Hoi, orcs, orks, and brethren! I wish I came bearing better news, especially since I had anticipated that I would be finishing up the latest upload months ago when I last posted a journal.

Unfortunately, that hasn't been in the cards for me. Since the pandemic I've been working at home and, with my workspace for both my profession and my hobbies occupying the same room, I've realized that it has really curtailed my ability to be creative - at the end of the work day (and I work pretty bizarre hours), I'm just exhausted. My writing has slowed to a crawl, and though I've gotten a lot done on the next upload (it may even be two or three uploads, really), I'm still quite a ways from where I want to be to go back and edit, post what I've got, and then mentally "reset" for the next scenes in my head.

To make things worse, the amount of work I've had to do has ramped up significantly since the end of last summer (and this spring is looking to be even more intense). That means even less time to sit down and write.

By no means am I going to stop writing completely - every damned day I'm thinking about this project, and the desire burns strong. I just lack the energy to not only get it out onto electronic paper, but to do it right. (I emphasise that last bit because one scene in particular - the one I'm currently working on at the moment - is particularly poignant given the events of 2020 and I really want to do it the justice it deserves.)

I see that people are still checking out my uploads of Shadowrun - Black and White, and I can't express enough how grateful I am that people are discovering it, re-reading it, and just generally enjoying it. I'll keep at it, but I must ask for forgiveness that it is taking so long.

Best wishes to all my readers. Grimm's thinkin' of ya, boss.

-HW

Hoi, all you tusk-lovers out there. Just a quick update that I'm still chipping away at the novel and haven't disappeared or given up on it yet. Been overwhelmed with the whole pandemic, all the #blacklivesmatter events, and also transitioning my job to entirely online (with no training or additional compensation to do so, of course...).

Thankfully, I should have a lot of free time in the coming months to continue to work on it, so that means the next upload (or two) should be posted before the summer is out. Thanks for sticking with me, and thanks for all your positive feedback.

-Raz

Hoi, y'all! Thanks for sticking around and/or joining me at FA.

I favourite a lot of stuff, so by all means feel free to peruse the stash. It's not as convenient as tumblr, but beggars can't be choosers I suppose...

Whenever the community finds a new place to hole away, I'll be bringing my blog back. Any future news will be posted here and on my twitter (@HellwindOrc).

Hang in there, fellas - we'll make it through the storm.

Hoi, chummers! Just a heads up that the next chapter is finished (fraggin' finally...) and I've sent it off to my proofreaders for last-minute checking. I'll have it up here within a week or two!

The good news of all this work and editing and such is that I have enough written for THREE uploads. Those will be coming at you in the next few months - they're all written, I just need to sit down and iron out details and such. After that, I'll probably sit down and work on the 2nd chapter of The Unbinding (I have 3 total chapters planned for that), then continue with work on Black and White.

Thanks for sticking around, and I hope it was worth the wait!

Hi all, just a quick update since I'm way behind schedule, regarding my, ah, schedule.

Work is kicking my ass this quarter - I've been pulling long days (9am-8pm) and that's been cutting into my writing time. On top of this, my conditions for writing at home have been somewhat problematic in terms of distractions. Without going into too much detail, I should be able to find more time to sit down and focus after the next few weeks. Hopefully my workflow will pick back up after then.

As for the story itself, I have the draft of chapters 12 and 13 completed. The start is looking pretty good and I'm happy with what I've got, but the end of 13 needs a bit of polishing before it's up to the level of quality that I want before uploading.

Sorry that this is taking so long - I know a lot of folks have been waiting for a long, long time for the next chapter. Thanks so much for bearing with me, and I hope to see you back here when it's done!

Hoi, chummers! Hope the holiday season is treating you well!

It's been a year since the last update of my novel, and I know a lot of people are waiting impatiently for the next upload. And frag me senseless with a ten-foot troll, does that include me, haha! I'm still working on it pretty much every day here, getting closer and closer to something that's ready to upload.

My hope was that I'd get it up before the new year, but arrrrghhhh there's just so many moving parts that have conspired against me and my progress. I do most of my writing at night, but I'm also a college professor that teaches night classes. And, well, sometimes I have to teach day classes too - the end result is that I'm on the job for a long stretch of the day and end up exhausted when I return. Not much writing happens during those times, but I do try to sit down and do something.

The good news in all of this is that, well, when I finally DO get this uploaded, you'll get a lot more than something. The current draft for "chapter 12" is probably around 100k words at my best guess, which means it'll be split into two parts. As much as I don't want to really do that awkward thing I did with Chapters 7-8 again, uploading a 250+ page .pdf is proooobably not the best alternative!

My best prediction of when it'll be ready is sometime in January 2018, so hopefully not much longer to wait. I'm on the final scenes of my document, which I'll then proofread and fix up (that part goes MUCH faster, at least) and then pass them along to my buddy to check 'em over. Once that's done, chapters 12 and 13 will be all yours. And then I get to immediately move on to chapter 14, which I'm just gonna hint at as "the BIG chapter" - not in terms of length, necessarily, but in where the story ends up going. I hope folks enjoy it, and I hope you even take the time to go back and look over all the previous uploads to find all the connections and hooks I've been dropping here and there. :D

So hang in there, omae! I'm grindin' away at this and polishing it to a sheen. I'll see ya on the flip side in 2018. Happy new year, trogs!

So it's been a while with no updates, eh chummers?

Just wanted to let everyone know that I'm doing alright and that work on [Shadowrun - Black and White] is still progressing, albeit really slowly at the moment.

I've been importing the novel into Scrivener, a program to help better organize and manage all my information and thoughts. That's taken quite a bit of time but is almost done. I would probably have finished the task and be writing chapter 12 if not for a major interruption in my free-time schedule: Persona 5. That, plus taking on a large heaping of extra work at my job for some extra money, has left me with no time to work on creative endeavours (other than just thinking about the novel constantly and allowing the ideas to pool together).

It'll be a while yet before I can really get back into the swing of things, but I hope it's worth the wait. Sorry to everyone who's been patiently awaiting the next part! I haven't stopped yet, so don't worry! It will be posted in due time.

-Hellwind

Holy drek. 11 chapters, 716 pages, 369529 words so far. What started as an idea has really taken shape over the course of a year.

I can't possibly express how grateful I am to those who have been reading, favouriting, and sharing my work with others, but I'll sure try. It means the world to me that folks are enjoying the story so far.

Odds are good that I will finish the tale some time in 2017. As of this writing the novel is definitely past the halfway point, but my best guess as to where we are is somewhere in the 60-70% range. As the plot starts to thicken and we delve into the depths of the shadows, I sincerely hope that you'll continue to join me along the journey.

The next chapter will take a bit more time than normal - I haven't even started it in any capacity, actually. The next step from here for me is to blueprint it out, get all my details into place, and try using this new program that my editor has recommended that I implement in order to make the entire process more streamlined. It makes things easier on my end, and the product will be the same regardless, but I'll have to put in some effort to getting it all set up and that will take time. Please bear with me in the meantime - the novel is *not* dead in the interim, even if I don't get something out to you guys until March or later, haha. (Gods, I hope it doesn't take that long!)

Again, thank you to all my supporters in the past year. The amount of attention my work has received is staggering to a nobody like me, and I'm thrilled that I've been able to create and share something like this.

If you have any questions or comments on the story, or the process, or anything in general, feel free to leave them here for me or send me a note. More than happy to chat with my readers!

Cheers, cerri! Hgecu' vazja, hulg za!

Hoi, chummers!

It's come to my attention that at least a few people are having trouble viewing .pdf files for my stories that I've posted. So, this journal is an attempt to get more information on other possible ways I can upload the story (perhaps to other resources like WordPress) that I can link from here.

First and foremost: I want to emphasize that the .pdf is the intended reading experience for the following reasons:
*Embedded images (there's only one so far; I have hopes of adding more later on when the story is complete and I go back to re-edit everything)
*Custom fonts used (Sylfaen for general text, Laffayette Comic Pro for Grimm's handwriting, and Perfect DOS VGA 437 for commlink screen output)

With those caveats in mind, I'd like to find an option that would preserve font choices and allow embedding images. Whether it's a document I can upload to FA here, link elsewhere, or some website where I'd have to learn to code it, it doesn't matter to me (I can do the grunt work behind the scenes).

The one thing I can't do here is provide the story as a raw text dump in each upload - the reason being that it will scroll ENDLESSLY FOREVER (because each chapter is, at least, 30+ pages... some are in the 60s or higher).

If anyone has any suggestions for feedback, let me know! Over the summer when I have more time, I will be exploring more options. For now, I'm sorry to say that my best option is to continue uploading .pdf files... though as always, if you would prefer the .docx format I can send that (though it will have formatting and font issues that detract from the intended reading experience).

Hgecu' vazja, hulg za, omae!

Hoi, chummers! As of this writing, work on chapter 5 is coming along smoothly - as smoothly as it can given the busy work schedule I've got to keep up with. I haven't posted anything new in a few weeks and just wanted to let everyone know that this is absolutely NOT dead.

In fact, I storyboarded out several chapters tonight instead of revising chapter 5... I have tentative notes going all the way up to chapter 8, which will mark a major turning point of the proposed story. If you've been following along so far, I can't say anything but the biggest bi'ce! (thank you!), and I really hope you are enjoying this tale as much as I am.

Things to note for the upcoming (insert some amount of time here):
*I bought a tablet, and I'm going to practice drawing when I can. I'd like to sketch out some of the scenes of the tale and post them in the chapters themselves. Don't expect much... yet. This is a loooooong work in progress.
*Reading over chapters 1 and 2 (and to some degree, chapter 3) it's very obvious where I feel like I hit my hez when writing this. Before this very noticeable line, there needs to be some serious revision and fluffing up of the tale. At some point, I may go back and re-do the first two chapters (and edit a bit of chapter 3). I'll make a note of that if/when I get around to it.
*If you're reading this for the ork-on-human lovin', yer not the only one, omae. Expect lots of it in the upcoming chapters. That being said... the honeymoon is gonna quickly come to a close pretty soon. Watch out, we're gonna get grim (but we're not gonna get Grimm - he's gonna get us).

Again, thanks to everyone who's given me their support for this project! Since I made my resolution to pour my energy into this as a creative outlet, I am being completely honest when I say that I've never been happier. I'm really excited about where this all is going, and what it has in store. I hope that that energy shows through in my work and gets you just as excited about it, too.

Hgecu' vazja, hulg za, cerri! (cheers, friends!)

Hahaha, not that many people read these journals (I sure don't!), but what's goin' on for ol' Hellwind in 2016?

For my 2016 New Year's resolution I'm gonna try to do more creative things despite not having the time to do them. (In reality, I have the time... just need to budget it a bit more and a bit better between work and video gaming.)

Among those is, obviously, art. However, "art" is a pretty broad category - as much as I am an amateur at drawing, I'm also an amateur at writing. On vacation to visit my boyfriend last week, his creative streak and a heavy dose of the Shadowrun universe combined to hit me with inspiration. The result: about 25,000 words worth of writing in the Shadowrun universe, culminating with - what else? Ork cock.

"And we ain't even done yet..."

Hope you guys know Or'zet. (I'll include a translation guide.)

That's in the pipeline, being edited. If I can get some other things out of the way today (just got back from vacation and work immediately starts back up tomorrow - drek!) I'll try to upload parts of it tonight. I have the whole thing storyboarded out, so future parts will be forthcoming. Hopefully people enjoy it - the world needs more ork porn. >:]

I'm unemployed over the summer, so I have a three month break before my work starts back up in late September. Since there are a LOT of amazing artists here and I'd always wanted to learn how to draw, myself, I picked up a sketch book and am putting in a few hours of work each day. My goal is to fill a page of the sketchbook each day with random things that I feel like drawing, and I'll probably keep it unstructured like that until I start to pin down a style or identify problem areas that I need to practice on (for example, the first 3 pages of the book are about 90% orc faces as I figured out how I wanted them to look).

It'll be a lot of work, obviously, but I'm enjoying it so far, and I already see some good things. I've posted a few things I've drawn in the last few days on here already, so go check them out if you'd like and feel free to leave me any feedback. I'm always looking to improve.

I miiiiiight start uploading daily pages to the scraps folder just to have them available to anyone that wants to look at them. If people found them useful while trying to learn themselves, or could provide feedback about my progression or give a next logical step, that could be beneficial too. I'll see what I can do about that.

Zug zug, orcs!

Hey everyone! I'm taking a stab in the dark to see if anyone knows of or has a copy of an orc erotic fic that was on the Nifty.org archive. Here's the first part, courtesy of the internet wayback machine!

http://web.archive.org/web/20110104.....-defeat-humans

The tale is called "Orcs Defeat Humans", and there's a second part to the story but I can't find that even with the internet wayback machine (they didn't archive that, it seems).

I'm hoping someone out there's got the second part saved on their hard drive somewhere and can forward it to me, or forward a link.

Pass this message around to anyone you know that might be able to help - I'd be extremely grateful! Thanks, orcs!

**EDIT** Found it from at least two people on here - thanks so much, orcs! WAAGH!

I'd just like to say thanks to all the people that have commented, favourited, or watched me in the last few weeks... been rather busy lately and I haven't really had a chance to say "thanks!" to people individually.

Also, I am very shy. *laughs*

But thanks! :)

Well, I figured I'd upload something that I drew some time ago. It's very, very rough, but I am pleased with it.

Perhaps I'll have something else to upload in a few years. *laughs*

I really ought to draw an avatar for myself. Yeah, I should get to work on that. Need an orc instead of this silly paint can, haha.

I was rolling up an orc druid for a D&D session I'm getting ready for. Having never played a druid, I rolled a few dice around to get a general idea of how I'd do for starting stats... nothing official, just practice.

Go figure: it doesn't count and I get an amazing set of rolls. 9, 13, 14, 14, 15, and an *18*. *laugh* Having played D&D for a good 5 years, I've never once gotten an 18 at character creation.

Ended up being...

Strength 19 (15+4)
Dexterity 9
Constitution 14
Intelligence 12 (14-2 ; I don't create "dumb orc" characters because they aren't dumb!)
Wisdom 16 (18-2)
Charisma 11 (13-2)

...not that it matters, because it was a practice setup, but heh. Hopefully when I do it in front of the DM, my orc will be just as lucky. *fingers crossed*

I caved in and started playing WoW. Hooray!

In other news, the resulting puddle of drool after staring at my orc's ass for a few hours caused my keyboard to short out. Oopsie.

Well, okay, not really... but all the delicious orcs and trolls are really doing it for me. *_*

All these trolls and orcs... it's making it hard for me to not start playing WoW. x3;;

Must... resist... urge...

Don't mind me, just watching people for now and leaving the random comment or two. x3

I'm not scary! Well, I hope not at least. :X