Chorós

Nancy Clayton, Yoni Safir, et al. | 17k words

A Qui Habitat story that is remarkably indulgent. I meant it to be a counterpoint to the fact that my main narrators are military men of great power in the city and it is that, but I am not sure I'd consider it necessary to the universe. It doesn't cover new ground, just looks at existing territory from a new perspective and I found myself deleting parts to keep from being repetitive. But it has some good lines and some good parts and I wish everyone to read it. :)
 

 It took me the entire semester plus a few weeks on either side, but I have finally finished editing the existing eighteen chapters of Qui Habitat and can now ponder forward movement. Thankfully, not too much added to the total word count (current: 114K words) because I also deleted here and there. I think it's a better story for the work, not just because I did all of the universe fleshing-out after it was written and it seemed thin because of it. There's more weight to it now, for sure, hopefully not dragging it down. My goal was not only to fix the discrepancies, but also going to make it a more thoughtful story about survival and less of a straight-up action adventure tale about an alien invasion that succeeded. Atlantis is a home now, not just a deployment that turned into an exile, and it's a home with a far more diverse population than the outpost it had once been. Not just ethnically, but that matters, too. One segment I did add visits a space where the survivors of fallen worlds seek to preserve and share their cultures. 

I also snuck back in to this summer's In Media Res and killed off an OC and retconned in the capture of Cadman, who'd been unnecessarily absent from the entire saga but is too major a canon character to try to make her present without having to overhaul a lot, so MIA/Captured she is. I need to wedge her into Rodney's story, too. 

I also also added the QH OCs to the big list; mostly women because I made a concerted effort to include them once I didn't have to give a crap about canon. A couple of them existed in the first iteration (Gantry, Garcas, Valentine, Waterman) and a few were introduced in the recent edit (Sato, Vega) and all of them now have first names and and an MOS (Valentine got a medical specialty). For the guys, Charlie Ngo, introduced in In Media Res when I decided to expand Little Tripoli and retconned into the main story, is also now listed, as is Rowell, who also got a first name.

I should futz with other side-stories, especially Lorne's (I did go back there and find-and-replace his name so he no longer narrates himself by his last name), to make them coherent with the rest of the changes, but I want to get some forward action going on first.