End of Act 1 (“Gathering clouds”) - 23/8/25

Well, that happened! We left off act/arc (I’ve realised I’ve used them kinda interchangeably) zero with fun, games and multiple-partner intimacy, and now, some one hundred and twenty chapters later we end off with a wedding, honeymoon and the destruction of multiple planets. Way to up the ante, me!

I’m going to post an update to answer everyone’s questions and so on that have been made since I last replied to comments (waaay back in June!) in a moment (so that this post doesn't go on forever), but for right now - thank you all for sticking with me and the crew of the Solar Ascent for about 203k words, which is rather a lot more than the 86k of arc 0… This is officially the longest single story I’ve written to date, and it’s only just getting started.

So, as we move from “Gathering Clouds” into “Fire in the night”, what can you expect? Well, as you hopefully saw in the epilogue chapter, the council are being even worse than useless - so there’ll be the fallout from that. Humanity is going a little rogue to protect their friends and allies - but that might mean that the threats they face are not only from the mysterious hostile aliens… Although, said aliens pretty much declared war, so we’re going to be hunting them properly now. Time for Dustin to start reaching out and finding new species that the council hasn’t even met; his mission will still involve making friends, but there’s going to be some venturing into new strands of the weave in their pursuit of the hostile entities.

As far as relationships go - there’s more planned there. I have to admit, when I wrote the end of act 0 post, I’d only really planned out Trea’k, Yril’k and Sammie - and even then, only in the most broad of strokes. Naera was floating around in my brain purely as “shortstack greenskin” partially but not entirely because goblins are hot, but I wasn’t expecting her to join the crew until after the act was over. Bleu was a total surprise when she decided to go for Dustin - I’d originally imagined her as being largely disinterested. Then I got to writing her, and wrote the chapter where we heard her thoughts for the first time and things escalated quickly.

In arc 2, we’ll answer the question “does mixing your naked inter-dimensional mental construct with that of your captain get you in his pants or not?” for Sammie, see more individual scenes with the ladies (I do tend to find 1-1 or 2-1 scenes shorter to write than the big orgies), at least one whole-crew-party, and a few more people joining both the sexual and non-sexual senior staff. There’s at least two ladies in the pipeline we haven’t even gotten close to meeting yet… but we’ll see who else shows up!

Now for the bad news; I’m not burned out on this story; writing it is a real joy for me, but I have taken quite a bit of time over the summer to think about things with regards the pace of posting, etc. I’d hoped to return from my summer holidays with about a months buffer - in reality, I had two chapters of buffer as of two days ago, and was busy yesterday to the point I couldn’t write anything. Now, I loathe the idea of just not posting a chapter when people expect me to, so I’m making an official change now that I’m back at work for both my sanity and for the quality of my writing; my day job just takes too much out of me to guarantee seven days a week of chapters.

As a result, I’m cutting back to posting ambassador every other day. My aim is to write more than 4 chapters a week for this story, so there’s a strong chance random days will get bonus interludes (remember those? It’s been a loooong while since I had the spare writing time to fit in writing one of them!), I’ll be able to build up a buffer of chapters in the event life gets in the way (because hooooo boy has it this summer - check the comments-answering-post 23/8/25 for details), and it’ll free up some time for me to get some words down for other projects I have knocking on my brain with increasing frequency. If I can get a weeks buffer built up, I’ll look at moving to four chapters a week.

Given lots of you have warned me against burnout, I hope that you understand my rationale for doing this; ngl, it’s pretty scary when I see so many likes and views a day to then go “no, you can’t have a chapter until tomorrow :P” - I can understand now why content creators over do it. Thank you all for your support though - it means a lot to me, and (stupid as it sounds) has gotten me through a really tough time of things over the summer.

Now, to finish things off just like at the end of act 0, here’s the current staff roster for the Solar Ascent’s senior staff with everyone’s full names as well as who’s covering the major staff roles that are currently empty:

Captain / Earth Ambassador: Dustin Smith

Chief Science Officer: Meli’a Smith (formerly Venn)

Chief Engineer: Rye Steamtender (soon to be Smith, pairing in progress)

Senior Communications Officer: Emely Val Smith (formerly Val Motea)

Chief Security / Gunnery officer: Yril’k K’ae’ck

Ship’s Counselor: Trea’k K’ae’ck-Smith (Note: Admittedly, she hasn’t told Dustin that’s what she considers her surname to be yet…)

Lead Pilot: Samantha (Sammie) Coastwood

Sensor control: Role Unoccupied, covered by Meli’a & Naera or junior staff

Primary Physician: Dr Bleu Myarkin

Senior Culinary Technician: Naera Willoughwood

Senior Botanical Sciences, Biological Sciences, Geological Sciences officers: All Roles Unoccupied, covered by Meli’a and junior staff