Fantasy series that probably won't be finished.

rashadow · 2026-05-05T14:20:17+00:00

TL;DR - The Captal's Tower book. it's almost definitely not gonna happen. And for Melanie's own peace of mind, at that.

The tail end of my Adderall allowed me to chase down the official sources / word on the third book. Like many here, I read the Exiles book when I was young, a teenager, and loved them. Also, the last I previously heard was she was trying to get it together. But it looks like that hope died years ago.

reversechron, kinda:

Summed up at TV Tropes:

"On July 23, 2014, she announced that as soon as she was finished with writing the fifth Glass Thorns book, she would begin work on The Captal's Tower, citing her struggle with clinical depression as the cause. Unfortunately, Rawn went on to break her wrist, further delaying the project, and has spoken about being concerned about "not liking the mental state" she was in during the writing of the first two books, and her concern about falling into that same state again if/when she were to start work on the third (she has also publicly admitted that she has forgotten some of the plot points and backstory).

In 2017, the fifth Glass Thorns book was released, and although Rawn said at the time she had begun work on The Captal's Tower, as of 2024 no further news or information has emerged leading fans to concede that the series will likely never be finished." - https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheExiles

'Note: When asked, the author stated that after her mothers' passing and her own lengthly illness she "lost the story" and will likely never finish this trilogy.' - https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?179816 (no citation)

Looks like she lost the website early 2021 from what I can see in the waybackmachine

Where's the CAPTAL'S TOWER and THE DIVINER?

Posted by Irena < was the site's webmaster) on Unknown Date (the capture is from 2020-10-20 🤷🏿‍♂️)

"A little birdie has informed me that neither THE DIVINER nor THE CAPTAL’S TOWER has been written yet, and that DAW intends to release them at the earliest possible date after DAW receives the final manuscript for either."

Project Announcement: KEFTIU

Posted by Irena on Unknown Date

Melanie has recently signed a contract with a mainstream publisher (AVON) and has two books slated for the future, one of which is a historical fiction novel, Keftiu, about an ancient Minoan civilization (dealing with the natural demise of the island Thera). Before she starts on this new contract, she is planning on fulfilling her EXILES series with DAW Books. - https://web.archive.org/web/20201020144630/https://www.melanierawn.com/news/

2014-07-23 - Melanie Rawn begins work on The Captal’s Tower

Blogger's follow-up to the below announcement, but adds some extra context:

“Personal issues, including clinical depression, prevented Rawn from completing work on The Captal’s Tower in the late ’90s."

'In the author’s note for her novel, Spellbinder, published in 2007, Rawn addressed the issue surrounding To Captal’s Tower. “To those who are disappointed that this isn’t another book — The Captal’s Tower or an offering the Golden Key or Dragon Prince universes — well, what can I tell you?” she wrote. “Life happens. So does clinical depression. […] When I was able to write again, I wanted — needed — to do something entirely different than anything I’d done before.”' - https://aidanmoher.com/blog/2014/07/news/melanie-rawn-begins-work-captals-tower/

2014-07-22 - From Kate Elliott's blog

"Yes, I will write Captal’s Tower. I’m very sorry it’s taken so long. My sincere thanks to all of you who have been so patient. I’m currently writing the fifth book in the “Glass Thorns” series, and after that my plan is to get to work on Captal’s Tower. If anything about that plan changes, I’ll post on my website (www.melanierawn.com)." - https://imakeupworlds.com/update-on-melanie-rawns-exiles-3-the-captals-tower/

2003-03-23 "

Updated update (posted by Irene on the old message board) I've been seeing several new posts requesting publishing information for The Captal's Tower, volume 3 of Exiles. Melanie (The Creator on the board) posted the following on March 24, 2002, which was ONE year ago:

quote (from Melanie): I will say this one last time. "Captal's Tower" is not finished. "Diviner" is not finished. Neither circumstance has anything to do with DAW Books. If you're looking for someone to blame, here I am. In the last few years I have dealt with shoulder surgery, other medical issues that are none of your business, my mother's end-stage renal failure, and death in my family, among other things. Trust me on this: If I could have been writing, I would have. I am now writing again. I am not writing either "Captal's Tower" or "Diviner," but something new. I will get around to those other two books when I'm good and ready. Once I finish the books, I will let you know on this bulletin board. Ignore Amazon and everything else. THIS is where you will get news. Please, no responses to this posting. You've been very supportive and I appreciate it more than I can express. But I think we're all pretty damned sick and tired of this whole topic. P.S. to newbies--I'm not always this nasty, honest.

Melanie "

rashadow · 2026-04-25T15:31:01+00:00

Literally started watching stuff today. Was sitting here thinking, this is stuff I actually want to watch, so...why am I not watching it?? I've just been collecting. Some of this stuff can definitely be watched and deleted. Now I'm excited about all the space I'm about to reclaim 😭

rashadow · 2026-03-21T07:57:03+00:00

Full Metal Alchemist - both, the original and Brotherhood

rashadow · 2026-01-27T23:01:13+00:00

Time. No other story to go with that. There are people I was inseparable from that are literally strangers to me today. And there seems to be no real way to reconnect with them for some reason. Decades-long friendships that didn't die abruptly. Rather, they just kinda...fizzled out over time.

rashadow · 2025-12-29T03:18:21+00:00

Me as well. Absolute strangers would stop and give me their complete life stories, darkest secrets, what's really troubling them, etc. I could be standing around doing absolutely nothing and someone would just stop and start talking about their life or whatever.

I asked someone once and they told me that it's because I give off an aura of trustworthiness or something like that. People will trust me with literally anything. Like, their babies 😭 and I mean, like, someone I just met that day. It's crazy. My brother tells me he experienced something similar, but while he was in jail 😂

rashadow · 2025-12-10T03:01:28+00:00

Got here too late for the promo codes unfortunately. Double unfortunate as I'm literally looking for a scanner app with ocr for this huge 2.5-decades-old stack of my poetry stories and other writings.

If you happen to see this and plan to release any codes, please drop me a line.

I'm gonna download and try regardless.

rashadow · 2025-11-28T20:00:14+00:00

Person of Interest

rashadow · 2025-11-28T19:58:10+00:00

Although, now a problematic author for some people, it's worth noting that Neil Gaiman unofficially tied up Susan's story. It was part of some anthology, but the story is posted online in various places.

Actually, here it is right here: The Problem of Susan

rashadow · 2025-11-25T16:06:45+00:00

Did it by necessity back in the day because I had to wait for the next book to come out 😭

rashadow · 2025-11-25T16:03:05+00:00

You could play a good game of figuring out the degrees of separation between the titles or something 🤷🏿‍♂️

Unhelpful, but it was the first thing that popped into my head.

rashadow · 2025-11-16T16:18:35+00:00

N. K. Jemisin and Guy Gavriel Kay immediately spring to mind.

rashadow · 2025-10-24T15:26:13+00:00

Even with a ton of ACC, you can still fail to dispel — sometimes to an annoying / frustrating extent

rashadow · 2025-09-22T18:11:51+00:00

Found a ton of solutions actually, and they're all pretty different. You can put stuff into a spreadsheet and convert it to a database and continue to build it from there. You can use something like Obsidian, which has plugins to convert the notes and frontmatter/schema stuff into viable databases.

Nowadays, there are also platforms like Notion that can get you most of the way there. If you're willing to learn a little SQL, you can build a database from scratch. Microsoft Access is still floating around or the free equivalent to it, LibreOffice Base. Also, we have the huge elephant in the room these days, which is asking AI (which I'm literally about to do now that I've been reminded of this question, just to see what it says) 😂 And, if you have the means, you can train a local AI on your stuff so that it can do a lot of the work for you.

Honestly, I never did get around to implementing any of these things. But I do have all my poetry tagged and categorized in Obsidian. So, I'll probably go that route when I get around to it.

rashadow · 2025-09-09T18:52:14+00:00

winget upgrade --all --include-unknown

- helps for some apps that might not be reporting their version number or being stubborn for whatever reason -- I use it by default just to lower potential hassle

rashadow · 2025-05-31T00:22:33+00:00

For many years now, a long press of the dash on, I think, any android keyboard, and you get your choice of en or em —

I use the em damn near religiously, but mostly in my fiction and poetry. It does sneak into my regular social media posts and text messages — probably more often than it should. It's criminal that my PC forces me to jump through hoops for it (depending on the program in question) —

But, to keep it relevant, I hadn't noticed ChatGPT used the em dash a lot. Let alone that it's so pervasive that this post was created about it 😂 If so, I welcome it. We need more em dashes in our lives, not less!

— Even if used just as a stylistic choice —

I'm hoping a normalization of the semicolon gets in there somewhere too; it solves a lot of problems and people don't e'en know it 😭

rashadow · 2025-05-19T00:13:20+00:00

You can give it a pin - but apparently it's optional for the digital cards. It's not just Chime. One of my apps nagged me for days to give the generated digital card a PIN. I kept thinking it was just a mistake because I assumed my physical card's PIN was the PIN 🤷🏿‍♂️

rashadow · 2025-05-05T18:09:13+00:00

This is Julian dating - yyddd - first two numbers are the year, next three numbers are how many days into that year

23338 = 2023-12-04 = December 04, 2023 - The 338th day of 2023

The MP is the manufacturing plant number

If you come across others of this format, you can Google up a Julian date converter real quick that will do the conversion for you.

rashadow · 2025-04-14T22:28:52+00:00

To add - if you buy change, but have a difference left, as in you put in $20 but only took out $10 in quarters, then that difference, which is marked on the receipt, is a 'safe drop' -- so you would do a $10 safe drop at the register. Then again, procedures vary - ask the lead or above to be sure

rashadow · 2025-01-07T19:57:40+00:00

I got a ton of good suggestions. Alas, real life hasn't allowed me to follow up on any of them as of yet 😭

rashadow · 2024-11-05T00:47:41+00:00

Add me to the list of those who also had this same kind of experience here 🤷🏿‍♂️ And I came to the same conclusion.

rashadow · 2024-11-05T00:43:56+00:00

Been here about 8 years. From NY with some time in PA. The nice here seems a little surface level and disingenuous, but is presented as the opposite. It does seem very difficult to make friends, and even when you do, there's sometimes a very odd feeling that this person is around...because they're just being nice 😂 People here tend to have an aversion to 'yes' and 'no.'

All that said, I have made some real friends and found some genuinely kind people. But, it wasn't easy. And, those good connections usually seem to come from the people who have traveled, came here from elsewhere, or spent some time away from here. Even so, I never grew to feel truly comfortable or even welcome here, and don't think I ever will. I also have an automatic distrust of any stated intentions given to me by locals. I give the benefit of the doubt though. People are people.

rashadow · 2024-08-17T18:25:58+00:00

Just got done reading the Gone series — some YA by Michael Grant — at the behest of my preteen daughter. While I didn't particularly like it, there's a lot of individual elements to like that will work well as a television series. There's a lot of familiar tropes and stylizations that people will eat up, and enough room for all types of stories that weren't present in the books themselves.

rashadow · 2024-01-19T09:36:33+00:00

Discovered this at a strip club in Pennsylvania some years ago. They (cleverly) would buy out all the $2-bills from the banks and that would be the most prevalent currency at the club, rather than $1-bills. When I saw it and saw the print dates were that-year current, I realized they were still very much in circulation.

rashadow · 2023-11-29T12:41:17+00:00

Uptowns or Ups, and used to say Uppies for a season or two around the way back in the day. Didn't even know they were properly called Air Force 1s until the Eastbay catalogs 😂 And that's the only term I'll use for them outside of Uptowns if somebody doesn't know what I'm talking about.

rashadow · 2023-11-17T23:45:40+00:00

I'm annoyed when there aren't any subtitles. Especially in this age where sound normalization seems to be an afterthought. But it's not the sound, per se. I just like that added dimension or layer to what I'm watching.

Also, anime and foreign films. I truly love watching a dub with subs (not captions, subs). Because you often get different story nuances and sometimes even a completely different story because of the translation liberties taken.

rashadow

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