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I'm working on a (hopefully) novel-length story and a short story both set in the same world. I'm also waffling between editing the first work I wrote in that world into a novella or just sealing it away from the light of day.

When the novel is finished, this will be the first page. The historical bent should be pretty apparent. I thought it was pretty neat to find out that Mexico not only used to be an empire, but that that empire was huge. It continues after the cut.

In the year 1810 a massive seismic shift drove the entirety of both Upper (called Alta) and Lower (called Baja) California into the Pacific Ocean. This entire land mass shifted further out to sea leaving a massive coastal shelf along the new ocean front properties in the west. As a result, the few areas of the Californias still above water, transformed from ranchos and missions into stony or desert islands, were those which had been coastal already.

Reading about heraldry

As I've given the story a second breath, I've also made it much more historically based and much more tied to the real life version of where it takes place. I think that this will make for a much more interesting story: "young man pilots flying warship against unknown foes during the American Civil War" has a lot more punch than "boy's journey to adolescence through a guild in a Dickensian city."

So, the great thing is that learning more about the real world history of the elements that will be included in the story leads to a richer and more vibrant story. The down side is that I wind up spending hours reading about the history of alchemy from the Egyptians through to the modern age. Or reading about heraldry for an afternoon. All of which is fun, but none of it gets the story closer to finished.

For example: at the top of this post is a crop of the sleeve insignia for the US Transportation Command. In heraldry, a sea horse doesn't look like the fish, it looks like a normal horse but with a fish tail. Lots of the time the front legs will have flippers. Sometimes the mane will be a fin. In this case the sea horse has wings.

When great advances in transportation were made people always compared them to what came before. The automobile was the horseless carriage, the locomotive was the iron horse. An airship is just that: a nautical ship that sails through the air instead of the sea. A sea horse given flight. I found the Transport Command crest while I was looking for examples that would be similar to what the flying guild will use for their crest. It isn't exactly the same, but it gives you an idea.

Back in the swing.

The bad news is that I had a fever for over a week. That sucked. The good news is I got a ton of reading done. The great news is that I sat down today with my cup of coffee this morning and started a brand new adventure! So far it's only 200 pages in, but I've made some pretty serious changes to the world.

Things are about to get 500% more swash-buckling in the near future!

Least relaxing bath of my life.

I'm still a bit sick, so I put the stopper in the tub and ran the shower on full hot to make a hot bath and steam up the room at the same time. The steam helps my throat and congestion like nothing else. So I hot in the hot water, settle in and hear this weird noise that sounds exactly like an angry wasp buzzing at the skylight over the tub.

It was had to be the pipes so I ignored it for a while, but when finally I got my glasses it turned out it was a huge pissed of wasp buzzing at the skylight! And one downside of a Kindle is that it's pretty bad for smashing wasps.

Long story short: I chased a wasp all over the bathroom with an old New Yorker and almost broke my neck trying to catch it. And when I finally got it, bits of it fell into my mug of my absolute favorite mint tea.

So I took a shower. Stupid wasp.

I need more tea.

I decided that there could be no better way to publish a story set in "Victorian" times than to publish it in the popular 18th century way: as a serial.

And then I caught a chest cold, and now I can barely speak. Obviously I can still type, but I have a sneaking suspicion that what I write today will wind up cut by my editor next week. This seems like an ominous first post.