

While I was at it, I’ve also reworked the main SM4200 page a bit.  Apart from a minor tweaks, the changes were:

1. Chapter 15 has been retitled. (Yeah, that chapter you're waiting for so patiently.)
2. All chapters are now HTML-only. (The text versions are still there, but there's no longer any link to them.)  This is mostly because the forthcoming Chapter 15 will be HTML-only; I'm not planning to create a text-only copy.