First Anniversary

So! The High Holy Days are over, Sukkos is over (it’s already sunset where I am), and there’s finally an update, nearly a week after the serial’s first anniversary. I’ve got nothing much of substance to say on the story itself — I would really rather it speak for itself, and in any case, it’s too early for any author commentary to be truly meaningful.

I’m a little stunned that I’m

still working on this thing after a year, even if updates have been glacial and my ability to put the words down on the page has been inconsistent. Really, the fact I’ve not given up despite failing to keep up a consistent update schedule is rather heartening. Nevertheless, I’ve gotten a good deal less written over the past year than I’d originally planned on; to be quite honest, I’m a little put out that my plans for weekly updates have been thoroughly scuppered, but in the spirit of stubbornness, I shall be continuing to backdate updates until it becomes abundantly clear that I really cannot hit a once-a-week-on-average update schedule, and not merely say, pretty clear.

Updates from now on will be posted when I’ve got two scenes minimum, rather than me waiting until I’ve got 4 000 words or so — this will likely shake out to between 2 500 and 5 000 words per update, and thus average out, but it won’t encourage me to pad scenes to get them over the arbitary word-count line.

Besides the update, the site code has been changed, and the already-published scenes have seen a couple of minor edits. Full changelog’s at the end of the blog post, for those interested.

As pertains to the serial, that’s all the news I’ve got for now; Anno Mundi 5782 is done, and good fucking riddance — a belated shanah tovah to ye all, may 5783 be good and sweet; and — since it’s Shmini Atzeres/Simkhas Torah — khag sameakh!

• [site] the comments system has been wholesale replaced by one that requires no iframes and gives me more freedom over the formatting of the comments — this is on a trial basis, if it fails to work out, well, I don’t have to pay for the service until this site hits the 10-comment limit.
• [site] the mobile version of the site has been updated to remove the JS-heavy dropdown menu and replace it with something less performance-intensive.
• [site] miscellaneous formatting updates, refactoring of various code and backend updates that are entirely opaque to most end-users but make me, the programmer, less antsy about inconsistencies, untidiness and potential edge-case weirdness.
• [site] the date (backdated) of1-001-02 has been corrected; for some reason it was set for a whole day after the previous scene, despite them being part of the same update batch.
• [story] the summary for 1-001-02 has been expanded to something more descriptive and rather more interesting.
• [story] added a minor but important detail of the young Nostalgines wearing red arm-bands in 1-001-02 — I’m sure this is meaningless to anyone not from the Ostblok, but it was bugging me.
• [story] in the same scene, likewise unlikely to have bothered anyone not Russophone and (post-)Soviet, corrected what the young Nostalgines call Anzu in the same scene, from “Anzu Tamiratovitsh” to “[Friend Doctor] Menelikov”; as a note, Anzu being “Reb Doktor” to the Yiddish-speaking Nostalgines is an affectation on their part, as strictly speaking, he ought to be “Khavr” like everyone else. As an exercise to the reader, I leave the question of why even the youth wing of the Nostalgines (or at least, the ones what speak Yiddish) call Anzu “Mister” — with all the connotations of the “Mister” in “Mister Vimes”.
• [story] corrected a threatening continuity error in Maks’s conversation with Anzu in 1-001-02, specifying that Eli does indeed live with hir twin brother.
• [story] “glasses” are now “spectacles” and “specs”, to nudge the English vocabulary further in line with somewhat old-fashioned British English and to eliminate the potential for ambiguity between “eyeglasses” and “drinking glasses” — such a potential exists neither in Yiddish nor in Russian (and thus not in Ladsky).
• [story] corrected the angle of the mezzuzah mentioned in 1-000-02. It’s not the correct 30°, and not the overcorrect 45°.
• [story] minor copy-editing, fixing spelling inconsistencies, weirding the grammar towards a more Early Modern English vibe, etc.