Short form:

The shirt decal appears in 44 more pages of The Dualist, in approximately 70 panels. All pages require the same formatting work that the first half of the book has received.

Said decal also appears on 23 pages and in 40 panels of the first part of Transitional Voices. TV is already the correct aspect ratio and has already been extensively fixed. While it may still be subject to a rewrite, the decal swap can be done separately.

That’s a sum total of 67 pages and approximately 110 panels that need adjustment, in addition to the raft of other work that needs to be done to The Dualist (and possibly TV).

In terms of page count, this is by far the costliest © error of my entire body of work.

There’s a chance I may push through the TV corrections before I start on the second half of TD2E. After all, it’s “only” 23 pages… and when The Dualist is Done, I’ll hopefully be Current on projects, instead of having More TV Rework ahead of me.

I do regardless – there’ll be a final pass over the text after TD2E is complete, and the cover’s going to be changed to match the stuff I’m brewing for the TD2E cover replacements. Those are givens and – relatively speaking – aren’t much of a challenge.

While development has been a vicious hydra of timesuck – CG for future bits, CG for DCR, CG for stuff I may never use, new dummies, script for TV.2, revisions for DCR.2, overplot, script ideas for “inserts” between stories that would be totally viable if this thing ever becomes an Ongoing Series, cover musings, structural musings, CG I Need To Make musings, website musings, Comp CD musings, how do I get moar eyeballs plz musings and OH YEAH THE SECOND EDITION – I’ve managed to make some Meaningful Progress in a couple of key areas and now have a reasonably sane timetable for near-future events.

It goes something like this:

1. Chapter Four (Clarity). Formatting work is ongoing – as of this writing I’ve done one redraw and two pages of renders. This chapter has an expanded scene in it, so I’ll have to start preparing to tackle that in short order. Lots of CG and lineart.

2. Chapter Covers. The CG backdrops for 1-4 are already done. I’ve showed them to my channelmates on IRC, and the general consensus is that they’re Nifty. The new cover formatting is not the current cover formatting – it’s intended for hardcopy and unlike previous bouts of handwaving, hardcopy is where this thing is heading. Slowly.

Getting this covers ground out is filling me with a peculiar sense of Rightness regarding the future of the book. I may well have finally devised something that Actually Works.

I still need to generate the cover for Incursion – the formula’s going to be a bit different than it is for the individual chapters, so I’ll need to do more with the thinking before that pops out. The intent is to work on the Cover artwork while Chapter Four is in reproduction rendering. Usually when ATC is Rendering I busy myself with drawing porn – but I’m almost an adult*, dammit. Time to be making more… useful… uh… use of my time. Or something.

3. After Clarity is done, Incursion (the first half) will be complete, which means it’ll be time for Proofing of the first half. Xeno gets to do his thing, I get to implement fixes. And then implement the first half for print, covers and everything. I’ll probably sit on it until the second half is Done, just in case I wind up needing to make some last minute changes or revisions or whatever, but better to have it Pretty Much Finished by the time I’m done with the second edition than to finish the web version and then have to do the entire hardcopy thing all at once. I did that with the first edition and it sucked.

4. While Xeno’s Xenoing, I’ll be working on a new version of the website. I’ve muttered about this previously – When I start rolling on Expulsion (the second half of the story), I’ll be rolling out a tweaked site. More on that when it gets closer to happening.

You’ll notice there’s no CG modeling work anywhere on that list. Fact is, much as I enjoy banging out spaceships in Silo (and as much as I hate texturing them), everything I need for this chapter already exists… and working on anything I don’t need for this chapter is only going to slow me down.

The first bit of Expulsion is entirely new CG, however – so after all of the above is done, I’ll need to do some modeling and texturing work. The model in question is damned near complete – it just needs some detailing and maps. It’s a plot-critical DCR object to boot, so having it Done (when I Need It, no less) will clear out a sizable roadblock on that project.

Long-term, my current plan is to finish the reformat of The Dualist, do the correction work on TV.1**, finish DCR.2, then move on to TV.2. There’s still FAR TOO MUCH work in front of me, but for the time being there’s at least a semblance of order to it.

Some sense of priority.

* I’ll be 30 in one month. Oh noes!

** I refer specifically to Ornix’s shirt, which needs to be fixed in both The Dualist and TV. I’ll probably revise the hell out of the dialogue while I’m at it.

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.