Before & After & Inbetween

...is still being written. My head just couldn't wrap itself around the missing scene of Zach getting his kids back & the kids' response to the Bionics, after I finished "Goose and the coffee maker", so I spent the afternoon adding more of my stories to the revamped homepage instead.

For protocol:
- all the "before the series"-stories are now up (Bionics will be added once it's finished)
- a few "early in the series" stories are also up (and I couldn't help myself, I put Caro's beautiful frontispieces back up; Bewilderment feels incomplete without it).

As the few of you who are left in the TB/X fandom have probably noticed, the updates on the Decagram have slowed to a crawl - even for my usually glacial writing speed.
An email by a friend about her rediscovering the joy of writing made me reflect on why that may be case.

In short, I'm not writing stories for the praise from my audience, but because I enjoy writing and exploring that foreign world behind the words. In that, each fandom I ever wrote in (Galaxy Rangers, the Emperor's Edge, and yes, TBX) has its own special appeal for me. For the Decagram with its setting in real world Tokyo of 2000 that was the research, the mental wandering of Tokyo's streets imagining how it would have looked for the characters, for the demons, for... If you are a fan of TBX (and the Decagram?), you'll know. :)

When I started writing the Decagram in 200x that meant endless web searches equipped with a babel fish, a cheap city map (on paper!) of Tokyo, and even haunting the abysmal small section of my city library for books on Japan and modern Tokyo.
The more the Decagram progressed, the more detailed its world got, the more indepth research was needed - but the webtools had gotten better: there was Streetview with its countless photographs, Wikipedia with and -media with sometimes whimsical articles about niche topics that were fun to study and helped figuring things out. And yes, still the open web with the babelfish via copy & paste to get the gist.

When I resumed writing the Decagram last year, all that was pretty much gone. The open website were a mess of slop photos, the Tokyo newspaper archives were behind paywalls - or captchas - "helpful" bots autotranslate their content, incidentally erasing and slopifying the information I sought, and Streetview is an -equally autotranslated- mess of advertising for shops I won't ever visit because they are literally on the other end of the world. I was there for the photos, not the prospects, thank you. I have a full time job, and the local library has opening hours made for pupils and retirees. And a lot of the whimsical articles on Wikipedia have been "dewhimsified", making them more serious sources, but incidentally removing what I used for inspiration.
In short, what had been the main fun in writing the Decagram had become an arduous chore: the research to get the setting right. (You really don't want to know through how many loops I had to jump to get any reliable information about Rebun-to, because the damn bots tend to mix it with a different island much further south.)

In contrast, with Galaxy Rangers I explore(d) how excruciating circumstances form character and worldviews, making my writing there essentially what you may call "closed source", meaning the ancient DVD set I have is all the material I need for writing cohesively in that fandom, making it much more resilient to the garbage dump the web has become.

All this results in me currently enjoying writing Galaxy Rangers stories much more than writing the Decagram, even though the GR fandom these days numbers in the single digits, judged by the access numbers of the new stories on the AO3.

I still have the Decagram story in my head, and I still want to write it, but until I find resources to do the research needed to get it right without wading through all the icky slop it will likely stay there.

So, chapter 7 hit the AO3 yesterday; a couple booboos were found since then (including the missing last two sentences), so if you read it before 2026-09-26 10:00 EST, have a look at the last para to get the full picture. You can find it - as always - as a logged-in user on the AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/89238176/chapters/247786981

We're now reaching the less drafted parts of Bionics, so progress may slow a little. Most of the Goose & ALMA stuff is written, but Zach's scene - even though he's supposed to be the main character of this story - are yet to be written. I have notes what has to go where in the plot, but nothing written yet.

And on a different tack:
I finally got around to reinstate my website as an intentionally very plain story archive, designed to be readable on most screens and printable via most browsers. Plain because I want to limit bandwidth and energy consumption (and because "fuck SEO, AIO, the scrapers, and the assholes who programmed them and consider wasting a shitload of energy to rip other people off a good idea")!

It's still far, faaaaaarrr from complete. So, if you want to read my stories - the AO3 is still the better address. But it's there. :)

I'm about halfway through editing & completing (as in filling in gaps) chapter 6 (working title: complications).
This chapter has a lot of Walsh & Goose scenes, which I want to get just right, because I still feel that my story telling abilities weren't really up to par yet when I was writing "Beyond the Frontier". And a lot of the topics touched in BtF are addressed again in Bionics.

So, instead of a chapter link, here's a snippet:

The rumor caught by Sheela’s well-honed antennas was bad. A sexual relationship with an undisclosed cohabitant…
He ground his teeth, sorting into the access traffic to the base.
Undisclosed cohabitant… was a problem. Undisclosed meant unvetted, and it was only a matter of time until somebody would want to correct that. Protégé won’t cover that allegation. There’s no way to explain his relationship with me without referring to Wolf Den.

was just posted to the AO3. As usual, I expect multiple corrections to come over the next few days. ;-)

On a side note: this is the last chapter without gaps to be filled, so updates will likely be slower from now on (or not; my imagination is weird & I so want to play with Goose & ALMA *gg*)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/89238176/chapters/239735026

...and will probably be corrected. Repeatedly. As usual. ;-)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/89238176/chapters/237674726

The first chapter of "Bionics", the story about what happened between Zachary getting shot and the S5 team being formed is up on the AO3 .
It's currently roughly 10 chapters, but especially in the second half are still gaps that will have to be filled, so final length may be longer. Anyways, hope you'll have fun with it.

Summary: In the first TV-ep, Zachary is shot, Eliza is captured, and at the end of the episode, we see him with the team and weapon-grade bionics.
Well, this story is my take on what happened between those two moments. It covers Zach's implantation and struggles to deal with it, Niko and Goose getting their implants, Doc learning about them (and the commander), Goose getting ALMA, and the S5's being formed...

https://archiveofourown.org/works/89238176

It's official, I've started editing Bionics, the story covering the procedure of how Zach got his hardware and the S5s were assembled, the story starts just after the disastrous flight to Kirwin in TV-E 1 and encompasses much of what's told in Beyond the Frontier and Reason #1.

It's currently roughly 35000 words, but the second half still has quite a few author notes to be turned into story text, so it's likely going to be longer. Number of chapters not yet decided. It is well structured, but that might not break down with reasonable chapter lengths.

Anyway, I have two reasons to edit Bionics (playing at the beginning of the Series-5 journey) before A Different Kind of Betrayal (which continues what's told in The Right To Refuse and Walking Through Nightmares):

1. It contains background of characters that will be critical in A Different Kind of Betrayal
2. and Goose's "introduction" to ALMA (which I can't wait to polish to shine now that I rediscovered it!)

Anyways, on to the edit!

Teaser: "Pink?" - "Blond?"

...just went live on the #AO3 - now only a short epilogue is to do.
(Sadly, Zach is underrepresented in this chapter).
Yes, this fic ends with a stalemate of sorts.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/87440591/chapters/235802556

two scenes to complete and edit & then the final chapter and subsequent epilogue are ready for the AO3 - tomorrow, if my mind complies for a change.

In total: approx. 10 more pages for the archive. Looks promising

Quote of the day: “And I’m here to keep them from confirming their guilt with taking out this fleet.”