One of the pleasures of being an author or producer here is knowing what stories are scheduled for release and keeping tabs on the 'bets' made by the community members as they try to predict what we've got in store. Sometimes the guesses are close... we even see occasional winners. But the rest of the time... the guesses can get pretty far afield. Or the stories on offer are exceptionally unexpected.

It's the latter that's the case, most likely, this time around. While it is a later chapter in something that has been in progress for some time now (it's part 4), it HAS been some time since we'd seen any progress. So its with great pleasure, as the staff rakes in our take of pastries, that we announce this week's content. From MageOhki, we have Part 4 of "Rises the Sun" in the Second Generation collection.

I'm sure my Sacramento desert climate has a bit of a jump on much of the rest of the country but this week definitely moved into shorts weather. Not 'ok, I can wear shorts with a shirt and a hoodie' where its a little chilly... but full on, clear blue sky and mid-70's pushing towards 80 during the afternoon. Shorts and a t-shirt necessary for temperature control (unless you cheat and turn on the AC at the first sign of warm weather).  We've also had a fairly rainy spring season, spread out over a couple months... so everything is flowering and green. Which, admittedly, sucks for allergies... but it certainly makes for gorgeous scenery.

Over on the Whateley Universe front, its also shorts weather. We have a couple of them that we're going to release together, all of them in the Original Timeline 2007 school year. From Elrod, we've got a vignettes collection "Charge of the Light Vignettes" and from E. E. Nalley, we have "Out Foxing".

Enjoy! Comment!

Trying out a little something new here. Dan and Wasamon have implemented a Table of Contents mechanism for today's presentation of an anthology of short stories. It is a little glitchy, and its... ugly... but it should be functional. If we can work the rough edges off the process of making use of it, it might become a method by which we can present some reading lists or combine author collections. And other stuff.

If it continues to be glitchy and I can't easily resolve tying it more into the site's style scheme, it might just be a one off. We'll see how it goes. :)

As to the content for today? Wasamon has some origin stories or other 'off campus' bits for a number of support characters that he thought you might like to know more about than the brief mention they get as background to someone else's story. Enjoy the Anthology! Be sure to comment.

For this week, we have part two of Astrodragon's story... "As ever the moon didst waen ...".  It can be found in the Gen 2 category of stories.

While Wasamon's piece "The Quantum Suicides" (the second half of which is out today!), uses the word quantum properly and on more than one level; I've been amused lately by the increasing number of products that are 'quantum!' ...as though it is the new version of 'super' or 'ultra'. It's not. Or like its the next thing out beyond Giga and Tera...also not, the next one in that series is Peta.

People talk about the lack of social interaction as a result of technology being a huge problem for civilization... I'm not certain I agree. I believe that the anti-intellectual inclination that mocks the 'grammar nazi' is worse. After all, this latter is personally opposed to (and rallying others to support them) in the idea that using words effectively isn't important. Civilization cannot exist without people able to communicate with one another... and science cannot advance without the ability to precisesly record and document steps taken. Thus, the reason I posted about uses of 'quantum' bothering me.