At last, a continuation of Shore Leave

I can't seem to find the Bright Empire topic here; maybe it got lost in the reboot, But I do have something new -- a story begun by Shadar a decade ago that got bogged down.

http://www.brightempire,com/ShoreLeave3,htm

Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day. You might think that has to do with Johnny Depp in the spate of Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but it was actually inspired by Robert Newton's portrayal of Long John Silver in Treasure Island six decades ago. Hey, you can look it up on Wikipedia.

Not that it matters; it's just to get your attention. Do we have any space pirates in the Aurora Universe? If so, I don't have any idea how they'd talk. But Changing Goddesses, the third installment of the Shore Leave series, is turning into an act of literary piracy. The first and second installments, adapted from Shadar's versions at Aurora Universe: Other Worlds, stuck pretty closely to his plotting, even though they changed some of the names and terms (For today's update, I've corrected some typos and other glitches in those that I'd missed before.). But the never-completed third installment, to my mind, was going completely off the rails, losing track of the central story of the Velorian expatriate Alisa Liddell, her Kelsorian comrades, and how Klara McCloud takes on the task of changing the future of Rostran itself. It's what gets Alisa interested in history and that relates to other stories in which she appears, notably Pictures of an Expedition, Throne of the Gods and Encounter at Westfold.

This isn't the whole story that I'm posting today, but it does bring the action up to the arrival of Klara on Rostran, sent from Sanctuary by Ann McCloud to replace her sister Aayla (otherwise called Tyla) as the Goddess — only with a mission to discredit the very idea that the planet should be ruled by a goddess. But little does she know about the deteriorating political situation, with the Kirke (religious fanatics) openly challenging the Gwyndylyn (secular fanatics) for dominance, and with Alisa and her fellow Outworlders caught in the middle... She's really going to have her work cut out for her in the continuation of Changing Goddesses... whenever I can work out the details!

--Brantley

As part of the updating process for the SHORE LEAVE saga, I've been checking related stories to make a few tweaks and establish a consistent backstory. Just yesterday, I noticed that the html for my mirrored version of Ultrasybraite's Finding Sanctuary was flawed -- no right-hand margin, so people couldn't read the text properly no matter how far to the right they scanned. I had to copy and paste the text into Word and create a new html, edit that for style, and re-insert the pictures:

www.brightempire.com/FindingSanctuary.html

It may take a while for some browsers to pick up on the new version, which has chapter numbers at the left rather than centered. Meanwhile, I also noticed that the Bright Empire file of Shadar's McCloud's Daughters didn't have a link to my sequel Bird in Paradise (which was and is itself linked to Finding Sanctuary, the third story in the series) and that it hadn't been updated to include the shift from Arion to Aurean in my version of AU-3, so I made those changes.


www.brightempire.com/McCloud.htm

More edits to related stories may be coming.

--Brantley

Thanks Brantley for the story updates. However is it just me, or are the links down/unavailable?

kshoo wrote: Thanks Brantley for the story updates. However is it just me, or are the links down/unavailable?

http://www.brightempire,com/ShoreLeave3.htm

Just realized I miswrote the ShoreLeave III link, with a comma instead of a period before htm. The links to the related stories work, but the one for Finding Sanctuary still shows the old version on Firefox but the new version on Safari. On Firefox, it may help to simply reclick the link, or to delete the www and reclick.

--Brantley