*WTF — what the flibberty-gibbet? why the fall-off? where’s that familiar friendliness? when’s the feast?

Okay, so we fell down, wayyy down, on our updating process. We don’t want to leave our friends without information. We do, really, really, want all of you to share in our treasure.
So, what have we been doing for the last 3 years that made it such that we didn’t manage to post even one little blog?

Deep breath . . .
. . . really, as much as we’d like to just dump all the responsibility on the whole worldwide covid experience (and honestly, we can put a bunch of life-eggs in that basket, too) we also have a pretty long list that didn’t involve avoiding viruses and waiting for the world to unshutter lots of familiar daily life stuff.

Admittedly, though, the mayhem of covid did demand huge changes in Meg’s business working with animals. She had to restructure her entire business practice so that she could keep on serving her clients, both human and canine, in the best and healthiest ways.

And yes, at some point every person in our household also caught the dread disease, and although we traversed it really very well, mostly like having an ordinary, not-very-serious flu, we all also experienced some annoyingly lingering long-haul symptoms, which, to be honest, we are still recovering from.
Feeling tired all the time makes all the work, and the play, too, all the more difficult.

We also experienced a sadness when we had to say goodbye to our kitty of 18 years, Magnus. It seems that his passing was also his gift to us, though, as not long after he left us, a new creature came into our household.
Soren, a Northern Inuit dog, came to live with us. He’d had a rough start in life, so he needed a lot of special care and attention. But he also brought with him a lot of joy. And we all knew right away that this special boy was going to be contributing to our stories himself, with his unique and very special companionship.

And so …
We’ve soldiered on through all of those big changes, and now feel kind of impressed with ourselves, actually, as we make this list for you here of the work we did on and for Mahavma Project!
Here’s what else we did amidst the extra-strange and shockingly sleepy days between 2019 and today:

We reconfigured the numbers of the entire population and it’s growth on Aazhvii, and therefore adjusted the entire time line AGAIN. How many times was this? We can’t really remember, but it feels like 17. The truth is probably closer to 5.

We hemmed and hawed (boy did we haw) over how best to tell the whole wonderful story, where to dive in, and finally decided differently, again, once and for all this time we swear, where to start this story. At the beginning.
Makes sense now, of course, but you know, we had to seriously consider that sometimes it’s fun to jump right into the middle of the action.

We also really, really finished our unwieldy encyclopedia, cross-referenced every single word with our Aazhvii-language dictionary, and, yep, got all the other 8 foundation books to truly usable levels for our writing purposes.

We had some fun drawing and painting a big map of the world of Aazhvii.
We also created big wall hanging to keep in our biggest writing space in the house that shows the entire 8 or 9 novel (not sure yet how many) story arc, and we made sure all our main characters also had deliciously satisfying personal arcs themselves.
They make the room even more inspiring to us.

And speaking of characters, we created a few more of those, too, and decided it might be a helpful and entertaining thing to create an incredibly detailed and complicated character generator for future use. And maybe even to share with other writers and game players of all sorts one day.
Little did we know how entirely tedious and time consuming this was going to turn out to be! But we did it, complaining almost all the way through, even though we were quite proud of it at the end.
Maybe someday we can show it off to some appropriate audience along with having our own very surprising and satisfying experience every time we have a new character we’d like to throw into the works, just to see what wild dips and swings might happen to the whole crazy mobile of characters we already have.

We also practiced and practiced both speaking and writing ever more fluently in the language style we’ve titled Aa-E. This particular blog post has blown all that practice to bits, as it is not written in Aa-E at all, but hopefully you’ll all forgive as we pull our last wagon wheel out of the mud and get on the move once again.

And finally, in keeping with our decision to start our story at the beginning, we created nearly 25 short, beautifully designed tales to take us through a few thousand years of history.
And this, dear readers, will indeed be our first published book, replete with imaginative artwork, to bring you into our complex and intriguing world of Aazhvii.

Much love and brilliant health to you all.
Meg and Cis