Chapter 6 of Wallachia: A Penny Dreadful by David Ely. Father Abraham attends the speech by Count Dracula and Negrescu Radu at the castle.

Wikipedia on Wayside Shrines that can be found throughout parts of Europe (and the forthcoming chapter 12). Here’s a photo of one in northern Romania.

Chapter 5 of Wallachia: A Penny Dreadful by David Ely. With the town all at Radu’s speech, Marley and friends “borrow” a book from the church.

Chapter 11 of Wallachia is out. Get it from the App Store and read it for free (then tip generously).

⚾️Nicolae plays oină and 🥬Romanian cabbage rolls are consumed.

Here is the complete tale of Manoli the mason, from E.B. Mawr’s Roumanian Fairy Tales and Legends, 1881. The monastery in question, the Curtea de Argeş Cathedral, still stands.

I actually wrote a complete sequence where they were practicing oină before realizing I had clearly established it was raining the entire day in chapter 9. Then later, I placed Dracula at the castle when, also in that same chapter, I had him a ways south at the same time. Ugh.

Chapters 9–11 all more or less overlap with one-another. I don’t think—at least I hope—it doesn’t come off as confusing. I wanted to follow each character’s journey through these days until they wind up back together. Marley goes off with Margareta, Ion is at the castle, Abraham goes to visit the farmer’s sick father, and then by the next morning they’re all back in the village. On a TV show you’d probably just cut back and forth.

There’s a new chapter of Wallachia coming later this week. You can download the app now to get caught up. wallachia.net

Coming, in chapter 11: 🌧rain, ⚾️oină, and 🥬cabbage rolls!

Here’s a nice piece about Uncle Iroh in Avatar: The Last Airbender.

(And yes, I did put a small reference to firebending in chapter 10.)

Valerian - The Complete Collection Sale

Tiny behind-the-scenes note: Laureline in Wallachia is named after the heroine in this fantastic French space opera. Seeing it on sale makes me want to get my copies off the shelf.

(Laureline not being a Romanian name, I made it a nickname for Laura Adelina. All the sisters go by nicknames—Marley is Mirela Elena and Dora is Theodora.)

An essential CD that I keep in my car and played for the kids often: David Bowie Narrates Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.

Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, Google Play

Steve Troughton-Smith is running a poll asking about SwiftUI adoption. I haven’t adopted any of it yet. There’s stuff I’d like to use, but so much of the Wallachia app is built around UITextView and all the NSLayotManager stuff that it seemed silly to host it all inside SwiftUI.

My stay-at-home listening has been this huge digital boxed set of 70s Bowie: Who Can I Be Now? (1974–1976).

While chapter 11 is off with my editor I’ve been putting together a companion app for me to use when posting new chapters. On the backend, Wallachia runs off of Apple’s CloudKit. Apple provides a webpage from which you can create and edit stuff that gets pushed out to the app, but it’s clunky. In time I’ll have my own custom iPad app that I can use to post chapters or make edits. I even made a little icon for it:

This is all part of my “2.0” push. I’ll all take a while but it feels good to get back to coding after a break.