Sunday, May 25, 2014

24: Bonds

Crappy chapter title, but who has time to think of a good one?

Anyway, hello! It's been a very very long time, I know (believe me, I do). Unfortunately, my explanation is rather poor (let's just say while the first half of my 18-hour semester wasn't so bad, the second half kicked my ass rather thoroughly) so all I can do is beg your forgiveness(es?).

I'd like to say things will be back to normal, but sadly that's not the case. I haven't had any time at all to work on Vulpine up until very recently. But it's summer vacation now, and things look smooth (for the moment). I still need to work on my outlining of future chapters, and then once that's done, the ol' buffer has to be reconstructed so this sort of thing doesn't happen for the remainder of Vulpine's run (however long that is, haha). I wish I could give you all some sort of timestable for this, but I really have no clue, sadly. It almost certainly won't be next Sunday, I can tell you that. There's still quite a bit for me to do, and although I'll work like a maniac this week (really!) it'll take some time.

Anyway, I figured I would (finally) post the Trick chapter, now that it's all done and stuff, since it was supposed to appear promptly after Riven's and that just never happened (damn you, 18-hr semester!). Mostly I just wanted to prove that I was indeed alive and still working on Vulpine. So, yeah. Guess I did that.

(Trick really needs to learn not to be nice to people, because everyone she's nice to has something horrible happen to them, haha. She's harder on herself than she prolly should be, but then she was planning everyone's dead, so it's justified, I think. :P)

There's only one review to respond to, so lemme do that and then I'll get out of here and get back to work. ;)

@Lynxeye: Yep, no superpowers here. The Tempers are something I've tried working in throughout the story in little pieces (we see them in the beginning as Sprite's musing over them, and then the Temper of each character is always scattered throughout their chapters in a variety of ways) but this is the first time it's really been explained, which pleased me greatly! One thing about the foxes that makes my life easier is that their mythology isn't overly-complicated or clear. In fact, it's pretty cloudy about most things! They believe the stars are spirits, but don't really know what that entails, they believe the sun & moon were foxes that have their own little story (that is rather long and stuff) but they aren't overly reverent about them, they believe in the Tempers (which are the most complicated thing of the whole bunch) but that doesn't enter their lives on a regular basis, and while they have some idea of what the Sky is like (a reverse of our world, basically; everything blue is water and the clouds are little pieces of land just floating around in the great cosmic soup; everything on the earth came from the Sky in one way or another) it's not too detailed or well-understood - because foxes, although clever, aren't too good on the whole metaphysical nature of the universe, haha. I'm rambling a bit, but I'm glad that while the introduction of the Tempers & some other religious things has given us a bit of insight into their culture, it's not too overwhelming or ridiculous. They're very removed from spirituality in most aspects of their life, and I think that shines through pretty well, most of the time.

And that's that. Again, super-duper sorry for the wait. I hope there's at least a few people still sticking around, but I understand why many of you might have flown the coop after three months (three whole months!). Hopefully the next wait won't be so long.