Happy New Year, everyone! It was a REALLY rough ride to get here, but... well... we're here.

As I take down last year's calendar and replace it with this year's, I can't help but think about my long-neglected project, Hotel Paradise. I've been public about how and why I lost my drive to write it due to a drive-by shooting nearly killing me, but now I really want to get back on track. The issue is that the track has changed. During the hiatus, plot points and character motivations/dynamics have shifted in my head, and I don't think I can really continue the story along its current path. I'm not saying I need to fully rewrite it and change character deaths or major plot points, but there are some things that need to be adjusted, corrected, or foreshadowed before I think I can keep writing the story. It's a bit different now than it was when I started writing it.

So, to that end, I'm going to start making those alterations, starting with Chapter 1. For anyone who's already read the story up to this point, don't worry, the canon events aren't changing. You don't have to worry at all about a dead character coming back to life or vice versa, I went into writing it with a full sequence of events and a "kill order" in mind, and I'm sticking to that. But there are a few lines of dialogue that don't make sense, or character actions/statements that blatantly contradict something that happens. There's even a point early on when a character is accidentally in two different areas simultaneously and I had to clumsily write around it. That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about changing.

And while I'm doing that, I'm going to keep working on chapters beyond what's already posted. I want to get back to the weekly schedule I was on at the start of things, with a backlog of chapters to post. My target is that new chapters will be added to my gallery around mid to late February, once all the editing to previous chapters is finished and I have a pile of new content. I'm not yet sure if I'll simply replace the existing submission files or move what's currently in my gallery to scraps and upload the new, corrected versions as new submissions.

Speaking of my gallery, I plan to clear it out. To put it simply there's stuff in there that just doesn't fit with my existing interests anymore, stuff that never went anywhere, or characters that I just never did anything with. Some of it will go to scraps, some of it will disappear entirely. I'm debating selling off some of the more abandoned characters to get myself some funds for the winter, since if they've been in my gallery for 7-8 years and I've never used them for anything at all, there's no real reason to hold on to them when somebody else could actually put that character to use.

I also have a comic that I'd like to start working on, which I believe I've mentioned before. "Sheepish", a slice-of-life romantic comedy thing about a sheep named Ewan who's secretly in love with his best friend, a tiger named Thomas. As the two of them move on to college, things become complicated for Ewan when Thomas introduces him to his girlfriend, a shiba inu named Maria, and Ewan himself ends up in a relationship with a zebra named Kurt. I've had these characters (and more) and some fun plotlines in mind for years now, and with my art practice starting to pay off, I think I want to try actually putting things on paper.

Speaking of that art practice, I have a Bluesky account where I've been posting a daily Pokemon sketch for over two years now. It's not technically a furry account, and is very SFW (I don't even cuss on it!), but for anyone who's interested I'm going to add a link to it on my profile page. I'd start posting the sketches on this gallery as well, but with over 700 of them done by this point, that would be a bit of an undertaking. I'll do it if there's demand, though. >.>

I think that's about it for now. Happy 2026, everyone! May this year find a way to be better than the last! (Granted, that's a pretty low bar...)

EDIT 1/3/2026: welp

Today I saw news from multiple sources that Telegram has decided to partner up with Elon Musk to force his stupid AI program into the chat service, so that seems like a good sign for me to delete my account there.

I wanted to put this journal up as a notice to those who have me as a Telegram contact, but I'll be reaching out to a few of you individually anyway. I'll still be on here and on Discord as points of contact, and might set up a Bluesky account as well -- I already have one, just not for furry stuff.

I think it's time to end this hiatus. The residents of the Hotel need to have their story told and concluded.

So, in addition to getting back to work writing the next chapter (I might start writing it again from scratch; I already have part of it that was written over a year ago, and I want to at least make sure that the style and tone are consistent with how I would write now), there's going to be an alternative, possibly more attention-grabbing way to read it.

Hotel Paradise is going to be a comic!

As I've been drawing and posting my own "practice references" for the cast, it's to warm me up a bit for making the story into a comic. Obviously, due to the size of the story and how much happens in it, this will end up being a much slower way to read it; I don't think I have it in me just yet to do back-to-back pages with any kind of quick turnaround. But I'll try for at least one page per week, and I'll do my best to condense as much as I can into those pages.

Before I can post anything, though, there are a couple things I want to pick up to make it look nicer. First is a higher-quality set of colored pencils, or at least a set that allows me more colors to use. I've had my eye on a 520-piece set for a while and recently came into the funds that I may be able to buy it. I also want to get a small scanner I can use to actually scan the page in and make it look better and more consistent than a cellphone picture allows me to do.

Fingers crossed that the revival works well! I'm still excited to tell this story, I've just been demotivated for a while. But lately, thanks to playing through the Danganronpa games with some friends on Discord, I'm feeling a bit more in tune with how I was when I started the story years ago. So... here we go, back to Paradise!

Figured since it's been quiet over here for a while, I'd just drop an update. Chapter 28 is nearly finished, just a few short bits left to write; I'm going to try and have it 100% ready by Tuesday.

Something that slowed this chapter down is that I've been sick literally all month long. On the 5th I got infected with my second bout of strep throat for the year (the first time was in late March), and even after a full course of antibiotics, I can't shake the cough and it's doing horrible things to my voice and energy levels in general. I am on steroids now to try and push the last bit out of me so I can go back to work full time, but all this week I'm off work so I can have time to actually recuperate, and I intend to spend it writing.

I also decided to cobble together a rough estimate of how long this story's going to be at the end. With the rough outline I have going, accounting for stuff I may realize I need to add, chapters running long and needing to be split (sometimes these characters start talking to each other and don't want to stop), or chapters being condensed because they're too short, I would say by the end Hotel Paradise will be somewhere around 70 chapters in total.

And then there's the decision of whether or not I want to follow through with a follow-up story that I've been kind of lightly planning on for about a year now, and already have a full cast AND name picked out for -- "Paradise Penitentiary". Aside from the cast, this one's still in very early planning stages, and I don't even know if I'll feel up to writing it by the time I finish Hotel. I guess the final chapter will be when I decide if there's a sequel, based on several factors, the most important being how long it actually takes me to finish this damn story!

One final note, I've been commissioning some alternate NSFW reference images of the Hotel Paradise cast from Silent_E, which I'm planning to post in between chapters to help fill the gaps a bit. Since Chapter 28 is so close to completion, I'm going to definitely make sure that gets posted first, and then maybe post the first of the new refs the following week.

Hope you enjoy them!

Currently working on Chapter 28, and having a really, really difficult time deciding between three scenes to include. I don't want to add all three, because it would make the chapter longer than it needs to be and would mess with the pacing, but I also still want to include all three because they're pretty relevant and there really won't be a good place to include them later in the story.

While grappling with this dilemma, it occurs to me: What about all the other stuff that happens in the hotel that doesn't get written up? It's not like the characters just stop existing when the focus isn't on them, and they're going to be doing random fun stuff every now and then... it might be fun to actually write that random fun stuff.

So now I'm thinking of writing up short, one-shot side stories that could be posted alongside the main story, stuff that's not essential to understand the plot as it happens but could still provide more fun insight and characterization, especially for the handful of characters that really haven't had a chance to shine just yet (but don't worry, those chances are coming). These would be nowhere near the scope of a regular chapter; for those I shoot for 4000 words at a minimum, but I think I'd want the side stories to cap out at 1000 on average. Just something bite-sized that I can knock out on a whim and keep myself from growing lazy, while still giving the reader something to whet their appetite.

And for those who would be really worried about where these stories fall into the timeline -- like myself, I'm one of you! -- I would definitely call out what chapters a story takes place during or in between.

I guess if I were to put it in terms of what these would be like as part of an actual Danganronpa game, and not just a story based loosely on the franchise, these one-shots would be similar to the Free Time Events.

With all that said, I'm also going to open this up for suggestions on scenes to write. That's not to say I'll write all (or maybe even any) of the suggested scenes, but if you have something that you think would fit this format and would like to see, I'll definitely put some thought towards it!

It's a beautiful night out, so I'm able to just sit in my backyard under my lit umbrella, listening to my music and just letting the creativity flow. God damn this feels like it did before the shooting that blocked me up for over a year.

That's all... just wanted to share this. :)

Hopefully this makes the series more accessible to read :)

Just a small update, because I felt it was worth mentioning. I'm pretty sure I didn't miss any chapters, but if anybody spots one that's either not a PDF or out of place, please let me know!

Well, after a painfully long hiatus, I've finally got the writing bug back in me. Been typing away at Hotel Paradise again and it feels good to do so.

Considering how long it's been since the last chapter went up, I'm considering this to be "Season Two" of the series. I think Chapter 26 ended on a pretty decent cliffhanger anyway, so it seems like it works as a mental trick for myself. :p

I am going to change my schedule on how I write and post the story, however. While previously I was posting every Tuesday (at least for a while, until circumstances prevented me from being able to write), that's not something that I think I can maintain anymore once I revive the story. So instead, what I'm going to do is write an entire section (including blue chapters where no murder has taken place, and red chapters where the post-murder investigation and trial happen) and, once it's finished, post them daily rather than weekly. I'll then give myself a bit of a break to recharge my batteries before starting on the next section, and the process will begin again.

To summarize:

- Write an entire section of the story, ending at the conclusion of that section's trial.
- Post a chapter out of that section every day until I run out of chapters.
- Give myself a week or two to recover, then start again from step one until I type the words "The End".

While this means there might be a bit of a wait between story sections, it also means you'll get the chapters that make up those sections faster, and writing Hotel Paradise won't be as much of a strain on me. Just an experiment I'm going to try and see if it helps!

I've been writing Hotel Paradise for a little over a year now -- it started last August. While this story isn't even close to completion, I have been itching to write some other stuff as well, so I might start posting other things to my gallery. Hopefully, getting these other stories either out of the way or started will help me get them out of my system, so I can fight the burnout of writing the same story and nothing else.

While I can't (and don't) guarantee that ALL of these stories will be written, these are the ones currently on my mind.

Untitled Ewan and Thomas Project
Two of my oldest characters, Ewan Townsend and Thomas Campbell, really need their own story. I can see this as a slice-of-life style romance story, as Ewan tries to deal with the complications that rise from his one-sided love interest with Thomas, who's completely oblivious to his feelings. These two characters and their relationship with each other has long been a favorite of mine, and I want to write it out properly rather than get the occasional piece of silly art about it.

Population Control Act Reboot
The first thing I wrote on a large scale, and on an older, now defunct account, Population Control Act was the story about a world where cannibalism was legalized out of necessity, and the people trying to survive and fight against the new society that had formed around the law. While I still feel proud of the accomplishment of writing this story, there are a LOT of things I'd change given the benefit of hindsight and my new preferences in the content I write. I would love to revisit these characters, and really want to reboot the story. (I actually did write a first chapter for the reboot, titled "Who We Were", which can be read here.)

High Fantasy Story
I love fantasy stuff, and would really like to try my hand at actually writing it. I have two different casts in my head for a potential fantasy series, and once I decide which one to use (or how to effectively blend them together, since they're tonally VERY different from each other), I'm definitely going to start this.

Cooking With The Mons
The story of two Plusle and Minun siblings who are picked up by two Digimon cousins to be cooked as a meal. This one's a one-off rather than an extended series like Hotel Paradise and the examples above, and although I don't really want to go back to being a vore writer/account, I can't help but admit that it's what got me started in the first place. I have been working on this one as kind of a "vent project" for a few years, typing away a little bit at a time whenever the urge strikes me. So this might be my one-and-done fix for this type of content.

Figured it's been a while since I've done a journal, so here's an update on how Charlie's doing. It's very much a mixed bag.

First of all, my family has started the process of moving. We're not at the packing stage yet, but we've got a house (potentially) lined up. As a bit of backstory, as I've mentioned in past journals such as this one and this one, my current neighborhood is... bad. And it's gotten even more dangerous lately, to the point where it's actually unsafe for us to come home at night.

To add context to the next few paragraphs, I'd like to establish that currently I live with my parents in a house that we own, and my grandma lives next door to us in a house that she rents. My sister and her now-fiancee live with my grandma.

This prompted most of my family to realize that it's time to move, and we're doing so. Our initial plan was to bring my grandma along with us (she lives right next door), since my sister and her soon-to-be-husband are planning to move out on their own anyway. We found the perfect house: a beautiful four-bed two-bath in a good town about a half hour away, not far enough that anybody would have to change jobs. And as an added bonus, it's right across the street from my best friend of over 20 years.

But.

Upon learning that we were planning to move, my sister became completely hostile. She's grown very used to living for free off of my grandma, and if my grandma were to move with us, she'd be cut off from that. Yes, I know I just said that she was planning to move out anyway -- I know. She immediately started attacking everybody in the family, not physically but verbally. My parents offered to give her the house we're currently in, rent free, so they can continue saving up to get their own place. This wasn't good enough, because she doesn't like the house, and doesn't want to live next door to my grandma, the woman she's currently living with.

Complicating things further is that my grandma, upon seeing the new house, decided she didn't want to move into it. For one, she didn't want to move "too far away" from my uncle, and the second factor was that she doesn't want to give up or even cut back on her smoking, despite knowing that the cigarette smoke bothers the rest of us (it actually makes it difficult for my mother to breathe), and would kill the birds that we own. We asked if she'd be willing to smoke in one room of the house, and that's not good enough. She wants to be able to smoke everywhere.

She doesn't want to move unless it's into a duplex, so she can still have her own space to smoke up all the time. Two issues with this: Mainly that there are simply no duplexes for sale around us that don't already have tenants in them (meaning we'd be buying the property to become their landlords or kick them onto the street, neither of which are things we want to do), and that the VA (whom we're getting the loan to buy the new house from) won't approve us to buy a duplex.

So now grandma decided that she doesn't want to move at all. With this revelation now public, my sister has told all of us that if we move, we're abandoning my grandma and terrible people. This despite the fact that she's already declared that she's moving away, and that she doesn't want to live next door to her. But it's not abandoning her when she moves, of course -- it's her getting on with her life.

At this point you're probably asking, "so why not just move without grandma if she doesn't want to leave?"

The answer to that is that she's incapable of taking care of herself. She suffers from short term memory loss and can't remember conversations from day to day, and lately it's gotten to the point where she forgets to take her medication and shower, because she thinks she already has. She's unable to buy her own groceries and often lies about eating (we do stealth fridge checks), and spends her entire life sitting in her living room, chain smoking and watching Game Show Network. Unless we can talk my uncle into stepping up more and becoming her primary caretaker, since he'll only be 3 minutes away as opposed to our 30+, she has to come with us whether she likes it or not.

So now it's a Catch-22 situation. Option A, move with her and accept the fact that she's going to be an awful housemate who fills the house with smoke, kills our birds (or best case scenario, forces us to rehome them), and camps us out of entire portions of our house while complaining about it all the time. Option B, leave her behind and try to figure out how we can still check in on her regularly enough that she can... well... stay alive.

I'm honestly not sure what's going to happen at this point, and it's actually causing me to lose sleep on a regular basis. At this point, though, we're absolutely going to be buying the new house, and will have to cross the grandma-shaped bridge when we come to it.

And as for my sister... at this point, with everything she's done (especially the stuff I didn't include in this journal), I'm absolutely willing to burn that bridge instead of cross it.

Now let's move on to something a little more positive.

In about a month and a half, my work is changing its hours for the Christmas season, going fully nocturnal and not offering day shifts until January. As mentioned above, my current neighborhood isn't safe at night anymore, so I won't be working during that period at all, no matter what they offer -- no amount of pay is worth coming home and getting shot in my own driveway just because I now live in a gang initiation area.

So, with over a month of "vacation" coming up, I'm going to have a lot of free time... and barring the possibility that we'll be actively in the process of packing things up and moving into a new house during that month, I fully intend on spending the time writing Hotel Paradise. My goal is to get a backlog of chapters again so I can go back to regular weekly posts, instead of the more random "whenever I have time to write a chapter" that I'm doing now.

I also plan, after I'm moved and can set up a proper space for it, to start streaming some games on Twitch. It's something I've been wanting to do for years now, but don't have a good area for it. I already have a room picked out in the new house that would be a perfect streaming den, and I fully intend on setting it up for that purpose.

So, like I said, a mixed bag. Definitely a lot of good and a lot of bad going on for me right now, and it's causing a lot of emotional turmoil. All I can do at this point is hope that in the end, it all turns out okay, and things can get back to some kind of normalcy for me. Or at least something that can be close enough to normal.

I've updated the character bios with theme songs! Albeit not on the images themselves, but I have added them to the descriptions.

For anybody who doesn't want to go through that section of my gallery again and check out the "playlist", here they are in convenient list form:

Bao - "Bad Luck" by Neko Case
Barad - "Trouble" by Hamish Anderson
Charlene - "Mechanical Love" by In This Moment
Dustin - "Kickstart My Heart" by Mötley Crüe
Edison - "Figure It Out" by Royal Blood
Elena - "Bodhisattva" by Steely Dan
Ginger - "Rhiannon" by Fleetwood Mac
Gregory - "Creep" by Radiohead
The Host - "Hotel California" by The Eagles
Jamie - "Virtual Insanity" by Jamiroquai
Jo - "Baba O'riley" by The Who
Kick - "Sabotage" by Beastie Boys
Lorena - "Born This Way" by Lady Gaga
Mae - "Sin Wagon" by The Chicks
Rex - "Party Hard" by Andrew W.K.
Summer - "Green Grass and High Tides" by The Outlaws
Zoe - "Seven" by Tijuana Sweetheart

For some of these characters, the songs chosen reflect their energy and attitude; others are simply appropriate in tone; and then there are a few that actually match their roles in the story, either past, present, or even future. (Of course, I'm not going to tell you which ones these are ;) )

I'm slowly getting back into writing Hotel Paradise. If this writer's block had never hit last year, the story would be wrapping up right around now, and that knowledge hurts. So I wanted to go into a bit of detail into what's taking me so long to write, and there are a couple of reasons.

As I mentioned in a journal last year, in October I got shot at, and nearly killed. This shook me pretty deeply. The most immediately noticeable effect was that I no longer felt safe on my porch, which was where I did all of my writing because of how quiet and distraction-free it is. Or was, anyway. I've "fixed" this problem by installing (badly) a patio in my backyard, where it's still quiet and also a lot more private, so I don't feel like I could be on the receiving end of a bullet out here.

But I think it actually got me deeper than I thought, because that was really the point where I stopped writing altogether. There's something in my head now stopping me from getting over that, and it's taken a toll on my productivity.

The second major factor comes down to animism. I'm personally a bit of a believer in it, and feel empathy towards all kinds of things that others don't -- including fictional characters. For those unaware, a quick and easy summary of animism is that it's the belief that things other than humans have souls, typically extended towards plants and inanimate objects. In my case, it's always been applied towards fictional characters, especially those of my own creation.

And with the type of content Hotel Paradise involves, it's no surprise that this could cause me some hesitation. It hits especially badly after writing a murder or an execution, when one of the characters in the story is killed. Knowing what I've already written, and what's to come, really puts a bit of an emotional toll on me as the writer of the story.

I do have a little trick for this; I imagine that the characters are actors in a film or a play. So while in the canon of Hotel Paradise they're dying, the actual "truth" of the matter is that they're just putting on a show. (Of course, this isn't actually the case in Hotel Paradise's storyline!)

The final major factor is my own self-confidence. For as long as I've been active in the fandom, I've never really attracted more than a small handful of friends, despite pouring my heart and soul into every story I write on this account or others I've had in the past. There's always the feeling in the back of my head that nobody cares, and that I could disappear altogether tomorrow and nobody would notice. After more than ten years, I'm an unknown nobody, and it doesn't seem like anything I produce can change that.

I don't want this last point to be misinterpreted -- I do genuinely love and appreciate the friends I've made over the years, and also the readers I've had in the past or have presently. Every favorite, watch, or comment I receive about how much somebody enjoys something gives me a tiny spark of hope that it actually is worth my time to keep going, keep writing, keep trying.

But sometimes when my depression flares up, those tiny sparks don't feel like enough, and that's when I really struggle.

For now I'm going to keep trying. I want to at the very least finish this story -- the characters deserve it, and you readers deserve it. Even if it takes me a few more years to muster up the second half of this story, it will be completed. You'll get an ending.

I promise.

I've just been struggling to work up the motivation to write lately. Hopefully the summer fixes that after I finish installing my patio in the backyard, because I'll be able to sit outside again without the fear of being shot at, and most of my writing last year was done out on the front porch.

For now my plan is to give Hotel Paradise a full re-read. Maybe find some errors or continuity problems in there that I need to fix, and update the files. If I do, I'll make a journal about which chapters are affected by this, along with some notes on what was changed.

Hoping that the re-read helps get me back in the mindset of all these characters, and I can continue the story!

At this point, I've pretty much accepted the fact that my brain needs a bit of a rest, and I'm gonna stop fighting it on that point. This story's already been going for seven months now, and if the cost of keeping it going is a short break every now and then, that's fine by me.

So I'm not gonna stress about it, and I'm aiming for an April return to this story. It's kind of at an okay point for a "To Be Continued" anyway, what with the second trial just finishing up at all. It's a natural rest point.

I might also start writing some other, much shorter stories to break up the monotony, which I hope will help me keep focused. As much as I love this cast of characters and the story I'm telling with them, there are times that it gets a little tiring for it to be the only thing I'm writing. So I might try to weave in some one-shot stories with a different group of characters in a different setting.

Just wanted to put this journal out there, so anybody who might think this story is abandoned can rest assured that it's not. I refuse to give up on it, but I don't want to force it, either.

Well, a few things got in the way of that...

Triangle Strategy came out.
I discovered Vampire Survivors.
Powerwash Simulator released an update.
I'm planning a setting/campaign for a new D&D group.
Civilization 5 and 6 are starting to hook me again.

By no means did I intend to miss this week's upload, but I did! I'm going to do my best to have it posted after work tomorrow, but... well... that list of distractions up there will still be a thing. >.>

I've been under a bit of stress the past few days, and I can tell I'm not in a good state of mind to focus on writing in any meaningful way right now.

So that I can write this next chapter while able to focus on making it as good as it needs to be, I've decided to delay it by a week. Chapter 22 will be uploaded the following Tuesday, on March 1st.

Sorry about this, I know it's a bit of a cliffhanger to leave on!

I admit, I regret not having something set up for this milestone.

When I started this story, I didn't think I'd make it this far. I had everything planned out, a cast I loved, and a story that I wanted to tell, but I wasn't sure if I had the dedication to see it through. I have a terrible habit of starting things but not finishing them, and especially with the low readership numbers (except for junkster, who hasn't missed a chapter yet!), I could see my motivation to continue simply coming to an end.

But that didn't happen.

Except for the necessary hiatus for work in December, I've managed to write a full chapter every week. 4000 words a week, sometimes reaching as high as 5000, and one chapter that actually made it to 8000. As of right now, this story is sitting pretty at just shy of 100,000 words. It's already passed my last major writing project from ten years ago, the story "Population Control Act" on my old account -- and this one hasn't even reached its halfway point yet.

I don't know how I'm staying so dedicated to putting so much work into writing this story that so few people are even looking at!

From the bottom of my heart, thank you to anybody who has been reading and enjoying Hotel Paradise (formerly The Killing Game), whether you're commenting on it or not. I truly appreciate it, and hope that you continue to stick it out as I write 100,000 more words (or possibly more) of this story.

All chapters have been renamed and renumbered, new thumbnails have been made, and tags have been adjusted as necessary. The only thing I haven't updated yet is the trial seating chart, but eh, that's a minor detail that can be dealt with later.

Hopefully this doesn't cause any confusion -- as of right now, Chapter 18 is the current point of the story, which used to be "Chapter 2, Part 8".

I may in the future change the actual submission file to a different file type, possibly .doc or .pdf

It also might be a good idea to at least change the file names for consistency, even if I don't change the file type itself. But I'm kind of wanting to do this, so I can add a small image at the beginning of each chapter showing the current state of the group -- as residents die off, they're removed from the group picture, which becomes smaller and smaller to show their numbers depleting.

After giving it a bit of thought, I've decided to rebrand the story. "The Killing Game" makes it sound directly connected to the Danganronpa series, when in reality it's simply inspired by it -- Monokuma and the rest of the cast doesn't and won't factor in to it, so I want to dispel that misconception.

So, I'm going to be renaming the series to Hotel Paradise, starting as soon as I work up the effort to put together a new thumbnail image.

In addition to the name change, I'm going to be changing the way uploads are titiled. Stuff like "Chapter One, Part Three" may be a familiar way to title it for Danganronpa fans, but for other readers it may sound a bit intimidating and confusing. So when the name changes, I'm also going to be retitling the uploads as such:

Prologue, Part One will simply be Chapter One.
Prologue, Part Two will be Chapter Two.
Chapter One, Part One will be Chapter Three.
Chapter One, Part Two will be Chapter Four.

...and so on. You get the drift. After this change, the story will have seventeen chapters, with chapter eighteen upcoming.

This isn't a change that's going to happen immediately -- like I said, I need to make a new thumbnail first, and I want to make sure it's better looking than the current one. Ideally I'd like to have the full cast featured on it, but with a cast this size, that may be a bit too ambitious.

Hopefully this helps attract new readers, makes it less confusing for existing readers, and will allow this story to grow and improve!

Finally.

I just uploaded the first set of four bio cards for The Killing Game before posting this journal, and the rest are coming over the course of the week. I'm aiming for four cards per day, so they should all be up by the time I post the next chapter of the story.

Planning on deciding which cards I make each day completely randomly, and no, the standing portrait on the cards are not a clue as to who lives or who dies. I just thought they'd be good for filling in the extra space on the side. :p

Hopefully the information I decided to put on them is good! I really wanted to include a spot for a character's Theme Song, but just wasn't able to come up with a good song for all the characters. For the record, though, these ARE the songs that I had assigned prior to giving up on that spot on the card.

Elena - "Bodhisattva" by Steely Dan OR "Moon River" by Audrey Hepburn
Gregory - "Creep" by Radiohead
The Host - "Hotel California" by The Eagles
Jamie - "Virtual Insanity" by Jamiroquai
Lorena - "Born This Way" by Lady Gaga
Kick - "Sabotage" by Beastie Boys
Rex - "Party Hard" by Andrew W.K.

Yeah, I didn't get very far in the project, and the choices are a bit on-the-nose. But hey, maybe it would be a fun thing to revisit some day in the form of a future journal.

I'm so, so sorry for the wait. I really didn't intend for it to turn into an actual month-and-a-half hiatus, I had every intention of continuing the story when and where I could, or making those bio cards. But life kind of got in the way.

And by "life", I mean "work", "Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker", and "getting Covid".

Don't worry too much about that last point; I'm fine. I'm vaccinated and aside from some congestion, a stubborn and constant cough, and some fatigue, feeling pretty okay. As for the first point, work is slowing back down for the season. It's not the full closure that I thought I was coming, but it's definitely freed up a lot of my time again -- especially right now, when they don't even want me to come in and infect everybody else.

Endwalker, though... that one's going to be a problem, because it's caused my FF14 addiction to rage out of control again.

But Chapter 2, Part 5 is nearly complete, and I'm going to make it somewhat of a long post to make up for the unwanted hiatus. I just hope that it turns out to have been worth the wait!

In lieu of a chapter this week (I did tell you that my new work schedule was going to slow down my writing!), I figured I'd take this opportunity to shed some light on my approach to writing this.

Before I even started planning the events out, I laid out a few ground rules for myself.

1 - There is no "main character" in this story; it's an ensemble cast. Points of view are shared between all characters. You're not following one single resident's experience in the Hotel Paradise, but rather sixteen of them, and all of their experiences matter. I never wanted a reaction to a character's death to be "oh well" -- if a character meets their end and it's met with a shrug, then I've failed my job.

2 - Whenever possible, every living character gets at least one line of dialogue per post. I had hoped going in that every character would end up with at least one reader who likes them, and I didn't want that reader to feel let down when their favorite was absent for a chapter. Of course, there are a few times where a character's total absence is necessary (as recently seen in 2-3 and 2-4), and I'm not going to force it. But if somebody's present for a scene, they're going to speak at least once.

3 - Everything gets planned before I start writing. I didn't have a single word of the story written down prior to coming up with the complete cast and order of events. I wanted to know going in that I'd never have a moment of panic where I'm asking myself "now what?", which could have resulted in a premature end when I wrote myself into a corner.

4 - Character deaths serve the story, not the bias of the writer or fanbase. Kind of an extension of the above rule. Story comes first and foremost in this... uh... story, so when a character dies, it's for a reason. Just because somebody becomes unexpectedly popular, or I become more attached to them than I expected to, they don't get a stay of execution. I already know who dies, and when, and who survives. That's absolutely not going to change no matter how much anybody wants it to.

5 - Maintain a buffer of two posts at all times. This rule was kind of a safety measure, to make sure that I'd have something to post should the unexpected happen and I'm unable to write. Obviously, this rule has already been broken, or there would be a new post this week... but that buffer got used up thanks to my own near-murder last month. I'm hoping that I'm able to get that buffer back in place soon, though!

And that's it. That's my approach to this story, and so far, it's been working out well for me. One final note; prior to this necessary delay, I had a planned end date of July 2022 for this story. But thanks to work bombarding me with hours, I'm now tentatively pushing that end date back to September. So I'm going to be writing this one for a while. And who knows, maybe next year when it's finished, I'll decide to do a sequel... or, you know, an unrelated project.

So, here's the situation! The story is not being canceled, far from it, so don't worry about that.

I do however need to change my upload schedule. While I've been pretty consistent about uploading every Tuesday (except for that delay getting 2-3 out), things are necessarily going to have to slow down a bit. I'm still on pace to have 2-4 ready by this Tuesday, but after that, no dates will be promised.

The reason for this is actually good news. I'm going to be getting a lot more hours at work beginning this week, which means more money for me (yay!), but less free time to dedicate to writing (boo...). Therefore, following the posting of 2-4, the upload schedule will change from "every Tuesday" to "as I complete a post". This will likely result in a slower upload schedule, but could also result in a faster one, depending on how much I'm able to work on it from week to week.

I'll also probably use this time to make those long-promised bio cards for the cast on nights that I don't feel like I have enough energy left to dedicate to writing, as my current planned layout for them requires MUCH less effort. I'll probably shoot for one bio card per night, going alphabetically through the cast, unless somebody requests a specific character to be bumped up the line.

In January, I will actually not be working for at least a month as my job shuts down for the season, so I'll be able to spend MUCH more time writing the story, and possibly others. So if anything, this is only a temporary schedule change that will only last a month and a half.

It's not a hiatus (at least I really hope it's not a hiatus!), so you'll still be seeing The Killing Game posted, but it will be more sporadic throughout the remainder of November, and all the way through December.

Sorry for this, but it's what I need to do to help keep myself a little saner during the holidays :)

To put it simply, I was just way too busy and distracted this week to focus on writing, so it's not ready. I'm going to be doing my absolute best to have it ready by the end of the day, but there's every chance I won't.

If 2-3 isn't ready to post by the time I go to bed, I'm just going to delay it until next week. Even if I have it ready by tomorrow, this should hopefully give me the time I need to get my backlog buffer in place again so I don't feel as stressed about making the deadline every time.

Sorry about this, but I'd rather wait an extra week to get the chapter out than post something sloppy and rushed that I won't feel good about.

Hopefully, these don't turn out to be anything that will affect the release schedule for The Killing Game, but just in case, I did want to throw this out there.

The past few weeks for me have been tough. To start out, I'm back at work, which is a good thing for sure. I'm just working a lot of hours because of how understaffed my new department is (really, every department at my workplace is understaffed, but I'm really feeling the crunch), and it's leaving me exhausted when I get home. I do try to get some writing in when I can, but it's nowhere near the pace I was able to prior to going back.

But the real thing that's been holding back my writing lately is... I almost got murdered last week. A few close friends already know about this, as I've talked to them about it in private, but I do want to mention it here. Last Monday there was a drive-by shooting in my neighborhood, and I was in the crossfire. I was sitting out on the porch at the time and one of the bullets flew past my head less than two feet away, and I'm still here out of sheer luck; if I was in the very next chair, I'd be dead, as the bullet would have passed right through my skull.

This has not only left me very shaken since then (I'm getting past it, but I'm still incredibly uneasy when outside), but it's cost me my favorite place to do my writing -- the porch. I can't relax out there anymore, and without that quiet place, I'm not able to focus as much on writing the story.

Fortunately, I've been maintaining a buffer of extra chapters since I began posting, so I still have one ready to post this upcoming Tuesday. But if I can't get back into the flow that I was in prior to the shooting, there may end up being a delay in the chapters as I struggle to catch up without my "sanctuary" and the free time I had before. Losing both at once was absolutely crippling to the progress I was making.

So, that's the current state of affairs. As I said, I'm hoping that this won't result in any kind of actual delay for new chapters, but I did want to make sure anybody who's watching the account and reading the story is aware of what's going on.