alexanderwales posts
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Thresholder, ch 137, Technopole
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkHey, it's a chapter!~~~~The Farfinder would have been getting crowded if not for all the extradimensional space. Mette and Kes were both living there, Perry had a room, and Nima was imprisoned in a recreation of the bedroom she’d had in her home world. There hadn’t really been any choice in the matter, given how important it was to remove her from the playing field, but it was a soft imprisonment. Mette kept her company, and there had been no further attempts at hostage taking.Perry’s eyes were on the monit...
Thresholder, ch 136, Interlude: The Assassin and the Spy
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkHey, it's a chapter! If you finish this chapter and are looking for more stuff to read, I suggest Millennial Scarlet, a webcomic I'm writing, drawn by ssandulak. The first two issues are almost up for the public.~~~~Dirk Gibbons was, so far as he could ascertain, completely fucked. He was yesterday’s news at the bottom of a bird cage. He was a house of cards in a hurricane. He was cooked, garnished, and served with a side of regret.This version of him, anyway.It had originally been some comfort that he had ...
Thresholder, ch 135, Vulnerable Places
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkOkay, the plan is to have the second chapter out either Friday or Saturday, and slowly claw the schedule back to what it's supposed to be. This is slightly complicated by the fact that it's American Independence Day tomorrow, but in theory it's doable. Thank you for your continued patience while my brain malfunctions.~~~~“He left us,” said Nima. Her sword was hanging down and her mouth was hanging open. She was staring at the spot where Perry had been.“You didn’t have leverage,” said Mette. She ...
Thresholder, ch 134, Dogfight
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkAlright, only one chapter this week, sorry. My mental hasn't been so good lately, mostly depression, anxiety, and the attendant trouble focusing. There might also be some burnout thrown in there, but I'm less sure about that. I started writing a short story to see whether I could keep up a good pace on that, and it seemed to do fine. I'm happy with this chapter, and enjoyed writing it, so I don't know. It's just going slow.~~~~Perry gripped Nima tightly. She had gone very still. Perry’s sword wa...
Thresholder, ch 133, Break Time
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Perry listened to it all while floating high in the air above. There was nothing about the magic tablets. Fenilor was a talker, but he hadn’t talked about the right things. If there was another session, if the tales continued, maybe there would be more.“Did we learn anything from that?” asked Perry.“He is supremely arrogant, sir,” said Marchand.“He’s admitted to all his mistakes,” said Perry. “There’s arrogance, sure, but he’s very clear about the mistakes he’s made.”“If you will permi...
Thresholder, ch 132, The Seventy-Eight Foes of Fenilor the Gilded, pt 2
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Why did places have good rulers instead of bad rulers? It was a question that haunted me. It was, of course, a subset of the more general question: why were things often bad instead of good?I eventually came to the conclusion that everyone had an answer to the question but none of them were worth the hair of a donkey.“Some people are born good and others bad, and it’s the work of the good to separate the two, and crush the bad.” So says the oral tradition of the Vikilee.“Badness is something accrued over ...
Thresholder, ch 131, The Seventy-Eight Foes of Fenilor the Gilded, pt 1
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkAlright, looks like there's going to only be a single chapter this week, sorry. I really should have learned the lesson that I should just take a week off if I'm going to be somewhere else, but I suppose in my mind I always think about all the hours I'll have when I'll be able to get some work done. What I never think about is writing away from my home environment, the way the keyboard on my laptop feels uncomfortable, the nagging sensation of the lighting in the hotel room being different. And then I...
Thresholder, ch 130, Good Company
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkI am still in San Francisco, where I'll be until next week. It's been an interesting experience, and I hope it's the sort of thing that I get to do again some day.Did you know I have a blogwhere I make infrequent posts? I've also started a tumblr, mostly to have a place to put shorter thoughts that aren't blog-shaped.~~~~The five crew members of the Farfinder were set up on bean bag chairs around a large screen in what Kes had called the break room. Hella was the exception: she was standing tall n...
Thresholder, ch 129, Not Nostalgia
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkAlright, first off sorry. This was one of those cases where I had great plans and poor execution. I'm away from home right now, and needed to get the chapter out on Thursday before travel, which just ... did not happen.Second, if I saw you at LessOnline, hooray! I was really not sure what it would be like, and had a ton of fun. I am still in SF for Manifest, but will be on normal working hours for writing until then, and hopefully can make up ground (but it's easy to promise words and hard to type them).~~~~T...
Thresholder, ch 128, Gilded
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkI have a tumblrnow, if you're into that sort of thing. I do still love my blog, so will keep that the place for higher-effort-but-still-not-that-high-effort things.Millennial Scarletis up to seven pages public, which I think is enough to get some of the meat of the story. Having someone make images for the things in my head has been a treat.~~~~Fenilor moved forward, with only the light of Perry’s armor to guide his way. Mette had moved to stand behind Perry, and Perry had his sword drawn, ready to defend if he...
Thresholder, ch 127, Bedrock
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkSorry for the late "real" chapter, my brain has been in zombie mode the past two days for unclear reasons, probably the chemical soup not working correctly.~~~~Kes sat at a desk that had been provided to him. The computer screen held an interface that was remarkably close to Windows 10. When Nitta had presented him with it, he had boggled at it, because there was no way that it should have been even remotely the same. In fact, when he’d first come to Earth 2, it had taken him a long time to get used to the ...
Thresholder, Perry Talks to His Sister
Alright, some explanation of what this is:I'm doing some of the developmental editing work on Thresholer: vol 1 right now, and some of that includes writing new scenes that help flesh out who Perry is. I've written a few now, and this is one that is probably NOT going to be in the rewrite of the first volume, mostly because it's too long and is kind of not ... what Thresholderis about. Plus I don't think it hits the right beats for Perry.However, with that said, I wrote it, and it makes more sense to have people read it than to ...
Thresholder, ch 126, Sidelines
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkSorry for the late chapter, my wife has been out of town so I've been doing the single parent thing. In positive news, I think I'm finally back to where I was before COVID. I've been partly measuring myself by how easily I can log time on the exercise bike, and I'm back up to being able to put in the same amount of effort as I could three weeks ago. Cognitively, I've felt fine for about a week, but that's much harder to judge.Editing on volume 1 continues. Some of it will be released to patron...
Thresholder, ch 125, Bedfellows
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkDid you check out Millennial Scarletlike I asked you to? Please do! It's step 1 of my 191 step plan to write comics for Marvel or DC. (Among my many projects is a movie script for a Multiple Man film, which is absolutely never going to get made even if it ever gets finished, but one of my goals for this year was to write a movie script.)~~~~The queen had requested that Third Fervor stay close by, and Third Fervor had no choice but to obey, even if she thought her talents might be better used elsewhere. Given the ...
Thresholder, ch 124, Interrogation Techniques
Do you like comics? I wrote one! The first issue of Millennial Scarletis up now, written by me and illustrated by ssandulak. It's about Lamont Pearce, a gig economy demon hunter, among other things. Check it out!Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~It had been the dead of night when Third Fervor came, but Kes had been awake. He wasn’t actually doing anything, but Mette had offered to stay up to man the radio, and he had decided that he would be there for moral support. He thought there was a good chance that Perry would come in hot, trailing t...
Thresholder, ch 123, Enemy Action
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Dirk sat with Perry in his room an hour later, going over the plan.“It’s simple,” said Dirk. “You fly across, sticking close to the water so you won’t be seen, or under the water if that’s workable. You go to the place where my people are stashed, sneak in through a window, gather them all up, then fly back across. You do all that without being seen. If you’re seen before you get to the house, we scrub the mission, because we don’t want you leading anyone there. If you’re seen after you leave th...
Thresholder, ch 122, Loyalty Returned
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkAlright, should be just about done with COVID. My own personal guess would be that I'm at about 95% capacity. Overall, it was about as bad as I thought it would be, and I'm glad to be done with it. I still need to get back to working out to really see what kind of damage to my lungs I'm going to bounce back from, but I'm thankful that I'm healthier than I was four months ago. I really did think, when I started getting sick, that I might just be able to power through it, but I'm very glad I did...
Thresholder, ch 121, Detente
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkHey, apologies, but there will only be one chapter this week. After four years of avoiding it, I finally caught COVID and my head is swimming. There's definitely a part of me that thinks I can just plow through the work, but I have a policy to go work on other stuff to get through a cold, if I really feel like writing. (This is mostly to make sure that I'm not writing something unhinged in a fever dream. This chapter was mostly written prior to me getting sick.)~~~~“Alright,” said Hella once the man in bl...
Thresholder, ch 119-120, NOT Spam, pt 1 and pt 2
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkYes, this is two chapters stacked on top of each other, because that's how it was written! Rather than build a backlog, because who needs that, I'm giving you both at once, though the RR readers will be getting them on separate publishing days, putting them another chapter back.~~~~ pt 1Perry sat in the shelf space, healing up. The reactor had been undamaged, and he was poaching its energy, using it to shunt into repairing both his body and the armor itself. That stopped the blood loss, and after that was don...
Thresholder, ch 118, In the Meantime
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Kes was having a good time with what he called the ‘superhero’ masks. There weren’t all that many superheroes from Earth that could map directly onto the powers that the masks could grant, but it seemed to work better than going off the stock masks recommended in books. He wondered whether there might not be some benefit to engineering cultural and social conceptions to favor different sorts of masks, but either the benefits were too vague or too spread out for anyone to have done it. It was also possible t...
Thresholder, ch 117, The King and I, pt 2
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkSorry for the delay, I've just been making the chapters too long. When Thresholder started, it was supposed to be three chapters a week with a target of ~3K words, and when it switched to two chapters a week, it was supposed to be ~4.5K words. I guess I just like long chapters.~~~~The king fell to the ground with blood gushing from the hole in his face. The bullet had hit just at the start of his left eyebrow, and he was definitely very dead. By the time his body had smacked against the forest floor, he wasn’t ...
Thresholder, ch 116, The King and I, pt 1
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkThis chapter ends on a tiny bit of a cliffhanger, just warning you now in case you would rather read pt 1 and pt 2 together.~~~~“You made this?” asked Nima, looking at the mask that Kes had shown her. He’d come to her bedroom to show her. The makeshift workshop area had gotten more disorganized since the last time he’d been up, and there were more communal tools squirreled away. “Why is it … like that?”“I went with my own designs,” said Kes.“The standard designs are like that for a reason,” said...
Thresholder, ch 115, The March of Kings
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Perry hung in the air ten miles away from the coast of Thirlwell. He was high up, and still had direct line of sight to the city, which was good, because the range on the nanites was frankly pretty terrible. There were no radio systems to hijack, only the natural transmission power of the nanites themselves, and they had definitely not been designed to operate across such large distances.Waiting inside the power armor was boring, and would have been impossible without the second sphere, which at least partially r...
Game Review: Underhill
Note: This is cross-posted from my blog, which updates rarely and only when I feel like it, rather than having some kind of contentified schedule. This review contains no screenshots, because this game doesn’t actually exist.The dwarves are mining, the bugbears are lumbering through the mushroom farms, the imps are scurrying to and fro, and all the traps at the entrance to the dungeon are armed and ready. From a bird’s eye view, it seems as though everything in the underhill is humming along, but that’s only because the problems are invis...
Thresholder, ch 114, The Difference Engine
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkSorry for the late chapter! I'm mostly back on track with writing, and some of the fog of depression seems like it's lifting. This one was going to be out relatively on time, but then the power went out while I was editing. My very first thought was that it was somehow the eclipse coming back, even though it was 2AM (relatively on time means technically the next day in my timezone). I do like the idea of "eclipse" as a general term for when it gets dark for any reason.In some non-Thresholder news, my ...
Thresholder, ch 113, Legends
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~“I have a request,” Perry said to Dirk the next time he saw him.“I know, I know,” said Dirk. “It’s one of the reasons I went to Calamus. There were people I wanted to talk to about it.” He looked around the town. The workers were in the midst of constructing the dome from materials brought in by airship. The airship itself was now being used like a crane to get the various pieces into place. “Not out in the open though.”“Sure,” Perry said. “If you’d like, you can step into my office.” ...
Thresholder, ch 112, Contact, pt 2
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkA few people have asked whether the masks seen here are the same as the masks from the Magical Masks prompt that came during voting. Nope! Those were intended to have more to do with identity, and I think the starting point for it would have been some vague memories of an island from the game Sunless Sea, which I don't want to look up for fear it would stifle my own ideas about what it might meant to put on and take off masks.~~~~Perry decided to wait five days at the most. Given the speed of communication, that ...
Thresholder, ch 111, Contact, pt 1
Normal LinkEdit/Comment Link~~~~Dirk and Perry went out for a walk away from the town, through the fields of flowers that ringed the factory. The flowers themselves were nice and vibrant, but the road that they walked on was dusty gravel with not a hint of asphalt or cobbles. Perry was careful to suppress the cleaning power of the second sphere, lest Dirk notice that none of the dust was sticking to him. All the pink fluid that had coated Dirk the night before had been wiped off him, and Perry was back out of his armor. They were out in the ope...
Thresholder, ch 110, Company Town
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkSorry for the late chapter, we were hit by a major snowstorm, which has meant three snow days in a row and my son spending a lot more time at home. After a relatively snowless winter, it's been nice to have snow again, but it's also a bit of a pain that they've deemed this worth shutting down the schools.~~~~Once the airship landed, it was deflated, which was apparently quite unusual for airships. The machine inside was extracted under the cover of darkness, a rush job that Perry watched from a distance e...
Thresholder, ch 109, Sunflower Fields
Normal LinkEdit/Comment LinkApologies for the late chapter, but I think I'm stabilized at a day late, which means I should only need to push a little bit to get fully back on schedule. I think I'm mostly through a bout of depression, fingers crossed.~~~~Perry’s review of the fight told him very little. Marchand was able to put together a composite virtualization from long-range vision and whatever the nanites could sense, but it wasn’t highly detailed, and there were significant gaps in what could be shown that way, especially consi...
