And for my next trick…

Transitional Voices is provisionally complete. According to the ATC Production Roadmap the next item on the to-do list is the “Science Pass” and “remastering” – a giant full-spectrum cleanup edit that will haul the comic cosmology kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

I’ll be starting on that soon. The idea is to steamroll through the material, make the required changes, and then make some PDFs. And probably CBZs since those are easier to make. If you support ATC on Patreon at a $10/month level you’ll hopefully have something to read – a lot of something – before the year is out. If you don’t, you’ll probably have to wait awhile to see the edits reflected on the site. While recent edits have been extensive this one’s going to be epic. The file structure will be overhauled, The Dualist and chapter one of TV will finally be configured for print, and some of the more willfully obtuse bits of the plot will (hopefully) be streamlined into something easier to relate to.

I’ll be doing a few graphics tweaks but for the most part that’s over with – all of the major graphical edits on my to-do list were done during and after the production of the final scene of Fire. I won’t be adding new pages. I will not be adding new scenes. I will be folding Observer Effect into Dead City Radio, moving Interstitial into Transitional Voices, renumbering everything to list correctly, and then overhauling the web site.

A large amount of the mental heavy lifting has been done – for the most part this is a vast pile of work that just needs to be plowed through. This phase should go relatively quickly when I get started on it. I say “relatively” as there’s no quick way to tweak and renumber almost 700 pages, and I say “when” as I’m still figuring out my post-Pittsburgh workflow. The incentive to get this leg of post-production done is the work that comes after – cleaning up assets and generating material for the restructured cast and lexicon sections. Shining ATC into product.

I’ve been searching for a conclusion for a couple of hours, but I’m coming up dry – it isn’t something I’ve thought about or rehearsed, unlike the massive list of post-production edits that are about to go down. I’d say “Courage” but Apple recently turned that word from an obtuse cultural reference into a worldwide punchline so I’ll sign off with something more appropriate.

Recalibration.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Send Me Your Money!

In early May I created a Patreon account. I’ve made it thirteen years without asking for help, and if I want ATC to keep going, well… I’m gonna need all the help I can get. I’m gonna need you to send me your money!

Apologies to Suicidal Tendencies – the song popped into my head while writing copy for Patreon and it seemed like a great opener for the related ATC blog post (this bit here), so I ran with it.

This post establishes the existence of the Patreon account and firms up the ATC production roadmap. The roadmap is planned to be the first blog post to the account once I take it live. I feel that it reads a lot like a pitch for a fixed amount of funding – a budget, if you will – and in some ways it is. While ATC was planned as a seven book thing and for a very long time was dreamed of as an ongoing series, I can’t see past the end of the current book. It has been in production since 2007. ATC is a trilogy until it’s done. I have to finish it; I can’t move on with my life until I do. I can not see or plan for what comes after it until I, myself, am after it. I am Ahab. Creative fatigue and financial stress have really put the zap on me. My costs are fixed. My freelance income is not. Freelance is a fickle beast – on the one hand pants are optional on the other the work commands and utterly exhausts the creative impulse. I am asking you to buy time. The more you pledge the more time I’ll have to spend on ATC instead of some hungrier thing. The faster this particular leg of the project isĀ done the faster we’ll get to see what comes next.

With your help there will be a next.