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 25th 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!