I hope you enjoyed Ethertravelers. The end is finally posted. (You can also read it from the start.)

This is my longest posted story to date (though when I resume Normal, it will eventually surpass it in length). Ethertravelers started being written in 2019 with just one story, which was Penisbirthers with some of the intro bit about how Gregorevich invented ethertraveling included at the beginning. I then wrote Egg Layers and I had a couple other aborted attempts to write these stories that I dropped.

Ironically, none of the non-Djinn World stories I actually used were complete (as in, the protagonist called home) when I got around to trying to turn the loose collection of stories I had into a coherent whole for posting. This was around the time I posted the last part of Normal that has been posted so far, in late 2023. The first story that actually had anyone call home was The Paradicks, an eliminated story that got re-set on actual Earth and turned into The Male Crisis to allow me to tell more of that story across generations. And the next one that did was a Djinn World that was also eliminated; it had all the people turn into trees, and was too similar to The Flowers in that respect. It didn’t have enough distinct content to make me want to keep it, and The Flowers was a much better story, but I later recycled the plot for the world shown in the final chapter.

I wrote a whole bunch of Djinn World stories after that, 20 of them in all. You may notice that you only got 6 Djinn Worlds in the final story, or up to 8 if you count the last two (which were not part of the 20). Out of the ones you didn’t see, four of them were very short; at one point I was considering having an episode called Djinn World Quickies that was going to be three short Djinn World stories to post at once, but I still had issues with two of them. I never had a good conclusion for the fourth very short one, so I scrapped the whole idea.

Clay Dolls was originally a Djinn World, but I turned it into a real world because I worried it was too disgusting having people making stuff out of what came out of their butt, even if it was not poop. I made them into nonhumans to make this more palatable, and silicon-based to make the building material more believably clay.

No Wrong Restroom was a combination of two Djinn World stories that had similar premises of allowing people to voluntarily change gender. The one which originally used restrooms for this purpose went off the rails with having people on the Djinn World develop technology comparable to Gregorevich’s time on Earth. This would have made the worlds where it occurred too powerful and too appealing to earthlings as destinations, and I established a rule of this universe that the ether communicator is a simple enough device for ordinary educated people to be able to be taught how to build one, but the ethertravel device that actually beams someone’s mind across space is more complicated and only a few real geniuses like Gregorevich would ever have the capability of going to a new world and building new ethertravel devices there. The people on Earth only did because they got ahold of Gregorevich’s to understand how it worked. So I combined this premise for how people change with the plot of the other story. In the final story, the board can do it because some of them have been working with Gregorevich for multiple lifetimes.

One Djinn World had the people on a low-gravity mini-Earth where people can fly, but it made the Djinn’s ability to remake the world too unrealistic. Eliminating this helped add another rule in my mind, revealed in the final story, that the Djinn is jumping around to worlds that could be Earthlike merely by changing conditions at the surface, and not at the level of changing whole planets and stars.

Two of the Djinn Worlds (including one of the very short ones) were too porny; I may post some porny stuff later, and maybe even these as Ethertravelers Outtakes with appropriate ratings, but I decided I didn’t want them in the middle of this story. A couple others were unfinished and I wasn’t inspired in good ways to finish them, and a couple were too similar to other stories.

Two of them were other attempts to tell the origin of the Djinn. I ended up writing Chaos World as a combination one of these two with another story that itself was a rewrite. I had a non-ethertravel but still other-world idea called Alive, based on the idea that everything on the world is alive and that sentient people have the ability to communicate mentally with the non-sentient matter to command it to turn into anything. I had started rewriting this as an ethertravel story with a hard SF explanation for the phenomenon, but in both versions, I found it challenging to have any real plot with the characters having such a strong power. Then I realized I could turn that into the Djinn’s power, and I just had to make the locals be living under an artificial restriction that kept them from realizing their own potential.

My Djinn World stories included what I called early Djinn World stories (where the ethertraveler doesn’t know Djinn Worlds exist when he’s sent out from Earth) and late Djinn World stories (where he does know). As I was assembling the usable stories, I established a timeline, put the stories into a sequence, and converted a couple stories between early and late Djinn Worlds. At this time I decided on the Planet of the Apes-style big reveal at the Cincinnati sign in The Flowers as the way to introduce the concept of Djinn Worlds into the story. In some stories I had to change the timeline to make things fit; for example, The Flowers originally had ethertravelers on the world for an additional century before calling home, and I condensed the timeline within that story to make the overall timeline more plausible. Still, in order to give the Djinn the time to make so many worlds I had to write in some timey-wimey handwaving in the final story.

This was also the point where I decided The Paradicks had to go. I didn’t have a problem with the ethertravelers sending more reports home to tell a continuing story, but there isn’t much motivation for them to do so unless they are calling for help or something, and this story needed them to call home over a period of centuries. It only originally had 3 of the reports seen in The Male Crisis; the later part where they learn about the other worlds was a story I wanted to tell, but it was inconsistent with Ethertravelers both on the level of habitation of worlds and in the timeline, so I hadn’t done so, until I decided to separate it.

Once I had developed most of the stories, I identified some holes I wanted filled. There weren’t actually enough non-Djinn Worlds that I’d been able to finish. Centaur World was added as a combination of a non-ethertravel “world event” centaur story I had written (where suddenly all the people on Earth start combining into centaur form) with one of the unfinished non-Djinn World stories in which the ethertravelers urgently called home to tell Earth to stop sending ethertravelers to avoid disrupting the world too much. So it was a nice bit of conservation that one non-ethertravel world event story turned into an ethertravel story, and one ethertravel story tuned into a non-ethertravel world event story.

Slime was a totally new story I thought of late in development, which filled the desire to include a non-Djinn World late in the sequence and one where it took a really long time to call home. It was also around this point that I wrote the Eel World, Facing the Djinn, and some of the little bits about what’s happening back on Earth that appear at the start or end of some of the episodes. The overarching story that these bits tell was in my head for a long time before it was really in the stories.

Finally, after a little over a year of trying to make the different stories into a coherent whole, I had the complete set of stories, and there was the usual re-reading and editing little details that ended in the first week or two of 2025, while I was posting some other shorter stories before starting this epic.

In some ways, Ethertravelers is similar to Normal, in that it’s a bunch of separate stories that came together as a coherent whole, and in other ways, it’s very different. With Ethertravelers, most of the stories were originally written to be part of this universe, with the premise of ethertravel as how they are tied together. Most of the Normal stories were not originally supposed to be in the same world, but were just stories about people getting powers, and I used the framework of Normal to give them more direction, help me finish the stories, and make them more interesting, but it also forced me to cut out contradictory bits of some of the stories.

In fact, only the first two Normal stories were originally written to belong together. The bird girl who lays giant eggs was a part of the original Kissing Bandit story and I wanted to give her her own story to tell how she got started. Before I started posting them, though, I came up with the shtick of giving previews of other characters to link the stories together, and in doing so, giving me the opportunity to tell the scenes were they cross paths from multiple perspectives. This idea was fresh in my mind from seeing it done in the canon 1st generation Whateley stories, where incidents often involved most of the main characters and each author would tell the story from their character’s perspective.

But I first encountered it in the 90s, reading books from the 70s, Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion novels. It is a pretty massive series made of sub-series of short novels. Each sub-series tells the story of a main character who is supposed to be an incarnation of the Eternal Champion, but they are in different settings on different worlds. There are certain major events that bring multiple incarnations of the Eternal Champion together in an encounter outside of normal space and time. In fact, these encounters sometimes occur in different orders for different incarnations, so sometimes one of them recognizes another but the other doesn’t recognize the first because the encounter where they previously met has only occurred for one of them.

My version didn’t have time twisted in this way, but did tell the same story multiple times from different characters’ perspectives, with sometimes different views of what’s going on and displaying each incarnation’s opinion of the others.

I do have more stories I plan to add to Normal, but you’re going to have to wait, because while posting Ethertravelers I’ve managed to finish several other stories. Dog Days is finally going to get published in August, as it should be. I have a full novel with two months of weekly chapters that needs to get posted before it becomes irrelevant; it would have been great for May’s contest, but I only finished it in late June. Then I have two novellas to follow that, which were nearly done when I started posting Ethertravelers, but I wanted to get that epic posted.

I have also been working on the revised version of my first story. It’s been re-revised several times, and it’s being as much of a mindbender for me to write as I expect it will be for readers. I’ve decided to write a whole accessory story to define the rules of what’s really going on to help me tell the main story right, so maybe you’ll get that as an appendix when it’s done. But it’s still going to take awhile; if I’m lucky, it’ll make it out in 2026.