!New horizons

Chapter three of TD2E is almost done. The art is there – if it were a silent scene I’d be trumpeting three down, five (and a half*) left. The writing is jamming me up a bit – fitting it in, and making it not suck horribly.

I’ve muttered about hardcopy in the past – mild threats that have never materialized. Funds, dissatisfaction, and a single-digit readership are all contributing factors. Hardcopy is expensive, time consuming, and just ain’t worth it yet. Which doesn’t mean I’m not going to continue to prepare for it, mind you. It just means it’s been knocked out of the production pipeline for the foreseeable future.

After the current chapter is out the door, I’ll goad xeno into catching up on proofing. That’ll lock things in, make the first three chapters ready for hardcopy, and give me a really good reason not to go back and screw with them for the third, fourth, fifth, tenth time. I’ll probably compile everything for hardcopy and sit on it until a later date, like I’ve been doing with the first issue of DCR.

On deck, then, would be: Concluding chapter three, editing of chapters one through three, hardcopy prep of same, the new chapter covers I’ve threatened previously… and probably another version of the website.

Again, the website. The main reason for wanting a change is the wiki section. The wiki hasn’t happened and probably won’t – from my current vantage point it seems a lot more efficient to simply create a few more blog categories and start throwing stuff in there… or create another blog (“universe” or whatever) that’ll contain the cast, lexicon, planets, vehicles, technology, etceteras. Stuff that would be bound for a wiki, if I had the time to put into one.

Also, aesthetics. I keep thinking of the site as being grayscale with yellow/orange links or hotspots – not the murky sepia that it has been for the past few revisions.

If I’m SMRAT about this, I’ll do the covers for 1-4, then either edit 1-3 and then do 4, or do 4 and then edit 1-4, then redo the website in preparation for the home stretch.

Ultimately, the order things get done in depends on how badly I’m blocking on rewrites.**

* The first four chapters (aka “Incursion”) had a short eponymous intro scene. The last four (“expulsion”) has one as well, plus there’s that few pages of aftermath. So while there are five chapters left, there are a total of seven sections remaining. Fortunately two of those are really, really short. And chapter six is also short. So plowing through four really will put this thing on the home stretch.

** You’ll be happy to know that the second half needs more rephrasing and continuity correction than it does a burn-it-down-and-do-it-over rewrite. With any luck, production of the second half should go faster than the first half has, if for no other reason than I’m getting deeply impatient and really want to be making new pages instead of gaping in horror at old ones.