Yup: got all busy again. Still all busy, in fact. But something might come of it. Soonish.
Books.
There are a few of these things to talk about, I suppose. So, in no particular order....

Acts of God
The news on this thing is roughly the same as it's been for a few weeks now. I got the book finished up sometime last year, then left it alone for a bit, wondering whether I liked it. Now, I've gone back to look at it and decided that, while I could like it, there are some goofy bits and it's longer than I'd meant to make it. Or something. So I'm going through the thing, fixing its length by exterminating the goofier bits.
Which is not to say that, in the end, nothing will be goofy; just that, in the end, I'll be okay with what goofiness remains.
I'm still hoping to release it on 7/7/7.

97D.com
Inasmuch as 97D.com is a book [it really kinda is], it's online and largely functional. Except for the missing bits. And most of those have been missing to date by design. Because there's this chronological mess to be considered.
Here's the thing. The Sector Ninety-seven Saga is ten books written over the course--roughly--of ten years. Whether they were also written roughly is a separate matter. The point here is that, from my perspective, the saga's finished. From the perspective of most people, it's barely begun, if it's begun at all. And that created a conflict.
Meaning that, for example, I could thump something from LK4 into the encyclopaedia, since I wrote it in 1996; but, for those who haven't yet read LK4, there might be a bit of a shock in reading it out of context. Meaning that the problem and the solution were identical: {{spoiler}}
Why that never occurred to me until half an hour ago is anyone's guess. But, now that it has, I've been looking through the encyclopaedia for the stuff from LK1 and LK0 I'd considered safe enough to copypaste into the wiki and, somewhat belatedly, started adding the {{spoiler}} macro from wikipedia.org into the top of each spoilerladen entry. Which might do some good; I dunno.
Also, given that, I can start copypasting bits from LK2 through LKLast into this thing now. There'll be those who'll read ahead and get all confused and/or annoyed by things; but, there'll be those sorts of people regardless what I do to try preventing spoilers. The hell with them.

FC2K
This being something I haven't brought up in a few years--to my knowledge, no one's brought it up--Hunter brought it up the other day. Or so. I guess it's been a couple weeks now.
See, once upon a time, in 1999, I wrote this novel. A week later, I wrote another; you may have seen that one; it was called News of the Stoopid [NotS]. The reason you might have seen that one but not this one was that this one had this irksome sequential problem in it; instead of trying to work out how I'd bent timespace all to hell in the story, I just set the thing aside and released NotS slightly out of order. Then, of course, NotS ultimately led to various publishing problems [ironically enough proving a certain point within FC2K], and, while I kept writing stuff, I didn't release anything until Paroxysm in 2005.
Leaving FC2K sitting around being unseen for the last eight years.
New chronological problem: the book, written in 1999, made way more sense in 1999; today, it's a bit outdated. But that'll come up again in a minute.
Hunter, convinced that, outdated or not, sequentially weird or not, FC2K was one of the best books she'd ever read. Moreover, currently inaccurate or not, it now reflects the growing, conspiratarded opinion that the 'net and everything else in the world is being declawed by the Powers Wot Suck. She might be right; that's not the point. The point is that she talked me into having a prototype printed up to look through after eight years of ignoring the thing; then the prototype ended up here on Saturday, and she ran off with it to read four-hundred-odd pages in six hours.
She really likes this book.
Then the fun begins. I'm off doing things all over town, unable to get away from Hunter on the mobilephone, hearing about all my predictions within the novel, getting asked whether, in 1999, I was guessing after or already knew about various proposed technological developments within the novel, and so on. After all that, I'm probably going to have to release this damned thing, just to avoid ever hearing about my clairvoyance again.
So. FC2K being pretty much in a releasable state [the only problem with the extant version is that it's formatted for a different and stupider aspect ratio than 6*9, requiring me to go through and get everything lining up correctly to fit into this better aspect], I should be able to have the thing resized, uploaded, and ready to go within a few hours. Meaning of course that, within a few manhours, I'll have got it ready to upload and order another prototype to wait a couple weeks to receive before looking through it to ensure that I'm okay ith it; then, if that all works out, it should be available in general, probably in June.
Then, as mentioned, I should be able to ignore the damned thing, since Hunter'll never stop telling the world on a daily basis to go buy a copy. She's dangerously obsessed with this thing. But: we'll see, I guess.

More later....

Forgot to add tags for this stupid entry.