The Marshmallow Ranch Gazette (Patreon)

Vol. 1, Issue 18 - Tuesday, July 26th, 2016

Howdy, patrons!

My apologies for not getting the double-shot of The Cult of Maximus done in time -- there's just too much going on right now for me to deliver on that front I'm afraid. But I will have part 17 up and ready for you this Friday! That will close out chapter four and spin us off into an eventful and uncertain chapter five! Whoo!

July turned out to be a fairly busy month. Last weekend (July 16th), a friend of ours organized a trip down to southern California for a jaunt through Disneyland and a puzzle hunt. If you're unfamiliar with the puzzle hunting concept, it's basically this scavenger-hunt-style thing where you go to a location, work on a themed puzzle which gives you another piece of a larger puzzle and/or a clue to the next location, and then you go somewhere else for another puzzle, on and on until you're able to solve the whole thing! It can be incredibly fun if you're into that sort of thing, but really intimidating as well.

Luckily, that friend is an absolute master at writing puzzles, so it was a total blast! It was a noir-themed puzzle that centered around the (fictional) murder of a movie character; the puzzles were related to the suspects, or points of interest around Hollywood, or specific areas of knowledge that each of us had. Our hunt took us to the Museum of Death (which is...an experience), an overlook on Mullholland Drive, an actual escape room (which was just the best thing you guys) and the Shambhala Big Cat Sanctuary, where we got to see lions, tigers, leopards and Tippi Hedren! We even had our picture taken in our team puzzle hunt shirts! It was quite possibly the best weekend I've had in a long time, and I'm eternally grateful to my friend for organizing it. He's one of the best eggs. THE BEST.

The weekend after that was the on-call weekend for my day job, so I was chained to my laptop. It was relatively quiet, but I'm a little gunshy about writing porn on work property for reasons. >.> So I decided to work on my Pathfinder game instead. That was quite enjoyable, but it didn't get me any further along with my writing stories. Most of this week has been catching up with work and getting the game session together, so between catching up with work after the puzzle hunt vacation and the on-call slog, there hasn't been much time for that.

This weekend I actually run my Pathfinder game after a long hiatus, which is exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. The weekend after THAT is my birthday, so the plan is to hang out with friends and probably drink a lot. Don't worry, though -- I'll make sure that a couple thousand words of muscly goodness is here all the while.

Now that we're getting further along in the serial, I'd like to know what I can do to make previous installments easier to get to. Should I create a repository at the Furry Network or SoFurry for the raw parts before collecting them into proper chapters? Should I create a Dropbox folder and send folks the link once a month so they have full access to the story so far? Should I not worry about it and instead focus on getting story parts out on time? Let me know in the comments!

For now, I'm going to head off and catch up on all this writing I have to do. See you at the end of the week!