Yeah, well, funny story, neither was I. :)

>
>I also wouldn't have expected Corwin to pick this as his first move
>after TBS; I guess he saw getting Iona a replacement ship-body as a
>concrete thing he knew how to tackle, and therefore something
>to do next, even if it wasn't necessarily the strategically optimal
>thing to do next.

Pretty much, yeah. If you can't be doing what you need to be doing, at least be doing something.

>It's interesting that no one discovered the Midway base in four
>hundred-odd years.

Beyond its historical significance from WWII and its occasional use as an emergency airfield for trans-Pacific airliners in distress, Midway Atoll is not the focus of much interest in the world today, let alone in the 25th century. Nobody lives there since the US armed forces abandoned it in the '90s, and nowadays it doesn't even get camping naturalists much any more.

>(it seems like Kongō
>didn't know about it, which is curious in itself since she was
>presumably constructed there, but still)

Kongō has... problems. We'll get into that more later.

>On a more meta note, having gotten this finished, do you have any
>comments on why it was difficult to write?

Oh, a combination of reasons, not all (or even most) of which have anything to do with the story itself. In no particular order:

- I've been ill with one thing or another in a more-or-less serial fashion since early August. Not deathly ill or anything, but feeling poorly enough that it's hampered my concentration somewhat.

- Plus, I just generally get lazy in August.

- This story got a lot larger than it was originally supposed to be. The original conception was basically just a cute mini based on the scene where Shioi and Iona blink in bemusement at each other and Corwin facepalms at himself. The rest of the fleet and the big overarching storyline involving them, which is likely to upset (or at least prompt significant rearrangements of) more than one applecart in re the rest of the plan for OOTR, just sort of... came along, and for a while I was really kind of at a loss as to what to do with it.

- I sometimes get into situations where more than one creative wave function, if you like, are in phase with each other, and I've got enough things I want to be working on that I almost can't work on any one of them. In this case that was basically this, OWaW, and the next phase of TFLF, as well as what I thought was going to be the next OOTR installment. (You'll note that this one still isn't a Movement, even after its unexpected radical growth, because the rest of the main cast is barely if at all involved.) By rights I should have at least established the immediate aftermath of Taken first, since I'm now going to have to go back to before this story and backfill some of it at the top of the next full Movement. But it is what it is.

- Elite Dangerous.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.