2025 Status Report

I aten’t dead.

I am, however,

incredibly busy. It’s been nearly a year since I last updated, and over three years since I launched the serial. Updates have been … well, let’s be kind and say “sporadic”. However, I’m still working on The Bitter Drop in my spare time, and I don’t intend on abandoning it.

So! When will updates resume? I can’t answer that in terms of specific dates, but I can give people an idea of what to expect and roughly when to expect it.

Firstly, I’ve written myself into something of a corner, and to fix it I’ll need to rework the extant two full chapters and one partial chapter somewhat. The amended text will be going up in toto in the near future, and I’ll announce it on the blog here, too.

The retcons are not going to be anything major, except for one thing — I’ll be renaming Anzu, in part. By “in part”, I literally just mean his first name, from “Anzu” to “Zigismund”, and accordingly, the name he’s known by commonly from “Nyura” to “Gizelle”. The reasons for this are mostly aesthetic quibbles on my part, as well as, frankly, so his sister can call him “Ziggy” and I can claim a proper overt reference to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Besides that, most of the retcons concern the royal family (since we’ve only heard of them, thus far, it’ll amount to name tweaking — the full ramifications of the these retcons will be invisible to the reader, as they’ll only start surfacing in future updates) and the state of the Talons. I’ll be pointing out the specific edits in a changelog, as I usually aim to do when editing the archive.

I don’t yet have an ETA for the amended chapters; it really depends on my schedule and my overall health. I expect the edits to be done anywhere between later this week — that’s week commencing Febuary 2, 2025 — and mid-April, but hopefully closer to today than to Paysakh.

After the amended chapters have been posted, I’ll be experimenting with uploading a whole chapter at a time. The rest of Chapter 002 will be going up either along with the amended chapters, or shortly thereafter, and Chapter 003 will follow as soon as it’s done. If a miracle happens, it might go up alongside Chapter 002, but I’m not counting on miracles right now.

The schedule will, for the moment, likely remain irregular, but hopefully more frequent than once a year. I’ll be aiming to update once a month or once every two months, with a full chapter comprising between 6 and 12 scenes. We’ll see if that works better than scene-by-scene.

At some point in 2025, I’ll be updating the site backend, and sorting out the mirrors. The SV mirror is likely going to lie fallow, and I cannot vouch for my patience holding out long enough to wrangle the ScribbleHub mirror, either. There might be an AO3 mirror soon, but again: I’m finding mirrors to be incredibly annoying to manage, enough so that I suspect the mere prospect of having to update the mirrors has made me reluctant to work on updates at all.

I’m still figuring out whether to bother with implementing a comment system on the site. In the future, I’ll see about setting up a Discord server — I don’t think there’s any need for one, right now. Eventually, I might set up a Patreon or something, too. Right now, doing so would put my disability benefits into jeopardy. If I get a Patreon together, I’ll post about it here and

on my Bluesky.

For now, if you want to comment on something — blog posts, actual chapters, whichever — your best bet is to email me.

So, I’m in law school. That’s where I’ve been. That’s why I’ve had no bloody time for anything. I’m doing well, my health is holding steady, and I’m attending shul regularly. There isn’t much to worry about, except money, but hey, that’s why I’m in law school.

The other thing I’d like to address is why updates take me a long time. The prose style I’ve chosen requires a fair amount of line-by-line editing and refining, and that’s been slowing me down. I’m unwilling to compromise on the stylistics, so I rather suspect I’ll not be able to update more often than monthly for the foreseeable future. We’ll see. Given the length of the chapters, once a month is probably sufficient. I’m well aware that there are serial authors who update weekly with 8k-10k chunks, but I can’t sustain that kind of pace, and I don’t want readers to feel like I’m updating faster than they can catch up, either.

Otherwise … eh. My motivation to keep writing has been low for various reasons, and I’d contemplated quietly taking the whole site down and pretending I never started. I’ve decided against that, but as you can probably tell, for a while I’d nearly given up on writing altogether. I’m choosing to push forward regardless, but some part of me is still skeptical it’s worth bothering. We’ll see, I suppose. Despite my misgivings, I’m committed to at least attempting to resume updating even irregularly.

Well, that’s all, for now. Again, if you have any comments or questions, email me! See you all soon.