Update for the week ending on 11-28-25
Chapters written
And this week, I wrote three chapters for Mind Your Step and The Technician’s Fight, as well as one for The Daughter and Harker, as well as working on draft two of Crimson and Monster when I make the time.
Chapters edited
That was four chapters for The Technician’s Fight, one for Harker and one for Going Home.
Other stuff
And……I’ve got nothing. I made no notes as to what has happened this week worth talking about, which means this week has been a boring one.
That’s really my big fear with these. That I live such an uneventful life that this is what the majority of these update will be. Nothing more than an advertizing for the stuff I write. Nothing more than <shudders> marketing.
Anyway, that’s basically it.
If you want to pick up an e-book, check out the shop. http://www.patreon.com/kindar/shop

If you have questions, please do not hesitate to ask them. If you want to drop by my stream, that’s Monday to Friday, 8am to 3:30pm EST on Twitch and Youtube. https://www.twitch.tv/thetigerwrites and www.youtube.com/@TheTigerWrites

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Chapters written
This week saw the writing of 3 chapters for Mind Your Step and for The Technician’s Fight, as well as 1 for The Daughter and 1 for Harker.
Chapters edited
That was 4 chapters for The Technician’s Fight, 1 for Harker, and 1 for Going Home.
Other stuff
This week was the definition of uneventful, except for one thing.
I believe I mentioned setting up a backup/sync system for my 2 computers before. Well, I discovered a flaw in it. It only properly backs up, therefor syncs, if both computers are identical(which they never are) when they aren’t. They remove whatever files they don’t have. And then, the backup removes those from the sync when it happens to either computers.
I have, with my IT helper’s assistance, setup a workaround, but this one comes with the issue that the end result means I don’t expect to be able to delete any old files unless I do so, manually, on the two computers and the backup, defeating the point of the backup.
I think that, ultimately, this means that creating perfectly synced/backed-up computers can’t be done with what I have access to. I’m going to give it a couple of weeks, then see how things are.
That’s basically it.
If you want to pick up an e-book, check out the shop. http://www.patreon.com/kindar/shop

If you have questions, please do not hesitate to ask them. If you want to drop by my stream, that’s Monday to Friday, 8am to 3:30pm EST on Twitch and Youtube. https://www.twitch.tv/thetigerwrites and www.youtube.com/@TheTigerWrites

Have a good weekend, and see you next week.

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Chapters written
This week I wrote 3 chapters for Mind Your Step, 3 for The Technician’s Fight, 1 for The Daughter, 1 for The Harker Project, and I finished draft 1 of the Off Campus short story Crimson and Monster. That one clocks in at 17,000 words. And while reaching a conclusion definitely feels like an Issue 1 of a comic. Also started draft 2 for it.

I’m unsure what I’ll do with it, beyond putting it on my Patreon. I don’t know that it works as a reader magnet, since it had little to do with Harker itself, other than being set in the world. And while it introduces a character who will attend Harker. He does so in book 2.

Chapters edited
I edited 3 chapters of The Technician’s fight, 1 for Harker, and 1 for Going Home.

Other stuff
As for the rest. This week was uneventful. Had to go to Walmart on the 1st of November, so I figured I’d look into the discounted Halloween chocolates for something to stock up on and…. Nothing. I mean literally no Halloween candies on the shelves the day after. All I found were a box of really, really cheap looking candies, and one for packages of sugar cookies with decorating kits.

Is that how it is every Halloween? Or is this a change in procedure that announces the disappearance of discounted Christmas and Easter chocolates? That’s going to be tough.

On the computer front, I finally setup a syncing system between my gaming and writing computers for general files. Basically all the stuff in the “My files” folder, which includes video, pictures, music, documents, and a few other categories now sync between them.

But that wasn’t without issues. Kzorith helped me with writing the .bat file that would make that happen. Then it was about figuring out how I’d make it happen. He warned me that before I got this started, I would have to sync both computer to the master folder on the house drive and I…didn’t listen. Or to be fair to me, didn’t hear. I was probably doing something relating to that when he typed it, and I missed it.

So, I synced the writing computer to the master file, then synced that to my gaming computer and…lost files. Now, nothing lost was that important. My stories are not in those files. They’re on Dropbox because I used to have to access them from anywhere back when I was a trucker. And I never really removed them from them.

But I lost basically all the game images I’d used during my gaming stream, only 4 of which I still used. And they were easy to track down. The one file that hurt a bit is the spinning TheTigerPlays logo for my pre and post stream. I replaced it with the Static one while Buttitplays remakes it.

On the writing stream side, I only lost a couple of image files for the overlay that let me clean things up since it turned out I wasn’t actually using them.

And that’s basically it.
If you want to pick up an e-book, check out the shop. http://www.patreon.com/kindar/shop

If you have questions, please do not hesitate to ask them. If you want to drop by my stream, that’s Monday to Friday, 8am to 3:30pm EST on Twitch and Youtube. https://www.twitch.tv/thetigerwrites and www.youtube.com/@TheTigerWrites

Have a good weekend, and see you next week.

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Chapters written
This week has been a normal writing week, which means 3 chapters for Mind Your Step, and 3 for The Technician’s Fight. As well as 1 for The Daughter and 1 for the Harker Project. This time it was the Orr brothers settling into the house they will live in for as long as they study at Harker.
Chapters edited
The 3 chapters for The Technician’s Fight, along with the one for Harker and one for Going Home, have been given a Read and Correct and added to the schedule for posting on Patreon.
Other stuff
On Saturday, I attended a writer’s meet in Toronto. My first one. After some miscommunication, I was able to find them, and it was an enjoyable talk. The group was a mix of novelist and script writers, experienced and less so. But all really enjoyable. One lady even writes in Russian, instead of English, as she doesn’t feel she’s fluent enough and she had really big ideas for her stories.
Over that weekend I also bit the bullet and upgraded my writing computer to windows 11. I’d set 6 hours aside to do that, and previously backed up absolutely everything on the computer in preparation for the…well, installing any version of Windows has never been a straightforward task, has it?
Why did I do that? One part is Windows 10’s end of life. The other part is that I’ve been using Win 11 on my gaming computer for more than a year now, probably two, and while there are definitely things I wish they hadn’t changed, (I really am not a fan of 11’s start button app menu) on the whole, it isn’t a horrible OS. I did check with Dell, and Reddit to confirm that my laptop would be able to handle Windows 11.
So, I hit the start button, went back to gaming, and kept an eye on the upgrading for any explosion. Two hours or so later, I was greeted with a “we are ready to finalize the installation” and it walked me through all the Microsoft stuff it wanted me to buy, which I declined and it was done.
That was it. Utterly anticlimactic.
Fortunately.
I don’t remember one time when Windows was this painless.
And finally, after months of talking to Ream Story, as well as the Stripe payment site, my issues with getting the money transferred should be resolved.
Should. I won’t know until the tenth, when it’s supposed to process.
It was months of back and forth, first between me and Ream Story Support via email where they walked me through how I was to resolve the issue of the transfer of money not happening, and me telling them everything was how they said it should be, then them looking on their side and telling me everything was good, and I the problem had to be with Stripe.
So I emailed Stripe support, well, no. Because they don’t have an email on their site, just an AI chat system which I despise. Not having a choice, I immediately told it to transfer me to living person, which it said it couldn’t do until I get it some detail of what the problem was. So I did. And it proceeded to list me the ways I could go about ‘fixing’ it. This time when I asked to talk to a living person it complied. Or at least it said it did, and the message I received felt more like an actual person.
I got them to agree to continue on email because I didn’t have the time to go over it on chat(a slight exaggeration on my part, as I work at the computer all day long) and I explained the problem, even hunting down the conversation between me and Ream Story as they requested. I got transferred to a higher up tech, who told me that everything was fine on their side, so the problem had to be with Ream Story. I should go back to them and get them to resolve it.
SO, I packaged all the emails together and forwarded that to Ream Story and asked if they could talk to Stripe directly, because *I* don’t have access to the under the hood information this clearly required.
A few days later I am informed that the problem was due to an update to Stripe’s systems that broke the transaction feeds between them and certain countries, of which mine is, and that they had talked and everything was resolved.
So, here I am, waiting for the 10th to find out if that is true.

That’s basically it.
If you want to pick up an e-book, check out the shop. http://www.patreon.com/kindar/shop

If you have questions, please do not hesitate to ask them. If you want to drop by my stream, that’s Monday to Friday, 8am to 3:30pm EST on Twitch and Youtube. https://www.twitch.tv/thetigerwrites and www.youtube.com/@TheTigerWrites

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Chapters written
This week, I wrote 3 chapters for Mind Your Step, 4 for The Technician’s Fight, 1 for The Daughter, and 1 for Harker.
The Redux for the Technician’s Fight is now out of the ‘full rewrite’ section, but I’m not done with it. There are a few more chapters that will need significant adjusting to account for the changed chapters and more that will need minor adjustments.
Chapters edited
Only 2 chapters edited this week, and added to the posting schedule, since that’s all I wrote the previous week.
Other stuff
Last week’s surgery went well. Other than talking about the steps leading to me being sedated(I went for local, with mild sedation) and the boredom or 24 hours recuperating at the hospital, there isn’t much to say. I’d brought my e-reader thinking I’d read, but in the end, all I did was play games on my phone and be bored.
The return home was uneventful, I took the bus, much to my mom’s consternation. She never understands how I have the energy to walk when I get out of the hospital. She and my dad(he gets surgery about as often as I do, since we have the same cancer) are completely out of it when they leave, so they need to be driven.
I did feel it the next day, not ‘badly’ but I could tell I wasn’t in my usual headspace for a Saturday. I still enjoyed the long weekend. I bought store brand pizza, extra cheese and pineapple and made myself Hawaiian pizza for the holiday. My housemate mate me apple pie, so I didn’t have to buy one, got ice cream to go with it.
I am curious if the pie is leading to a ‘I did this for you, so do that for me’ moment. I can’t say he has a history of doing that, but people as a whole rarely ‘give’ something without, on some level, expecting something back. Time will tell.
Me and Kzorith played Icarus, but on Monday, since his family celebrated Thanksgiving on Sunday. We closed up the mission we were doing. We’d finished it in a previous session, and were using the remaining time to gather special resources, but attempting to gather them from the geyser generated creature waves that utterly wiped us.
It has led to a few decisions, the main one being that we are going to build up to the top armor we have access to from now on when the mission gives us the time, and probably not bother gathering the resources when it doesn’t. I also decided to install a mod that increases the stack size. I don’t care for how small the more complex food stacks are. Unfortunately it increases ALL the stacks, but it doesn’t change the mass of items, so we will still be limited.
I have joined another support site for writers, in the hope of widening my reach. Of course, 99% of the stories that are heavily romance oriented, so, again, I don’t expect I’ll manage anything there. But if I don’t join, the odds are definitely 0, while joining means they are 0+.
The site is Inkitt, my page is: https://www.inkitt.com/TheTigerWrites

Do you want to read for free? this week is THE week. Ream Story has a lot of free stories available: https://readers.reamstories.com/raid

That’s basically it.
If you want to pick up an e-book, check out the shop. https://www.patreon.com/kindar/shop

If you have questions, please do not hesitate to ask them. If you want to drop by my stream, that’s Monday to Friday, 8am to 3:30pm EST on Twitch and Youtube. https://www.twitch.tv/thetigerwrites and www.youtube.com/@TheTigerWrites

Have a good weekend, and see you next week.

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I'm unsure how it happened, the app I use to cross post the advertiving for the story I will be writing on Twitch on that day was supposed to be set to not post to Furaffinity.

Won't happen again.

For anyone who's expressed an interest in buying the digital version of the Inheriting the Line series, but didn't want to deal with Amazon, it is now available on Gumroad https://kindar11.gumroad.com/

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as many have noticed, my writing Twitter was hacked. I've let support know, but I have created a new account for my writing.

https://twitter.com/tigerwritestoo

it will be the best place to stay up to date on my writing, I expect

A week can make a lot of difference.

First off, thank you for the replies, here and elsewhere. Not only does it help to know people care, but enough have pointed out that this is something happening to a lot of people on Patreon and other such sites that it shifted the situation from “I’m the problem,” to “this is something going on all around.”

It might not sound like much, but sometimes, a shift in point of view is all that’s needed to bring things back on a semblance of normalcy. That’s not to say the ‘stress’ is gone. My income is low enough that any shifts are things I must pay attention to, but I’m no longer smashing my head against a wall thinking I should quit this (that only lasted a few seconds)

So, I am still writing everyday, and updating my Patreon. There will be alterations to the posting schedule coming down the line, but I haven’t decided what exactly they will be. The goal will be to add variety without over flooding my supporters. If you have ideas of what you’d like me to post there, I’m all ears.

So this is a short one, just thanking you and letting your know I’m going okay.

As usual, you can find me Monday to Friday on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/thetigerwrites 8AM EST to late afternoon. My Twitter is TheTigerWrites If you want to support me, You can do so through my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/kindar and by buying my books, Sylvain-St-Pierre’s Author page

And with that. I, will wish you a good day.

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To start with, long time no see. Sorry for the lack of update. Most of the time I have nothing I feel is worth talking about.

And when I do, well, it tends to be a doozy.

This Friday was not a good day for me, writing wise.

On the first of December, Patreon started processing my supporter’s payments. And as with every previous months, I lost supporters when their payments didn’t go through. I’m used to that at this point, or so I thought. On previous months, I’d gain enough supporters to get close to fifty, and twice, go over it, then on the first, I’d drop back down before fifty.

It was basically a joke to me at this point; that I’d never hit 50.

This time, I dropped below 40.

Ah, Ah.

That isn’t funny.

Other writers on Stream I watch before my day started tried to help me by asking me questions and offering advice. The more we talked about it, the angrier I felt myself getting at the situation and my perceived unfairness of it. I brought the conversation to an end before I became too angry and lashed out at people who don’t deserve it.

When my writing time started, I tried to work. I really did. I lasted about half an hour of staring at the screen, still getting angrier. Some of my watchers tried to help and offer support, and I appreciate them from that, but in the end, I ‘admitted defeat’ and walked away from the computer. I binge watched the show Wednesday, then Played Space Engineer for the day and the weekend.

So, why did it hit me so hard?

Well, the obvious one is that with fewer supporters, I get less money. It’s not significant enough to affect my bills, but it’s still ingrained him be that how much money I make is a demonstration of my ‘value’ as a person. So, yeah, that hit hard.

But that’s not really it, is it? That’s just the thing I can hang the ‘blame’ on. You know: it’s societies fault, it’s other people’s fault, it’s everyone other than me’s fault. All the things we tell ourselves so we don’t need to do anything to fix the problem.

So, why did it hit so hard? In the end, it’s a case of “why isn’t what I’m doing just enough to give me what I want” and some “losing track of why I’m writing”. Or possibly, having to reevaluate why I’m writing and change how I do things.

One thing I did do, is ask a question to my supporters about what they were looking for from me. If you want to look at it, and tell me what I could post there that would make you join my Patreon, feel free to do so: https://www.patreon.com/posts/what-are-you-in-75409174 any and all information will only serve to help me figure out how to proceed with my Patreon.

I did have 2 people there already give me an answer, so thank you to them. Unfortunately, one isn’t as helpful as the person giving it and the others requires a conversation with them to parse what they mean, and how/if I can incorporate that in my process. The discussion is on the post, should you want to take a look at it.

The difficult part in all of this is that I have to make changes. I have to look at what is going on and decide what I need to do about it. Yes, there are outside factors involved, but I can’t do much about those, so I need to work on adjusting how I do things in relations to them. Have I mentioned before how much I hate having to do work that isn’t directly writing?

So yeah.

I had a bad day, and you get a journal out of it… so that’s a win?

I will do my best to keep you appraised of the development, but do yourself a favor, don’t hold your bre4ath. I’d like to have readers left alive by the time I work through this.

If you want to support me, You can do so through my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/kindar and by buying my books, Sylvain-St-Pierre’s Author page

And with that. I, will wish you a good day.

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This past week has been… interesting.

On the whole, it was good. The writing happened, I finished the layout for the print books I am re-releasing (I have mentioned I’m now handling all facets of my books, right?) and because of that, I had a marketing meeting.

I hate marketing. Being on the receiving end or the giving end. There is something inherently slimy to me about marketing, and it doesn’t matter that it can be ‘wholesome’ or that it’s ‘needed’. I hate it, and I want nothing to do with it.

Unfortunately, I now handle all aspects of my books.

So I scheduled a meeting with someone who is good at marketing and who will tell me how to do my marketing.

It hurt.

Not the having to be the one to do it, perse. It’s the having to fight my inner resistance the entire meeting, and still, now that I have to do the work.

But it is getting done, very slowly.

So, for those who are interested, here is the re-release schedule for the Print version of the Inheriting the line Series.

Book 1, Finding the Line, releases on the 27 of October
Book 2, Toeing the Line, releases on the 10 of November
Book 3, Taking the Line, releases on the 24 of November
Book 4, Protecting the Line, releases on the 08 of December
Book 5, Breaking the Line, releases on the 22 of December

On the front of my Read and Correct audio work, 3 more chapters of Stepping Up (dungeon Runner book 2) as well as 2 Chapters of The Used Child, (Tristan book 3) have been added to sound cloud Soundcloud, Stepping Up Soundcloud, The Used Child as well as Youtube Stepping Up - YouTube The Used Child - YouTube

You can find the previous books for both series there as well.

And that’s it for now. Hopefully, I won’t be quite as lax in posting updates in the future.

If you want to support me, You can do so through my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/kindar and by buying my books, Sylvain-St-Pierre’s Author page

And with that. I, will wish you a good day.

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I really wanted to announce I’d finally crossed the 50 supporter mark this week on my Patreon. I really wanted to, and I was confident I’d be able to since I was up to 56 supporter in June.

Then, the 1st came around and enough payments bounced that my supporter list dropped to 44.

It seems that I’m ‘cursed’ to never cross the 50 supporter mark.

Oh well.

Something I noticed is that my Patreon Goal is seriously out of date. So I’m going to post a pool to see if an idea I have in mind is something you’d be interested in.

On a very delayed front, although I may have mentioned it before. I am posting my Read and Corrects of Dungeon Runner as well as the Tristan Series on Youtube and Soundcloud Dungeon Runner is on Stepping up, Stepping Up - YouTube and Soundcloud, Stepping Up and Tristan is on The Used Child, The Used Child - YouTube and Soundcloud, The Used Child

And that’s it for now. Hopefully I won’t be quite as lax in posting updates in the future.

If you want to support me, You can do so through my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/kindar and by buying my books, Sylvain-St-Pierre’s Author page

And with that. I, will wish you a good day.

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There was a Furry convention this past weekend, and I had a dealer’s table. Overall, it went well, sold enough to make a profit, because I cut the expenses as much as I could.

The one thing that happened served to remind me that, for as much as I have my ADHD under some control, it can still be a bitch when I take for granted that control.

Some context. I’ve known Furnal Equinox was happening for 6+ months. There was always a chance it would be canceled if Covid had a surge, but that just meant the table I had paid for 3 years ago would get pushed to the next year, so I behaved as if it would be happening. That meant doing an inventory of my stock.

I pulled down each crate with books in them and used the opportunity to transfer them out of the flimsy Walmart crates and into genuine Milk Crates. I write down the series in a spreadsheet, using the book numbers, and once a book was counted, I added the name, as well as how many I had in stock. As a crate was filled, I stored it in a more accessible location.

I took multiple days to do this. My ADHD makes it tough to do something I don’t enjoy no matter how important, so I averaged one title a week. Once the last title was added to the spreadsheet it was another week before I looked at it again.

Every book number, except 4, had their titles and quantity listed. I stared at those empty field and was pissed at myself for not having filled them when I counted them. And promised I’d do better next time and moved on.

First day of the con, I’m setting stuff up, have my display in place and work on reordering my crates so five of each title is on top for easy access, and discover that I am missing four of them. Book 5 of the Tristan series, book 3,4, and 5 of Inheriting the line. I’m immediately annoyed with myself because it means that as careful as I was, I left a crate behind. Probably in the car, which is home, because I’d dropped off my stock the evening before. There is no way to park in Downtown Toronto, so the plan was always to drop the stock and bus back and forth. I called home and had a housemate check the living room for a crate since I’d put them there before moving them to the car. No crates there

That meant I couldn’t sell those books that day, and I already had one person wanting one of them. They promised to return the next day once I had stock.

I get home and look in the car. No crate there. Checked the living room again, no crates there. Check my room, no crates there. While I’m contemplating that someone stole one of my crates of books (for some inexplicable reason) something nags at me and I message my publisher to confirm that I had ordered the stock.

I had not.

I was not happy. In fact, I was pretty pissed. I had set up a system to catch such a mistake, and instead of sticking to it, I’d just dismissed it because I KNEW I’d simply forgotten to write the information down. If not for my publisher provided me with a workaround, I would have Rage Quit Conventions right there.

For those who don’t know, I get self-destructive when angry, not physically, but I have no problem throwing away years of work in anger.

One of the reasons I was able to convince myself I had the books was because I had the author’s copies for all those books, so I had seen and held them. My mind took a handful of books and turned them into full orders. I brought those copies to the con so I’d have something to sell that person, and a few more if needed.

More than those, and my publisher had offered to ship any books people bought at my table.

In the end, it wasn’t needed. I only sold two of those new books.

So, the Con was good, overall, disaster did not happen, and hopefully, I have learned my lesson(anyone willing to put money on that?), and next year I will have all my stock.

If you want to catch my Writing, it's on Twitch Monday to Friday, 8am EST to 3:30pm EST: https://www.twitch.tv/thetigerwrites


As usual, if you have questions, please, ask them, they give me something to talk about. If you don’t feel comfortable asking them here, you can email them to me at: S.Stpierre[at]thetigerwrites.com


If you want to support me, You can do so through my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/kindar, Kofi https://ko-fi.com/kindar, or . . . . Hmm, I do need 3rd thing to make this work, don’t I?

And with that. I, will wish you a good day.

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So, it’s been a while, being at home all the time means there is hardly anything I feel is worth talking about, and without that, I have absolutely no idea what to writ on here.

But, right now, I have something to talk about.

To Start with, the MTO stands for th Ministry of Transportation of Ontario.

So, I moved back to Ontario last May/June don’t ask for anything more precice than that, I have no idea. I am horrible with the past.

Because I’m now an Ontario resident, I had to get my Driver’s licence transferred. Because I have a commercial licence, there were a few extra steps needed. The first one was getting a family doctor because, while officially I never dropped my Ontario doctor while I lived in Alberta, he lost his licence not long before my return. I found out when I called to make an appointment to schedule my Driver’s medical.

Finding a new family doctor took some doing, but I found one.

Then I needed to get the driver medical form, because the doctor doesn’t keep them.

My Google-Fu is horrible, but it shouldn’t have taken me 3 days of navigating the government’s website to find said form. With that in hand, I made an ppointment. 3 weeks later I took the form to my doctor, to find out that wasn’t the right form. More days of searching, and this time the form I found was on the webpage for Commercial Driver Licencing, so it had better be the right <bleeping> one. Made an appointment. 3 weeks later I’m at the doctor wit hit. They commented on how the form had been updated, as they filled it, then all I had to do was take it to the Registry office(called Drive Test Center)

Stood for 3 hours outside, in -10 oC (and I did consider giving up on my Commercial licence right there), then another one inside then handed the form with everything needed to transfer my Alberta licence to Ontario.

The clerk took one look at the form and went to speak with her manager.

The managrreturned to tell me that it wasn’t the right form, but it was similar enough they were going to process it anyway. If the ministry didn’t accept it, they would mail me a letter explaining why and it would include the correct form.

Color me unsurprised when, a week later, I get said letter in the main. Schedule an appointment with my doctor. At least it was only two week later this time.

Before the appointment, I also get a letter from the ministry telling me tht because the name that was entered in the system did not match the one they had of file (from before I moved to Alberta) I had 1 month to come into the center to fix that or they would annule my licence altogether.

So my doctor fills the form, and was nice enough not to charge me a second time for it, then I bussed to the center and jumped the line because I was only there to hand in a medical (I conveniently forgot to tell the person manning the door I had other things to deal with while there) I hand it, along with the letter about my name (it turns out that back with I first registeredmy driver’s licence into the electronic system of the ministry, I hadn’t been able to put the ‘-‘ in my last name because back then the computers couldn’t deal with symbols in names)

The clerk fixed everything without batting an eye and that was finally resolved.

Or so I thought.

A week later I get a letter telling me that the medical form I submitted wasn’t an approved form, but it did give the name of that form and it was the one I had submitted a month and some time before, not the one I had just used. So I called the ministry, and found out that 1) they only sent me this letter about my medical. They have no idea how I received another one. And 2) after one full week, my new form still hadn’t reached their office.

That’s the government for you. In an age of near instant electronic transmission, they manage not to receive anything in a timely manner

So, here I am. Officially without a licence (only a temporary) and no idea if the government will take longer than the deadline before my Commercial licence isdown graded to a normal one.

If I was only slightly paranoid, I’d suspect the government doesn’t want me to have the backup of being truck driver if my writing career doesn’t work.

And with that, I’m going to wish you a good day.

If you want to hear from me earlier, I highly recommend you give me something to talk about, because I now live the quiet life of an obscure writer. That doesn’t lead to having a life worth discussing

If you want to catch my Writing, it's on Twitch Monday to Friday, 8am EST to 3:30pm EST: https://www.twitch.tv/thetigerwrites


As usual, if you have questions, please, ask them, they give me something to talk about. If you don’t feel comfortable asking them here, you can email them to me at: S.Stpierre[at]thetigerwrites.com


If you want to support me, You can do so through my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/kindar, Kofi https://ko-fi.com/kindar, or . . . . Hmm, I do need 3rd thing to make this work, don’t I?

And with that. I, will wish you a good day.

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Well, one day, anyway.

This Saturday, literally as I ended my morning Gaming Stream, my gaming computer died. I called Dell, and that turned out to be a surprisingly stress free call, considering the debacle the last time was. The person I talked with was clearly not a technician, even if I was transferred to “Premium Technical Support” but he was polite, listened to what I said, instead of constantly repeating a useless script, and after the few attempts to get the computer to turn on so he could get error codes failed, he actually read wich warranty I had and never even suggested I mail the computer back to them for repairs.

that was the first time anyone at Dell even did that. From the fist laptop I bought from them, 20 years ago, if they couldn’t fix the problem remotely, they always tried to confince me the only way to repair it was for me to mail it back in. only once I dug my heels in and pointed out I had on site repair did they relent.

The technician will be here on Tuesday for the repair.

The lack of a Gaming computer threw me off completely. I spent the afternoon wandering the house listlessly and interacting with the housemates, which was odd in and of itself, since they are usually only up at night.

Evenually I went back to my den and read on my Kindle, then slept.

On Sunday, I gave in and installed Steam on my writing computer and didn’t so much play Timberborn, as used the time to run stress test on water and food production. I’ll probably do the same today, and hopefully tomorrow the Technician will figure out what is wrong and I will have my gaming computer again.

As usual, if you have questions, please, ask them, they give me something to talk about. If you don’t feel comfortable asking them here, you can email them to me at: S.Stpierre[at]thetigerwrites.com

If you want to support me, You can do so through my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/kindar, Kofi https://ko-fi.com/kindar, or . . . . Hmm, I do need 3rd thing to make this work, don’t I?

And with that. I, will wish you a good day.

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A while back, I gave Critical Role a listen. I drove a truck, had plenty of time to kill, and I had heard a lot of good things about the ‘show’. I made it three or four episodes before stopping. At first, I thought it was the length of each episode they are three hours or more. I also thought it might be the fact that starting with season 1, which is 121 episodes long, might have intimidated me. Season 2 was already underway, and well over 100 episodes, so I wasn’t going to start that. I figured I’d wait on season 3.

Before that happened, they did Alexandria Unlimited, and it would only be eight episodes. That was going to be perfect.

I shut it down halfway through the first episode and finally understood something about me and stories.
I’ve already stated I’m not a fan of comedy as a writer because of how difficult it is to pull off. As a reader, I’m more lenient, but comedy still doesn’t rank high on my list of preferred genres.

And that, it turns out, is the problem I have with Critical Role. For as serious as the stories can be, the storytelling itself isn’t.

And I understand why. They aren’t a group of friends sitting down to craft a serious story. They are getting together to have fun. And that shows. Watching them, on Youtube, you can see just how much fun they are having, but it leads to a type of storytelling that isn’t serious, no matter how serious the story being told is.

And that is what I discovered. I need my storytelling to be serious. You can make me laugh within the story, but if you aren’t taking the telling seriously, it becomes difficult for me to stick with it.

As a side note, I am looking forward to the animated series of the adventures of the characters from Season 1 of Critical Role. I am hoping to get the story, without all the out-of-character humor that makes it so fun for the players to participate.


As usual, if you have questions, please, ask them, they give me something to talk about. If you don’t feel comfortable asking them here, you can email them to me at: S.Stpierre[at]thetigerwrites.com

If you want to support me, You can do so through my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/kindar, Kofi https://ko-fi.com/kindar, or . . . . Hmm, I do need 3rd thing to make this work, don’t I?

And with that. I, will wish you a good day.

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Perfect Conclusions + Serious Writing

Something of a Television Show Review this week because I have nothing else to talk about and the season premiere of The Flash did something they do more else less everything and it really bugged me this time (they did two things, but one involves the main story plot so I’m not going to address it)

The B plot of the premier revolves around Alegra (I may get he the name wrong) being promoted to the position of head editor for the bigger and better Citizen media, who, in the last six months went from a 3 people online blog to a company employing reporters used to interviewing politicians. As can be imagined, they aren’t taking her seriously and she goes back to her boss to say that, as she’s told her initially, she wasn’t the right person for the job. She gets a pep talk in return about how she’s of the people, and is the voice the paper needs. So she goes back to her job, give a speech about how the company is supposed to be about the citizens and they have to write their pieces with that in mind. The writers grumble, walk away and the show goes on to the A plot and at the end, we come back to Alegra to find out her speech got every writer in the company to go along with her vision.

This is what I call the ‘perfect resolution’. The underdog wins because they are the underdog and for no other reason.

There is absolutely no way Alegra should have gotten all the writers to go along with her. They are seasoned writers, have worked for big papers (which raises the question of what they're doing at the citizen, a media company that had 3 employees six months ago.) and she’s a nobody, best friend of the boss, writer. The fact she was promoted is favoritism. The fact not one writer quit of over it is plot convenience, and that they all write exactly the kind of piece she demanded of them in the end, unrealistic. It’s implied in their attitude and dialogue that they could go work for any paper, so why are they taking this kind of denigrating treatment? Oh, they are still grumbling about what Alegra did, but that is just “the price of being management”.

All I ask of a story is that it be plausible. I’m already accepting that the Flash can move someone around at super-speed and not ripe their head off in the process, or that they lose all momentum he imparted them in the process the instant he let’s go of them. That’s fine, it’s superpower stuff.

Alegra’s plotline is real-life stuff, and that also has to be plausible. Higher than thou successful people don’t buckle under the ‘inspiring’ speech of a rookie nobody. At least not all of them. If we’d found out one of them had quit, and that, you know what, the company didn’t need that kind of person anyway. I would have been more than satisfied that plausibility had been met. Maybe it could have been made clear that those writers, as much as they think of themselves, didn’t really have anywhere else to go, so they could do what Alegra told them or leave to whatever else they could find out there. That too would have met the requirement of plausibility.

When you write a story, keep in mind how far you can stretch plausibility. Superhero logic gives you a lot of leeways, but the closer you are to the real world, the less and less you get, so you need to give more explanation if you want to nudge it beyond what a reader might consider plausible. It doesn’t usually take a lot to make something plausible, I gave two ways the writers of The Flash could have resolved it, neither of which change the show at all. But it has to be done.

the closer to "real life" you get, the less plausible perfect endings become. Asking the reader to just “trust you” that it happened is poor writing.

And I firmly believe we can all do better. The writers of The Flash certainly should have been able to.

As usual, if you have questions, please, ask them, they give me something to talk about. If you don’t feel comfortable asking them here, you can email them to me at: S.Stpierre[at]thetigerwrites.com

If you want to support me, You can do so through my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/kindar, Kofi https://ko-fi.com/kindar, or . . . . Hmm, I do need 3rd thing to make this work, don’t I?

And with that. I, will wish you a good day.

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I had someone leave my Patreon recently and he left me an extensive message as to why. In the end, it boils down to this. The realization that I am a flawed writer.

I replied to his message, so I’m not going to address this here, but it made me realize that maybe I need to lower my reader’s expectations to something realistic.

I am not a ‘great writer’ I’m definitely not a master at the craft. I’m an okay writer. You can believe otherwise and that’s fine, but please don’t spend your energy trying to convince me of it. You won’t succeed.

Not only are my stories not “Great writing”, but they were never intended to be. I’m not looking to write the next Canadian Masterpiece. I’m leaving those to the Authors out there. I’m just a writer.

Another step I take when I write, is to clearly mark what draft of a story I’m posting, but in the tags, in the subject line, and file name. A draft 1 will be messy as hell. Half the time I don’t know where I’m going in a draft 1, that is the point of that draft, for me to figure out what the story is. The rest of the time, I have one of Ben’s outlines to guide me, but I’m still discovering a lot about the story. Character personalities might in inconsistent, location might be nothing more than a piece of cardboard saying “set piece” on it. That’s what a draft one is. So if Stepping up is confusing you right now by Tibs not being the “Hero” of the story, well…. You’re going to be disappointed, because Tibs isn’t a Hero. He’ll never think of everything. He and his friends are kids, with the Exception of Khumdar. And kids will never be the great heroes a lot of books seem to be convincing people they are. At least, not the kids in my stories.

I will tell you that in the end, Tibs will win. But it’s not going to be a clean victory. There will be a price to play, mistakes will be made, by him, by his friends, by his enemies.

Got side-tracked, sorry.

But yeah, a first draft will be ‘bad’. That’s basically the description of what a first draft should be. It’ll get better in draft 2, then my editor will get his hand on it and improve it again. And you’ll have to be happy with that, because that’s the end of the work I do on a story.

So please, if you have a high opinion of my writing, bring it down a notch or two. It’ll make the realization hitting you I’m not that great not as painful. (and who knows, maybe you’ll continue to support me so I can keep improving.)

As usual, if you have questions, please, ask them, they give me something to talk about. If you don’t feel comfortable asking them here, you can email them to me at: S.Stpierre[at]thetigerwrites.com

If you want to support me, You can do so through my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/kindar, Kofi https://ko-fi.com/kindar, or . . . . Hmm, I do need 3rd thing to make this work, don’t I?

And with that. I, will wish you a good day.

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UnderworldDare (https://www.furaffinity.net/user/underworlddare/) asked: Which of my protagonists would I get along wirh, and which series was created the longest again.

Answering the second questions first: Tristan is the first series I began, in that I wrote book 1 before any of the others. Although at the time, there was no plan for a series.

As for which of my protagonists I’d get along with. I’m going to start with the caveat that if they know I’m the writer of their stories, none of them will let me live. Beyond that, I think Denton is who I’d have the best chance of getting along with. Despite everything that’s happened to him, he’d very much a down to earth kind of guy, and a twenty year difference wouldn’t faze him.

I’d love to say that I’d be friends with the Orrs(the none-magical version) but their social status ensures I’d never dare get close to them. Tristan and Alex…. No, never happening.

For those who are interested, a reminder that on Tuesday November 2nd, I will be streaming a new Apocalypse LitRPG story, Unwanted Company, at 12:30pm EST on my writing Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/thetigerwrites

As usual, if you have questions, please, ask them, they give me something to talk about. If you don’t feel comfortable asking them here, you can email them to me at: S.Stpierre[at]thetigerwrites.com

If you want to support me, You can do so through my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/kindar, Kofi https://ko-fi.com/kindar, or . . . . Hmm, I do need 3rd thing to make this work, don’t I?

And with that. I, will wish you a good day.

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Sporkula, on InkBunny asked if I ever had a scene where a character told me what then needed, and I wasn’t comfortable writing it.

No, I never had a time where I was uncomfortable writing what a character needed. What I have had are times where I then read what said character made me write and I realized that was extremely problematic.

That Character? Bobby. I’m not going to tell you where the one place left online where you can find his stories is. The stories were written for someone else. Not that they asked me do to so, we talked, they mentioned their interest in adult child play and I just started writing, their character and an initially unnamed tiger. He wasn’t the tiger to be me, but I made it clear *I* had no interest in taking part.

As the scenes evolved, as situation arised where he needed to be name. Bobby it was. In a futher one, he needed a last name. That turned out to be Orr. Bobby is the first of the Orr Clan to be created. He and his brother Byron are the two characters with the most problematic predilections, but Byron never had sexual screen time, so I never had to worry about him

Bobby has a full story involveing him and a child that is at most ten years old. The age isn’t actually given as far as I remember.

While I was writing it, it all seemed like the most natural things for Bobby to do, he never forces the child and the guy I wrote it for loved it.

Bobby get one cameo in another story, and then he is never seen. Will never be seen again. Bobby is who he is, as is the entire clan, but he and Byron are possible the only characters I know of in the clan that I don’t want to ever write again. And the clan includes a sociopath I love to write, so it should give you a sense of what it takes to make me uncomfortable looking back at what a character made me write.

So, while I write. My sense of “write and wrong” it over written by the characters. They will do whatever they will. My editor has had me strike a few things out of stories because they made him uncomfortable, so they will make the readers uncomfortable. I’ve removed most of them.
If I can see a problematic character coming, I will do my best to mitigate their in influence, but once a character is in the story, they will do and say whatever they must. The best I can do is put people around them who won’t let them get away with it.

As usual, if you have questions, please, ask them, they give me something to talk about. If you don’t feel comfortable asking them here, you can email them to me at: S.Stpierre[at]thetigerwrites.com

If you want to support me, You can do so through my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/kindar, Kofi https://ko-fi.com/kindar, or . . . . Hmm, I do need 3rd thing to make this work, don’t I?

And with that. I, will wish you a good day.

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CB, on Patreon, asked what my publishing plans are, I suspect he’s asking because he want’s to know what I’ll do with Bottom Rung.

I Self-Publish. Usually, I say that it’s because what I write is so niche that no traditional publisher wants to even look at it (gay, explicit, furry, bad guy wins). But with Bottom Rung, I’ve had to reconsider why I have no interest in traditional publishing, because it’s as close to ‘contemporary’ as it gets (fantasy, no sex, action, interpersonal drama, hints of gayness). I could definitely get some traditional publisher interested if I was willing to do the work to get them to look at the story. And I’ve sort of been approached (that’s another story)

In the end, it comes down to this. I don’t believe in traditional publishing anymore. I’m down to one author I read who is traditionally published (Jim Butcher, Dresden files) everyone on else I read is self-published or with publishers so small they might as well be.

There was a time that if you got a traditional publishing deal, you’d made it. From that point on, they told you what to do, and other than that, you could start working on your next project. They took care of the editor, the marketing, and told you where to go for your readings and signing.

Now, they ask “what is the size of your audience” before they’ll look at your work. They want you to figure out where you can have you appearances, do your own advertising to that audience you needed to have before they’d take you on. Now, the author needs to do 90% if the lifting, for…. A small advance.

If I’m going to have to do most of the lifting, I’ll get most of the returns, not some company who will do little more than stamp their name on my book.

That isn’t to say that if I’m approached I won’t look into them. But I won’t feel like I’ve won the lottery, it will simply be more work I need to put into my career to make sure that what I invest in gives me good returns.

If you’ve made it this far, onto some maintenance.

On Monday, a new story is starting. “Collision Course” book 1 in the Monsters and Bad Men series. Until the start of the LitRPG experiment (only a few weeks to go, I hope) you’ll get two chapter a week. If you’re joining my Stream, https://www.twitch.tv/thetigerwrites I’ll be working on it Tuesday and Thursday afternnon. Once the experiement starts, it’ll be Thursday only.

Monsters and Bad Men is an action/romance series following Tristan and Bart and they first meet(and try to kill one and other) and navigate a relationship where both party have some interesting emotional issues to complicate it(1st trilogy), then try to settle into a life together(2nd Trilogy) in the 3rd trilogy they end up on the run after the events of the first 2 blow up around them. And in the 4th, they settle down again, but by their terms, and no one elses.

This might be published, it might not. It’s half pleasure project and half serious attempt at as close to a romance as I can write.

As usual, if you have questions, please, ask them, they give me something to talk about. If you don’t feel comfortable asking them here, you can email them to me at: S.Stpierre[at]thetigerwrites.com

If you want to support me, You can do so through my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/kindar, Kofi https://ko-fi.com/kindar, or . . . . Hmm, I do need 3rd thing to make this work, don’t I?

And with that. I, will wish you a good day.

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Or podcasting, or blogging, or any medium where I’m alone talking to other people.

I’m a conversationalist. I need a back and forth to be comfortable talking.

Writing journals like this only has one of those, the ‘forth’. I need to come up with the entirety of the discussion by myself. It’s not too bad if I know what I’m going to talk about, but once I’m out of idea, I’m stuck staring at a screen and…….

A lot of the time, that’s what will happen. Which is why some journals feel like I’m just reciting the events of the week, because that’s all I can think to do. (it’s also why I have my ‘ask a question line’ since that bring in the ‘back’ portion of the conversation.) when I was on the road, it wasn’t too bad, but now that I’m home, doing the exact same thing every day, I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it interesting no matter how hard I try.

So yeah… sort of out of ideas at this point.

As usual, if you have questions, please, ask them, they give me something to talk about. If you don’t feel comfortable asking them here, you can email them to me at: S.Stpierre[at]thetigerwrites.com

If you want to support me, You can do so through my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/kindar, Kofi https://ko-fi.com/kindar, or . . . . Hmm, I do need 3rd thing to make this word, don’t I?

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Underworlddare (https://www.furaffinity.net/user/underworlddare/) asked another question. Where did Tristan come from, what was the hardest moment to write and what is my favorite part.

Tristan came to me after watching Dark Fury (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407658/) the animated Riddick short. Simply, I asked myself what would my version of Riddick be? And Tristan was born. If you can find the original version of the story, Riddick has a cameo.

Hardest moment. Removing Marty’s PoV from Book 4(the PoV remains in the version posted to the internet, so you’ll have to buy the book to find out how removing it altered some events). This is one of those “killing your darlings” thing. I had this series of event about Marty, how he tried to manipulate the people around him and ultimately met a deserved end. He was in the story for 1 joke, and a point about what wanting something too badly can get you. My editor strongly suggested I remove his PoV, when I explained about the joke his reaction was: “yeah, that’s got to go”. Reluctantly I removed the PoV, and as always when my editor has me make changes, the story was stronger for it. (and the jokes wasn’t that good anyway)

Favorite moment. That one’s easy. The chapter after Tristan finished the wall in book 6. As soon as version 0 of Shattered Savation (the old mans Gambit) was done and I knew Tristan needed to go back home, I had that scene in mind. Writing it was a delight. I love moment of realizations.

On the Life front, this month marks the first one living only on the rental income. I moved the extra to a savings account, and the prediction is that I’ll have 50 or so dollars left at the end of the month… I certainly hope so.

As usual, if you have questions, please, ask them, they give me something to talk about. If you don’t feel comfortable asking them here, you can email the mto me at: S.Stpierre[at]thetigerwrites.com

If you want to support me, You can do so through my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/kindar, Kofi https://ko-fi.com/kindar, or . . . . Hmm, I do need 3rd thing to make this word, don’t I?

And with that. I, will wish you a good day.

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I’ve been walking on the treadmill for 2 weeks now. 5 days a week, 3 blocks of 30 minutes each at 2.7kph. I find that to be a comfortable speed. On Saturdays, I also walk to the grocery store to get my supplies, the main one is 20 minutes away, and the Walmart is 45 minutes away. This Saturday was the Walmart.

I discovered two things.

1) Without the treadmill, I tend to walk too fast. To the point where my legs hurt. They4 say pain’s good, but not when it causes me to question if I should walk that far. I’m not certain why I didn’t notice it when going to the closest store. I made a conscious effort to slow myself down and the rest of the walk was fine.

2) My ability to listen to audiobooks is even more situational than I thought. I expected to be able ot ever so slowly go through my Left to be Read audiobooks when I walk to the store, but today, as I was started the book, I found myself switching to music. It could just be I didn’t feel like it that day, but I’ll have to pay attention if I don’t want the money I spent on the books to go to waste, as well as the credits I have left.

As usual, if you have questions, please, ask them, they give me something to talk about. If you don’t feel comfortable asking them here, you can email them to me at: S.Stpierre[at]thetigerwrites.com

And with that. I, will wish you a good day

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Underworlddare on FA (https://www.furaffinity.net/user/underworlddare/) asks: Do you feel any pressure to portray your gay characters a certain way due to lack of mainstream representation, or do you not take any mind to that?

The short answer is no, of course not, I’m a writer, I don’t worry about that stuff.

The still short answer is yes, Of course I do, how can I not?

The longer, probably not so simple, answer is that I do my best not to let outside pressure of any kind affect my writing, but I’m only … I kind of have to say human here, don’t I, since being a tiger doesn’t have the same connotation.

We are bombarded by outside pressures from the moment we are born, I doubt we will escape them before we die. Even when we recognize one of those pressures, adjusting out behavior to take it into account isn’t always easy.

Just today I realized that I coded a character as male basically as a reflex, when I knew them to be genderless. Pressure is simply that deep in us.

Underworlddare ask if I feel pressured to portray my gay characters in a certain way DUE to a lack off representation. The answer to that is no… or rather, it isn’t the lack of representation that causes me to portray my gay character in a certain way, but a rather constant way media had been representating gay over the years: as a caricature.

What endeavor to do is portray my gay characters (as well as all of them) as three dimensional beings not defined only by their trait of being gay, or even a flaming gay, or a bear, or an otter, or a tiger.

I think that as creators of characters and of stories if we start from the point of view of making our characters “humans” (generalized term used, applie which ever species is required here) we are in a good direction to fight outside pressures to portray anyone in any specific way.

And if you want to portray a character in a specific was as a response to such a pressure? More power to you. You are the creator. Just remember, as you are creating your character, you are creating a pressure someone else may feel a need to respond to.

Pressures are all around us. Some of them, you and I have created. Handle them with care.

And with that. I, will wish you a good day

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