This Report won’t be long, since I spent all day working on HPMOR instead of composing the Progress Report. 22,000 words into Ch. 86 which is proving incredibly difficult. The True version of Ch. 85, which I could not manage to write to my satisfaction in time for the previous series of updates, has been completed. I intend to post the revised Ch. 85 and the new Ch. 86 as soon as Ch. 86 is done – it won’t be the perfect reading experience that it would be if I had the other chapters ready, but HPMOR has gone too long without an update. If I can manage to finish 86 in December, the update will be on 7PM Pacific Time of Sunday of whatever week. (Probably not the 2nd or the 9th, though – I’m not that close to finishing 86.)

If there is no new chapter posted before then, the next Progress Report will be on 10PM Pacific Time of Jan 2nd, 2013. (Not the 1st, this time, because I might be doing something else on New Year’s Day.)

Meanwhile, in hopes my own tastes can prevent you from starving, fics I’ve finished and enjoyed lately include “Naruto: Game of the Year Edition” (Naruto discovers he’s living inside a video game and begins to adapt accordingly) and “Big Human on Campus” (Ranma enters the Rosario x Vampire campus and nobody believes he’s actually a human), both of which are much better, and much funnier, than their premises perhaps sound.

It’s getting shockingly hard to find enjoyable reading material anywhere, including in mainstream science fiction and fantasy. I think that reading fanfiction has trained me to expect a certain amount of funny and awesome in my stories, and mainstream SF&F, whatever its other virtues, is not delivering the quantity of hedons per second I have come to expect. I mean, yes, have your characters suffer and character-develop, but also have them strap a solid-fuel rocket to a broomstick, ya know? I try to read the mainstream stuff now and nobody in the novels is having any fun even when I’m a third of the way through the book. It’s like they don’t even realize their readers might want sympathetic hedons along with the suffering and character development.

Signing off until next time, hoping it’s soon,

Eliezer Yudkowsky.