While Steve’s been bogged down in house-hunting, med changes, and a couple sides of medical stuff — as well as pitching in with the recently turned in draft of The Dragon in Exile — Sharon’s been cleaning out backfiles and has come up with a couple you may not have seen.

Most recently, there’s this discussion and outtake from Carousel Tides, which she felt ought to see the light of day.

Before that, also found in files, was this piece, a much older outtake: Strings, Strands, and Vines In Motion, which is after all a part of Cantra’s original story which morphed into the version we later settled on.

Do keep watching — the last of the scheduled follow-up med visits are coming right up and we’ve cleared some space to work in. Aside from the upcoming Principal Speaker gig at PhilCon  in a couple weeks we’re both going to be focusing on the words pretty hard between now and Boskone (in February).

All things are never equal.

In this case, my plans for a rapid turnaround of the next chapter of Quicksliver fell victim to the fact that we’ve put our house on the market and needed to do some hasty decluttering — and then my plans were not equal to the task of doing the  decluttering at the same time I was doing some disaster-recovery as my main working computer bit the dust.

Now that the back-up computer has been crowned king and the laptop named viceroy we’ll be getting back in gear — and we’re continuing with the process of shifting our base of operations, as well.  What that means is that files, both paper and computer, that have long been unused, are being weeded, and in some cases rediscovered.

Sharon, for example, found an out-take from the Crystal Soldier/Crystal Dragon duology — and found it so readable that she had to share. You can see it as “Strings, strands, and vines in motion” … and if you like, you can support the story. Also there’s an author’s intro for those who need to know more.

Meanwhile, work on Quicksliver is going forward, and my loyal readers have already moved us nearly one hundred dollars toward the goal of chapter seven. Thanks for all the support and the trust — forward motion is returning!

While we’ve been busy getting the house ready to put on the market a lot of readers were doing their 4th of July vacations.  Hope you all had a blast — safely. Now, I’m sharpening the keyboard and getting ready to start on the next installment of Quicksliver — just as soon as the next donation comes in. It’ll take a couple days to get up, but at the moment we’re at 99.1 percent for Chapter 6. Oh, by the way, what pushed us so near the brink on the overnight? Several $5 monthly recurring support payments. Thanks gang!

What’s that look like?

OH, and on the big front:

Provided byFund-Raising-Ideas-Center.com

At the bottom is the link to donate directly via Paypal… If you prefer to donate to Splinter Universe or Quicksliver by mail, send to Splinter Universe, C/O Steve Miller, PO Box 1586, Waterville, ME 04903 – make checks or gift cards payable to Steve Miller

Saturday update:

I missed the scheduled 9 AM post this morning, what with me sleeping in, reading the new real estate ads, feeding Mozart and us, doing an early stirfry to avoid cooking in the expected afternoon heat, and starting the laundry.

Oh yeah, I’m afraid that in the middle off breakfast I had a Eureka Moment about a piece of the Quicksliver back-story that had become dated because of recent science – and so we may add a bit to a couple of the early chapters or even come up with a prolog, to answer this. Science is wonderful, but sometimes you have to run hard to keep up! Also, Sharon was quite patient about refilling my coffee while I was in the middle of an idea-attack.

Here’s the Chapter Six line at the moment (call it 12 Noon, Saturday, June 28) – and it is a good thing I waited until now because we just got in a $5 donation bringing us up to 66.6% (yeah, 2/3) of the goal. Many thanks for the support!

Our usual visual aids follow:

This week’s goal:

And here’s the long range goal, in thermometer graph:

Also, if you want to make sure I keep busy over the next few days, here’s the link to donate directly via Paypal… If you prefer to donate to Splinter Universe or Quicksliver by mail, send to Splinter Universe, C/O Steve Miller, PO Box 1586, Waterville, ME 04903 – make checks or gift cards payable to Steve Miller.

Paypal link:

I missed the usual 9 AM post this morning since Sharon and I had competing medical appointments across the bridge in different parts of the city of Waterville.  After lunch … back to work. What we’re working on now (besides Quicksliver and the unnamed Liaden book 1 of 5) is travel plans & decisions for our party at DetCon – and deciding when the house goes on sale.

Here’s the Chapter Six line at the moment (call it 7 PM, Thursday, June 27) – still under 50% of the goal.

And here’s the long range goal, in thermometer graph:

With Chapter 5 posted we’re now counting the pennies to funding Chapter 6. That’s not really fair I guess — very few of my supporters are using odd cents in their donations.  Here are the totals as of this morning …

For Chapter 6:

Provided byFund-Raising-Ideas-Center.com

For the overall goal:

Provided byFund-Raising-Ideas-Center.com

And if you want to help now:

Thanks!

Thank you all for your patience while life — and delays to the Quicksliver project — happened here. The good news is that much of the work we needed to do around the house to prepare for going on the market with it is done.

Chapter 5 is available now, and as soon as I made the link live I realized there was something that needs amending for the longer story to work — thank the lucky stars this is rough draft and not the absolutely final copy.

Oh, and if you’ve been following along at home, you may want to know how the next chapter is coming. I’ll be working on that over the next few days and so far I’m not late because we’ve yet to hit the support goal there. Still, even without my reminders, we’ve moved beyond the $9 I reported last week….

How are we doing? Here you go:

And that means on the overall we’re now at:

Thanks!

Yes, there’s been a delay getting Chapter 5 up — I hadn’t finished it by Sunday night and when Monday rolled around so did the contractor helping get our house ready to put on sale, his schedule suddenly meaning he needed to check-in, buy some stuff, ask some questions … and then despite initial plans to spread the immediate work across several days or weeks we managed (me as a minion) to get it done yesterday. Thus, a late Chapter, since this isn’t one that Sharon and I can trade off on.

So, now more than half the work in the basement is done, and Chapter 5 well started, and after a short break for a long planned visit upcountry, I’ll be back on the firing line here. Thanks for your patience!