DD says:

"Folks, just a quick word: this week has become unusually disrupted due to other work that’s going on in-house, so I’m going to have to postpone the chapter posting until just after the 27^th. Unfortunately the chapter’s just not ready to go up yet, the in-house crisis won’t allow any work on any other projects until the weekend — when we’re due to be at the Discworld convention in Birmingham — and even then opportunities for work will be understandably spotty until Wednesday. 

"(sigh) I’m so sorry about this. Life this month just has not been going to plan. More shortly, however."

The excellent Linnette Stoney, who has been converting the Big Meow chapters to mobile format as they've been published, has now provided us with new and shinier versions of Chapters 1-7.

Linnette says, "I re-created the earlier [Mobipocket versions] to include a title page which will show up on the new e-ink devices such as Cybook, Kindle, and Sony Reader."

You can download the entire mobile package of chapters 1-7 and their accompanying handsome graphic here.

Friends,

It's up at last.

There are a lot of places where this notification needs to be posted, and a lot of explanations and profound apologies to be made... but for the moment it just seems best to get the news out.

Chapter Seven is linked to from the normal TBM gateway page at http://www.youngwizards.com/picaresque/ . The same old username and password will get you in if you're a subscriber. (If you can't find your login info, email me and I'll send it out to you pronto.) HTML and PDF versions are there right now: the mobile .prc versions will go up in due course, as soon as we receive the conversions.

If you're not a subscriber, the chapter will go public on the 28th of the month. Look for the link to its gateway page in the left-hand menu.

For those of you who've been trying to use the upgrade buttons on the Paperback Upgrades or Upgrade To Paperback pages and have been getting an error message from PayPal -- this problem is fixed now: it was a code-formatting glitch. Thanks for your patience.

Now that the new Drupal installation is bedding in, I get to add some neat new stuff here. One new feature: research materials. I keep these on my home machine using Onfolio, which also makes it easy to publish stored material online. So here's a link to where my Big Meow research material can now be found online.

After the outline for The Big Meow was written, its publishers passed on publishing it, citing low sales figures for the first two books. A number of years then passed while the outline sat in DD's file drawer and hard drive, doing nothing. Occasionally she received an inquiry from a fan as to where the third book was. Normally she just wrote back thanking the writer for his or her interest, and telling them that because of the first two books' relatively poor sales figures, there was no chance that a third one would be published.

The two books making up the sequence so far -- The Book of Night with Moon, and its sequel, published in the United Kingdom as On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service and in the US as To Visit the Queen -- are offshoots of the Young Wizards series, taking place in the same universe, and with the occasional crossover of characters from the older, larger series.

In the YW universe, it's understood that wizardry is sometimes offered to Earth-based species besides humanity if they are either intelligent enough, or just high enough up their local food chain. Cats qualify on both counts: any animal smart enough to routinely get humans to give it food for nothing will plainly have no problem mastering wizardry.