June Update

Act 3 of Shadow of the Eagles is finally done, and it is perhaps the biggest single chapter of anything I have ever written. No, seriously, it’s like 250 000 words or something, larger than Sabres of Infinity, Mecha Ace and The Hero of Kendrickstone – possibly even longer than the two-part (four part, technically, but who’s counting, right?) endgame segment of Lords of Infinity.

More than once, I’ve been tempted to put together a flowchart to demonstrate just how sprawling Act 3 is – and I still just might.

Needless to say, this month is going to be a bit slower, after the breakneck pace of the past two. I’ve been getting as much exercise and fresh air as I can before this year’s Strong El Niño and the seemingly inevitable march of Saudi Aramco and Sinopec’s shareholder maximalisation strategy climate change makes it impossible to run outside for longer than ten minutes before dying of heatstroke. I’ll mostly be focusing on polish – especially polish for Act 3, adding some additional choices which I’ve missed the first time around, more reactivity, and so on. I’ll also be working on the two interludes which bridge the gap between Act 3 and Act 4: the Coup of 18. Brumaire, and the Consulate.

Which means I’ll also be doing a lot of research, because this time period: from about 1799 to 1807 (when Act 4 ends) is both one of the best and worst known periods of Napoleonic history. It’s the period of Austerlitz and Jena-Auerstedt, but it’s also the point where Napoleon goes from General to First Consul to Emperor, forges the Grande Armée, sets in motion the administrative reforms which lead to the Empire, and the drafting of the Code Civil.

At the same time, it’s also a period where a lot of what we would consider the unambiguously positive gains of the Revolution are rolled back. Women’s rights are curtailed, slavery is re-legalised, and Napoleon sends his brother-in-law and a gigantic army to re-impose direct rule over Haiti in a campaign of unspeakable brutality via methods we would now almost certainly consider genocidal.

So needless to say, I need to get this stuff right, which means I need to do a lot of reading. Up top, you can see some of the books I’m using to support my writing for this project. A few of them I had beforehand to feed my personal interest, but a lot of them I bought recently, with the monetary support from my Patreon. If you’d like to help me expand this library even further – and get access to the development Discord (where you can suggest new features to add to the polish list) and the playtest versions, take a look at the Patreon page for Shadow of the Eagles here.

That doesn’t mean I’ve been neglecting my first Patreon. This month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding, are now also up for general viewing, now that they’ve been up for a week for existing backers..