Well, I've been somewhat absent lately.

There's a reason for that, and it's probably best summed up by a Reddit post I just made regarding the third book in the Martin Chalk series:

"Well, my amateur-detective hero Martin Chalk is hot on the trail of the third piece of a five piece wand (super original, I know, but there's more to it than the simple McGuffin) and I wanted to show the rise and fall of a mortal paladin who held the third piece.

The only logical way to condense a life story into a book was to use time travel as a device and to hit the salient points of the antagonist's life. I thought I was so clever, until I was some way into it and things really started to bother me.

For example, how to deal with the butterfly effect?

What about temporal paradoxes? Martin is the cause of something that he'd deeply like to undo, the death of an obviously good and positive character. What's to stop him from going back in time from where he finds out his advice doomed her, and giving her different advice? B-bu-but then he'd have remembered doing that!

What about predestination? If everything turns out as it should, then that sort of implies the lack of free will, which sucks to both me and Martin Chalk, who deeply cherishes causality.

ARGH. And it sort of snowballs from there.

Honestly it probably would have been easier to restart the tale, except for that I'd done some (to my mind) particularly fun and entertaining writing and didn't want to lose that work. This book was supposed to have been finished in April :D It was also supposed to be novella sized and I'm pushing 80k words with a probable 100k in sight.

Iirc JK Rowling banned and wrote out the timetwisters Hermione used, and a jolly good thing it was too. I bet she also regretted messing with causality ;)"





If I manage to keep a rigid writing schedule, then Martin Chalk and the Quest Through Time should be out in a month or two.