Chapter Five of "The Big Meow" now online for subscribers

[dianeduane]

(sigh) After dealing with an incredible amount of local crap (which I'm not going to bore you with at the moment, but will, a little later, on the weblog and elsewhere), this is just to let everyone know that Chapter 5 is now available for "The Big Meow"'s subscribers. And my apologies for the long delay. (The chapter will go up for public consumption a week for today.)

Profound apologies also to those who emailed me about the long delay in chapter posting, and didn't get a response: the mail is just one more thing that's been very screwed up lately. I am working to fix that, as well as many other things. More of this shortly. (Briefly, I want to finish the book up before the end of December, and am about to set up a new pub schedule. We'll also be revamping the TBM website so as to make it simpler to do updates and stay in touch with everybody in a timely manner. When everything's set up, I'll see if this weblog can be imported / incorporated directly into the website structure.)

Subscribers are being mailed information about the file locations right now. (Briefly: it's where chapters 3 and 4 were on their limited release, and the same usernames / passwords will work for accessing the new material. If you're a subscriber and you've lost the location information or the passwords, mail me at diane.duane@gmail.com and I'll mail you the passwords straight back. Please put the word PICARESQUE in your subject line so I can make sure Gmail notices your messages properly.)

Once again, all possible apologies for the great lateness...but I'm now on track to getting this thing done, pronto. Thanks again to all of you who've been bearing with me so patiently.

Comments

[barberio.livejournal.com]

Don't worry about it. Most of us who bought in will understand that writing doesn't come on-tap.

(I'm waiting till it's finished to read it.)

[hrrunka]

Thanks! Just finished reading it. :)

[bodhibird.livejournal.com]

The link for Chapter Five actually goes to Chapter Four. I replaced "Four" with "Five" in the URL and got the new chapter.

And I have to tell you this: I just about fell out of my chair when Arhu said, "Interspecies STUFF!" My stepdaughter, who is now nearly twenty, used to use "stuff" as a euphemism for "sex" in the same way--"I don't want to see this movie if there's stuff in it." I died of joy and then revived. It was so funny, so utterly adolescent. (And I had no idea who The Silent Man was till they went to restaurant, dopey me.)

[pendlemac.livejournal.com]

Seconded!

( Although I'm too impatient to wait, so I'm reading each chapter as it comes. )

[cgbookcat1.livejournal.com]

Hooray! I just got my roommate hooked on the series.

Don't worry about the delay. We've hoped for this book for years already, and a few more months are nothingl

[txvoodoo.livejournal.com]

Totally offtopic - inspired by some comments in an earlier post in your LJ, I started re-reading some of the early ST:TOS novels. (I'm an obsessed completionist - I have all of them up until #96 - your last 2 books. And a good hunk of the TNG, DS9, and various multi-series books. This includes the Bantam novelizations).

I had forgotten how good some of these were.

In re-reading, one thing stood out - the prescience of technology to come (although we've certainly sped up the timeline a bit!) and also how some of the imagined technology was offbase and is now, almost quaint.

Do you ever have the urge to go back and revise these, in light of technological advances? Granted, the revisions would probably need to be done every 5-10 years or so ;)

[robotech-master.livejournal.com]

Oh yay! Another great chapter! <devours greedily>

<crosses fingers for stuff not to get in the way of the next one being on time.>