Here’s a random funny writing story.

After my decision to put out a little mercenary short story with the combined goals of inspiring myself to kick into something, test my premium blog offering and make enough spare cash to pay for my Zelda DLC (mission accomplished, by the way), I figured I might as well make it an actual publication.

I’ll be releasing it as cheap as possible on Amazon, with a note saying that most of the writing is available on the blog already for free. However, the new story will only have a few tantalising snippets on the blog, and the stories I have already started will get their conclusions in the new anthology. So I get you coming and going! Sorry not sorry!

But I was amused to find that even before those as-yet unwritten parts, I’m looking at 300 pages of draft. This isn’t going to be a cheap twenty-page offering. Furthermore, the stories have mathematical properties I found very enjoyable.

First, there are four actual stories in the anthology, and three smaller interlude short stories to break the parts up. However, I’m not just putting the four stories one after another. Each story is divided into segments, and I will be printing those in a set sequence, moving back and forth between them. Furthermore, each of those segments is divided into exactly nineteen chapters, forming a theria of sorts (it’s an in-story convention that just sort of emerged here, go ahead and look it up on the blog – I may also make an aki’Pedia entry about it too).

What am I talking about?

The story of Predericon and her friends in the Destarion has four nineteen-chapter parts (1, 2, 3, 4). The story of Çrom Skelliglyph and the Black Lotus will have three nineteen-chapter parts (1 and 2). The story of Maladin and Dunnkirk will have two nineteen-chapter parts (here’s 1). And the story I have tentatively titled Panda Egg[1] will have one nineteen-chapter part.

[1] Why? Well like most of my stories, this started as a joke that got massively out of hand … but then suddenly fell into place and began to make sense. Because the urverse is funny like that.

So, not counting the interludes, I have four interwoven short stories creating a single tale in ten parts, ten being the magic number of the urverse. All of these parts breaking down into nineteen segments[2], the magic number of the Corporate academic theria.

[2] Okay, not perfectly. Predericon in Darkness has twenty parts, but that in itself is a meta-reference to the secret code messages hidden in the faulty theria in the Destarion‘s lower archives; and Devils And Such has a Coda chapter that I have repurposed as the first chapter of the next part, so it still works!

These are the things that make me happy.