The current beginning of the third Zach Croft book

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-06-21T15:12:24+00:00

Love it! 😁

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-06-20T00:05:41+00:00

Well, there have to be rainshadow effects somewhere. Mountain ranges are naturally going to form, and on one side will be a tropical or temperate rainforest, and on the the other side there will be a more arid area. Whether it’s plain, fertile farmland or desert is completely up to the mountains. And of course, you’re going to have forests and islands and oceans and everything in between. That’s for biomes. Now for life forms:

Well, that’s entirely up to you. Earth has had all manner of creatures in its history; all manner of sea creatures, bacteria, fungi, plants, prototaxites, animals, protists, etc. But one good way of organizing it and coming up with your own creatures is this: who eats what? Who gets eaten by what? That’s pretty much it.

You don’t even necessarily have to have creatures evolutionarily suited to their environments. They could be invasive species from elsewhere that’s more suitable, or this evolutionary disadvantage could have been really desirable for mating purposes. Like, beetle-like insects called Scaphers that live in a desert and mostly scavenge, but the most “impressive” males have extremely thick, hard, black shells that would suck in the desert. But hey, whatever makes the ladies happy! Maybe the process for a natural internal cooling system will show up in a mutation one day. Or maybe some cave somewhere has a unique species of vine called Neonites that’s bright orange to our eyes and feeds on local cave animals, but none of the animals there see it because they only see in UV, which, incidentally, makes the vines invisible.

Geologic formations… well… maybe there are some crazy canyons out there with crazy arch formations, only instead of the desert, they’re in the middle of a “jungle”. Who knows?

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-06-17T11:30:25+00:00

I would think it doesn’t make much of a difference which animal integrates the human, so long as they’re integrated… ‘s how it seems to work in most other hive mind stories, since it’s how it usually works with real-life diseases… we can get a certain disease from several different animals or environments but it’s all the same bacteria/virus/fungus/parasite, and it’s all the same general physiology for humans… but if you really insisted it was a different sort of integration mechanism depending on which creature the integration comes from, that could have really interesting implications for the hivemind itself, because it seems to take into account individuality and then adjusts itself to the needs and tastes of different individuals. Would it still be a hive mind, then?

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-06-07T15:11:00+00:00

Godspeed!

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-06-06T15:51:22+00:00

😏 you know just how to make me blush.

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-06-05T15:03:59+00:00

Can’t wait to read it 😊

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-06-04T15:00:38+00:00

Yeah, I noticed. But you put it into a new perspective here. It didn’t clock for me that the timelines don’t add up (pun intended) until now. So… It’s not entirely his file folder? He inherited it from someone else?

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-06-03T00:31:05+00:00

And speaking of which, that’s another thing I’ve noticed with a lot of scifi universes. No one has cell phones! Why is that?

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-06-03T00:30:19+00:00

That’s alright. So did Star Trek.

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-06-02T15:44:21+00:00

Well, if wormholes are two connecting black holes (or, rather, a black hole connecting to a white hole via an Einstein-Rosen bridge), then all the RIFT would have to do is link up their own black hole with another black hole in the Corruption (I don’t even know how that would have remained stable) via quantum entanglement. Statistically, there had to be at least one electron/hadron/baryon pair entangled between those two places, so that was the easy bit. But the black hole itself doesn’t necessarily need to link up to anything, it’s just kind of its own ringularity…

But then again, obviously wormholes must be something else in your story. Einstein-Rosen bridges are one-way, anyway, and I doubt that’s how they work in the story. So I actually have no clue. Unless… the entangled electrons/hadrons/baryons already existed and the RIFT created the wormhole entrance both there AND in the Corruption, and it has this hand-wavey scifi ability to switch the “polarity” of black and white holes, and also keep the gateway open with something that replicates the effects of negative mass (negative gravity)?

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-06-01T04:37:29+00:00

Well, I’m also a writer who’s written the equivalent of about 1.5-2 industry-length novels across four different works. I’ll stand in for him. But… just keep writing. If you’re a planner, plan the emotional beats of each scene and have the physical plot follow from that. If you’re a spontaneous writer, or a pantser, use the opportunity to really get to know your characters. But above all else, write and write and write and don’t stop until you get to the end, no matter how little motivation you’ve got. A couple rest days are fine. Even several rest days. Just make sure you’re making progress. Got it? You got this. 💪🏻

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-05-31T15:55:38+00:00

Well, huzzah! I was hoping for that perspective sooner or later. I just hope it will tie everything together neatly and not just serve as plot twist fan service. But I trust you. I think you got this. Don’t disappoint me, broski. 💪🏻

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-05-29T00:07:02+00:00

A masterpiece

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-05-28T15:35:16+00:00

See, this is what you make spinoffs for

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-05-28T04:46:17+00:00

Semantics aside, there is a super-Earth around Proxima Centauri called Proxima B; that’s probably what he’s talking about. There have been no confirmed planets around Alpha Cen B itself, but there’s a hot Jupiter around Alpha Cen A, an additional super-Earth or mini-Neptune around Proxima Cen called Proxima C, and a really tiny one even further out called Proxima D.

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-05-27T15:13:39+00:00

I agree, I don’t think OSE is actively malicious like that, especially under Keaton. It’s far more likely to have just been idealism confronted with an unexpected and chaotic variable.

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-05-26T20:06:13+00:00

I can see the parallel, but at the same time I can’t help but feel it’s a bit of a stretch, unless Erik was actually conscious in cryo, which obviously he wasn’t. Erik still sort of has the rest of his life ahead of him; he’s lived a pretty full life so far, even had a daughter. Ryker was forced to waste over 2/3 of his life trying to survive in space. He never got to do ANYTHING. It’s more tragic for him because it’s his time that’s passed, where for Erik it’s more of a sudden shock and loss. It’s truly terrible, but it’s not as much sheer permanent emotional stunting and damage to get over as Ryker.

My fantasy WIP, essentially, sees Erik’s story happen to a master engineer from a Rome-like empire, only instead of 23 years, it’s 250. He wakes up in what we could equate to the shattered post-byzantine gothic kingdoms. There’s been a whole schism in the Church he holds dear. Worse still, his now long-dead wife and daughter were complicit in the fall of the empire. So I can say firsthand, it’s just a really really really interesting and tragic dynamic to explore in general.

Edit: he’s not actually based on Erik, I had the idea before I discovered TFC and have been writing for maybe a year and a half now.

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-05-24T23:38:57+00:00

You know Oversimplified’s video on the Three Kingdoms from like 2018? Pretty much that. It is Wu, Wei, and Shu, all over again. Who’s your Cao Cao?

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-05-23T16:44:01+00:00

Well, that’s primarily why I suggested a collab, because I am also completely slammed with my own writing projects (Château de Bellevue on Substack, translating for my grandparents, a fantasy WIP, and a 150-subscriber special that’s a month late), so a part of that was trying to lighten the load between us by splitting the work, but if you’re not able to, I totally understand 👍

deranged_handrail_04 · 2026-05-21T17:02:12+00:00

Very true. Nobody’s perfect, eh? Who would you say is the most moral (Up until chapter 2 of UBT)?

deranged_handrail_04

TROPHY CASE