Well, it’s been quite the slog!

I completed the last chapter of The Changeling Game and posted it online, along with the Afterword, on January 27, 2025. This was immediately followed by my madcap “February 18 Project” in which I posted updates of all of my unfinished Pitch Black-related stories to Works In Progress on the 25^th anniversary of its theatrical release. Then, my day job went loony. (Don’t ask. It’s totally brain-breaky.)

In the middle of all of that, I began doing massive edits on The Changeling Game to correct grammatical issues and continuity errors, as well as clean up some of the prose that felt awkward to me and make sure that the formatting standards I’m using are applicable across the board (and chasing down a good way to format things so long-dashes never get orphaned in any format was quite the adventure, but I succeeded!), and get it all applied. Roughly two weeks ago, I thought I was done and uploaded new copies of the eBooks into the archive, but that was before I discovered a few bits of coding weirdness that forced me to take another deep dive into the text. As of today, everything should be corrected.

The Read Online option, which went offline two weeks ago, is back and looking pretty spiffy if I do say so myself. New .epub, .mobi, and .pdf versions of the story are available for download.

Some naming conventions got changed, based on additional digging I did. In the twenty-five years since Pitch Black came out, for instance, the legitimacy of “Tangiers” has pretty much gone away, so the planet the second act takes place on is now “Tangier Prime.” Other bits of nuance like that got cleaned up. A few minor characters’ names changed for a variety of reasons (one of which is that a few of my current coworkers are interested in reading the story, and some of the characters happened to share names with other coworkers—purely coincidentally but I decided that I didn’t want anybody assuming otherwise) and a whole lot of bits of unintentional verbal repetition got wiped away. Hopefully it’s a better, cleaner read as a result.

Over in Works In Progress, the first three chapters of the sequel, Song of Many ’Verses, are up and ready to read. And now that The Changeling Game is fully put to bed, hopefully chapter 4 will soon follow. My day job is still insane, but the insanity should finally begin to abate sometime in the next two weeks… hopefully after that, I can get a good head of steam going on my writing again.

In the meantime, enjoy!

Seriously, this thing is a monster, but it’s nearing its conclusion. We’re now firmly back in the story’s “present,” learning about what happened to Kyra after she and Jack split up and dealing with a few persistent mysteries. Things are nearing their close… and the beginning of the sequel, Song of Many ’Verses. Which will be the first new story within the fandom that I’ve written in more than a decade and a half.

Things changed up a little in the last few chapters, too! The story has gone from being M-rated to being X-rated, from “Gen” to “Het (Plot),” from “No Pairings” to “Riddick/Jack,” and has acquired a warning for “Explicit Sexual Content.” So that changes things up just a bit! I also did a continuity editing pass to streamline the timeline of events and smooth out some contradictory ways of presenting information, so it’s a good time to download a new copy of the eBook; in addition to new chapters, most of the preceding chapters underwent tiny corrections. The story is now up at the 350K word mark, which is an intimidating first for me. I had no idea it was going to get so big, I swear!

My posting speed is dropping down a little over the holidays because of some other obligations I have right now, but we’re getting close!

Enjoy!

It’s been almost two months since I updated the online copies, but I have now added chapters 61-77 to the existing eBooks and Read Online pages, so now’s a good time to get a fresh copy. We’re (finally!) back in the Frame Story, which means Riddick has reappeared… and does he ever have a lot of opinions about what’s happened so far.

(But no, he’s not saying “too many words.” HA! That’s a Riddick that We Just Don’t Talk About around here…)

But I am a little agog at how big this little story has gotten. Still, we’re getting much closer to the finale and then the launch of Song of Many ’Verses, which will proceed at a more sedate pace so some of my other incomplete stories can advance toward completion, too. This has been one heck of a wild ride, folks, but I’ve been loving every minute of it, and hope you have been, too!

I plan to post a single chapter of Song each week, so that I can begin updating Forbidden Gifts (which people on Ao3 have been clamoring after). I hope to also start updating Falling Angels and The Slow Burn again, too… and working out a kind of balanced schedule for advancing all of those stories to their conclusions. No promises how that will all work out, though… muses like to hijack me.

I will try to get back to updating the archive roughly every five chapters, too. Cheers!