Story Post: PMF 7, Chapter Three! (Patreon)

Me, this morning: OK, Patreon post time.

Tree cutter in my neighbor's back yard: bzzzzz

Me, typing: "I haven't gotten as far as I'd like on the book in the last month because lots of things interrupted—"

Tree cutter: bzzz—oops!

Branch hitting the power line to my house: WHACK!

Nearby transformer with components literally melting: POP POP POP POP

My Computer: ...

...so that's how the first half of today went. Thankfully, no one was hurt and the local power company came out to reset everything. I had all my work already saved except for a few sentences of this post, so nothing but a little time was lost there. Bonus, that gets the power company out here ahead of our annual windstorm-and-power-outage, and they cleared some brush (along with the aforementioned tree cutter), so maybe this saves us a bigger problem later?

Anyway, October was a busy month for me with travel, and travel prep, and veterenarian stuffs because my cats pick great times to have stomach bugs (they're okay now). PMF 7 is therefore only at 70k words when I was hoping for, um, more. November is also historically not a hugely productive month for me, but I'm gonna do my best.

Now, on for this month's chapter! I think I mentioned before that the plot and direction of this book changed significantly for me once I was a couple chapters in. You may not see it right away, but this is where that shift really shows for me. As a point of detail, Chapter Three here introduces Cavalier Services, a "private military corporation" (mercenaries) hired by our villains on the planet Voltaire to, ah, "keep everyone safe." Specifically to keep the Runners "safe." I need to go back and seed this issue in the prologue when I do revisions, but since posting this chapter meant a revision pass of its own, I figured I'd roll Cavalier into it.

Anyway, we last left Tanner with the sun setting on him at Fremantle University as he realizes he has no realistic hope of working in his desired career field. The dream that helped get him through the Navy and the war is shattered, much like his dreams of college before the Navy happened. Probably not a good feeling, y'know?