Apr. 21st, 2019

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I have three sisters so a while back Mom started a group text that included all of us. An exciting upgrade was a couple years ago when my father finally got his own smartphone, after years of having all his input filtered through Mom. So now the family groupchat is the four daughters, Mom, and Dad. Normally it’s used to send photos of the various niblings doing Significant Stuff around, but occasionally we get something great like the youngest niece posing artistically in front of Dad’s latest demolition project.

[Image description: small blonde girl in bright cheerful clothing strikes a coy, vampy pose leaning against a garbage can in front of a mostly-demolished cinder block building full of neat piles of junk.]

(One could almost imagine she’d done this with the power of her mind, knowing her.)

Anyhow, yesterday Dad sent a photo, which I will decline to share here, of a gloriously majestic enormous wolf spider sitting on the wainscoting in the kitchen, next to the kitchen bookshelf. “Spring has arrived. A visitor to our kitchen this morning. Mom at first thought it was one of the toy bugs, but it’s just looking up Easter recipes in the cook books.”

Various of us reacted in different ways, and I went on with my life after doing my part (looking up the spider’s Latin classification to verify it was the species I’d thought), and it was a bit later that my youngest sister got to the message.

She wrote asking if they’d set him a place at the dinner table.

In the meantime, my mind had gone a very long distance from this chat, and I had been discussing Passover seders with someone, so I immediately assumed this was someone talking about, of course, the Prophet Elijah, so I had to go poke the notification to figure out why my sister of all people was chiming in on Passover commentary (we are Catholic by upbringing, so).

It took me some backtracking to figure out she was talking about the spider. 

I made a joke about it in the family groupchat but I’m the only one in the family who knows anything about Passover so it went unappreciated, so I’m sharing the setup here at least where someone might be amused. 

I AM A DELIGHT also, in looking up wolf spiders, I discovered that they are not in fact signs of spring; they live more than one year, so this glorious specimen likely overwintered somewhere. Then I got distressed, to Dude, wondering where spiders GO in the winter and DON’T THEY GET COLD. He was like, uh they’re fine, don’t freak out. But a part of me wants to knit tiny spider sweaters, so let’s be glad I never learned to knit.
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1) In case y’all missed it, the ebook of the canon source material for this fanfiction (lol that is what is important) is on sale currently for $1.99 in the US.

I am going to self-importantly claim that this is because there is just so much demand for it because everyone wants to read my fic and it was so much traffic that the publisher was like oh my gosh! time for a sale! But also, everyone should read The Goblin Emperor. So. (No, I am not sincere in this belief, but I like to tell stories.)

2) eagle-eyed reader @csevet pointed out that, duh, the Archduchess Vedero is Maia’s half-sister, but the pirate captain Shaleän, of course, is Maia’s aunt, so I had to hastily amend chapter 7 to reflect this, which gave Kiru a great deal more flailing to do and honestly enriched the conversation quite a bit so I am very glad about that. However, it does mean that I had to edit a previously posted chapter, which is a thing I don’t like to do, so I’ve put a note at the beginning of today’s chapter and am also calling it out here, chapter 7 has been revised. It was also pointed out that I have the characters’ ages all wrong, but I’ve declined to revise that; I can easily explain that by Kiru being an older woman and genuinely believing her male coworkers are all babies. 

2a) incidentally this means I get to mention something I haven’t yet had a chance to incorporate into this work: Archduchess Vedero is absolutely the social head of a fantastically rich lesbian subculture that is going to flourish like gangbusters during the reign of Edrehasivar VII and I wish I had time to write a whole novel about that but rest assured, Science Lesbians is basically canon, and at some point Maia’s aunt Sheveän is going to visit and just blow the doors off the fad of young noblewomen becoming proficient swordsmen etc. ALSO Csethiro is going to go down in history as the Empress who wore trousers at court and single-handedly revived the fashion of dueling.

3) the chapter after this is the wedding and I haven’t worked out yet how that’s gonna subdivide but y’all can rest easy, there will finally be kissing in this book… tomorrow. 

4) Today’s Chapter Update: Chapter 8, Our Business. The strain is getting to Cala.

*

Cala leaned against the wall, pressing his forehead into the flocked wallpaper, while Himself was off bathing and dressing for bed. Beshelar came up next to him and put a hand gently against his back between his shoulder blades. He’d been spending enough time with goblins, Cala thought, that he was starting to absorb some of their habits, if he was going around touching other people with his bare hands like that. It was pleasant, though; Beshelar’s hand was large and warm and comforting.

“Wilt thou survive?” Deret asked softly.

Cala laughed, no louder than the sound of his breath. “It’s just a headache,” he said. “We can meditate our way out of that and be fine by morning.”

“Should’st not have wasted thy wakefulness charms on me,” Beshelar said.

Cala shook his head slowly. “It is well, Deret. I need thee.”

Beshelar’s hand was such a welcome, grounding pressure on his back, and stayed there for a long moment. Cala opened his eyes and blinked at Deret, who was clearly casting about for words for a response to that. But Cala understood, and smiled, and Beshelar smiled back.

“We’ll make it,” Beshelar said. “It’s not long now.”

“Mm, maybe they’ll spend their whole first day married in bed,” Cala said, brightening a little.

Beshelar grinned. “Mayhap,” he said.

*
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