Thrilling Tales: back in the mad doctor’s laboratory

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I’ve got just a few days left before I need to shift back to the illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book, so I’m trying all the harder to make some more progress on my other Thrilling Tale, which is Part Two of The Toaster With Two Brains. As you see here I’m back in the laboratory of Doctor Rognvald in the Tower of the Brain Thieves.

That’s not, in fact, where the story begins; but because this Tale will go live all at once, rather than in a serial, I don’t have to start at the beginning. This is the sixth of about a hundred and twenty illustrations. So, you know, although I’m happy to be making progress, the progress isn’t all that measurable just yet. It’s a marathon – not a sprint.

There’s something potentially pretty neat in the wind. It’s so speculative that I can’t say a thing about it and (speculative things being what they are) it’ll probably be quite awhile before that changes, if ever. Consider it a mystery, and cross your fingers for me.

Thrilling Tales: Update on The Toaster With TWO BRAINS

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I know it can quiet when I’m busy over here, since ‘busy’ brings on my sophisticated system of Tunnel Vision. This means that I’m not too well aware of anything else. But when my blog gets sort of empty and echoing that’s usually a sign that a whole heck of a lot is going on. Which, it turns out, has been the case.

I’ve finished the script for Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS and I’m liking it a lot; as the second act of the story it’s got a lot more action, for one thing, as things become more clear and more frantic at pretty much the same time. I’ve followed the "narrower, longer" style of story branches that I described earlier and the result is that you can read through the story from several viewpoints at different stages; and while there aren’t usually as many options to choose, the options that are there lead to very different events within a story that still arrives at the same place at the same time.

I like it a lot; hopefully you will too, though because of the time I spend on the illustrations you won’t be seeing it for roughly a year.

I’ve finished entering the story data in the form the web site needs, and today I’ve completed the images and HTML for all the new inventory items. There’s about two weeks on my calendar before I go back to the illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book – so I even have some time to make a start on the Two Brains illustrations before that happens.

First milestone for Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

The noisemakers and trumpets in the Secret Laboratory are making as much noise as you’d hear at a Retropolitan chess tournament because this morning I finished the first draft for Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS.

It’s just five pages (or "nodes") short of Part One, in length, but when I’m done it’ll probably be just about exactly the same. The story is following that different interactive structure I described earlier with story branches that are longer, but narrower, and I figure I’ll be adding a small number of very minor alternate nodes to fill it out a bit.

Also I haven’t done a lot with new inventory items, and I may want to review that, too. But it’s a pretty reliable first draft and with that, anyway, I’m pretty happy.

I got a little bit stuck as I tried to start the final section. I cleared my mental palate by working for a few days on a new set of T-shirt designs. (They’re not up yet: there will be four – or possibly five – in the set, and I’ve only done three so far.)

Once I’d reset my brain by doing those the rest of the TWO BRAINS script came together pretty quickly.

Of course I need to go over it and make a lot of changes. That ought to be all done well before April 4th, which my calendar tells me is the day when I have to switch back over to the next illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. In fact I wouldn’t mind having some TWO BRAINS illustrations done by then, too. But we’ll just see.

I’m glad to see that the page updates feed worked properly yesterday – I’m not sure what went wrong in the first place so I can’t be sure that it’s fixed, either, but we look good so far.

Thrilling Tales: the Page Updates That Couldn’t Die

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Thrilling Tales: Page Updates

I’m pretty sure that the brain I implanted in the Thrilling Tales page update system was not labeled "Abby Normal". But I do get a little absent minded, so….

Anyway I’ve made a couple of slight changes and did a new test behind the scenes, and everything worked just splendidly – possibly because it was behind the scenes so you couldn’t see it.

But since we’re talking about what’s behind the scenes, here’s what goes on there.

When a previously scheduled post goes live at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual*, it emails a page update notification to an ultra secret email address. The Webomator blog checks the email for that address, and if the email is legitimate the Web-O-Blog publishes it as a post in the Thrilling Tales: Page Updates category. Then it deletes that email from the mail server, just like your own email client probably does when you download new messages.

For whatever reason, I think that the emails weren’t being deleted this morning. So every hour the Web-O-Blog would check the email, find a "new" message, and post it. That shouldn’t have happened, and I can’t make it happen again now, so maybe I fixed it. The next real world test will happen Monday morning when another page goes live.

I sure don’t know why it happened in the first place; if what I did this morning really did fix it, it may have had something to do with the way the emails ended. Anyhow: I’m sure it was annoying if you saw it – if you’re seeing these posts on Facebook, you’re still seeing it. Please believe that it annoyed me at least as much as it did you.

*This is the clever bit, because only serialized Thrilling Tales pages are scheduled ahead of time.

[tags]thrilling tales of the downright unusual, the lair of the clockwork book, stupid wordpress tricks[/tags]

Coming Thursday: Page update notifications for the Thrilling Tales

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Well, in response to a reader request I’ve just added a page update notification for Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. It seems to be working just fine, but I’m interested in seeing how everything behaves in a real-life test. We’ll see that on Thursday morning when the next page goes live.

The page update notifications will be available through an RSS feed here, in my Webomator blog. The RSS link will go on the Thrilling Tales front page. I’m not sure I want those updates to actually appear here in the blog, though: that might be annoying for my readers or for folks on Facebook, since these blog posts get echoed over there. I guess I’ll see how it all works and then deal with where it all works.

Now in progress: Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

So here I am, with the automagical Clockwork Book machine posting its pages while I’ve got my back turned – through June, anyway: I’d be in trouble if I didn’t get back to it on schedule – and at last I’m back at work on Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS. It’s a nice feeling, even though I still obsess about promotional tasks for The Lair of the Clockwork Book.

I was paying pretty close attention to Part One as it shaped up (well, naturally!) and I’ve continued to think about it since. There are such differences between what can work well in the web version and what can work well in print… more so than you might expect. That means that some things that made perfect sense to me about the script for Part One didn’t turn out to be as perfectly sensible as I’d like.

It’s not the story itself. It’s more about its fundamental structure. In a lot of ways Part One emulates a graphical adventure game. I think that shows up most clearly in the conversation trees that eat up a lot of pages. They seemed perfectly okay because they were essentially free pages in the web version; but the pages are the opposite of free in the print version, so adding a lot of nearly identical story nodes was a bad idea. The reader gets to page through a conversation in any order at all – but so what? Very little is really added for the reader, and the additional pages cut down on how many unique things can take place in the story because of the cost of the printed pages.

I made a virtue of that by often doing alternate illustrations for similar story nodes. But that still didn’t make it a good idea.

So this time I’m approaching things a little differently. One thing I really enjoy about Epicsplosion is that its story branches take off in completely different directions. There aren’t all that many options on most pages, but when you do select one, the two story branches are very, very different. I’m not doing the same thing, really: my story’s a multi-part one, and my branches each have to leave you in a very similar place at the end of the volume. So the story can’t transmogrify into something completely different. What I can do, though, is to take a very different route to get to that same eventual spot.

One of the things that I think worked very well in Part One was the way you can follow more than one character in the story. I’m doing even more with that in Part Two (in fact that’s pretty fundamental, as are some tricks that make you wonder what happened in the other branch, once they come back together).

So in Part Two I’m concentrating on the several point of view characters. An individual page may not have as many options, but I’m trying to do more with the options you get. More of these options "expire" if you haven’t used them (you don’t often get the same choice on two consecutive pages). So the result should be a story whose branches are thinner, but longer: a tree rather than a bush.

I think it’s going to make for a better experience. Maybe even for me – I just realized that there are fewer flow charts in my future :).

So far, let me see… the first draft is about 25% along. My next stop is a chess tournament that’s celebrated pretty much like a basketball game, or maybe like a NASCAR event. I’ve got three different characters headed there and only one of them knows what’s really going on. Good times!

It’s Day One for The Lair of the Clockwork Book, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I’d have liked to launch it with a sonic boom and a tremendous plume of multi-colored and potentially toxic smoke… but due to local ordinances I’ve simply uploaded the new files that have jolted The Lair of the Clockwork Book into its new shambling, unlikely life.

Sort of thing.

Yep, after months of preparation I’ve just added the first page of my first serialized story at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. The next thirty-two pages are all loaded up and scheduled to post on Mondays and Thursdays – that’s only about a quarter of the whole thing, so obviously I’m going to be laboring behind the scenes as we go.

Here’s a link to the first page; this link, on the other hand, is one that will always display the most recent page of the story.

Because there’s only one page of Clockwork Book today, the new navigation buttons are ghosted. They’ll lurch into usefulness on Thursday, when the next page appears. The new comments system is all live, though. Um, muahahahaha, etc.

[tags]thrilling tales of the downright unusual, the lair of the clockwork book, retro future, illustration, illustrated, stories, fiction, serial[/tags]

Counting down till Monday – The Lair of the Clockwork Book

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I’m still counting down to Clockwork Book Day (Monday!), but "counting down", in this case, doesn’t mean that I’m sitting around and, you know, counting. Which makes me wonder why I’m calling it "counting down". But I choose to ignore that, and just press on*.

I’ve kept tinkering with the revisions to the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site – from content-sensitive banners to new site banners to a new home page that I almost, but not quite, like a lot; but the rest of my time’s been spent on redoing four of the Clockwork Book illustrations at a much higher resolution for use as posters and archival prints; that’s led, along the way, to new T-Shirts, coffee mugs, and iPad cases because once I get rolling it’s pretty hard for me to stop. Even though I see that I’m doing merchandising for something that won’t be published till next week. Hey, whatever. Timey-wimey.

I’m really happy with the way the poster designs have shaped up. And as for the story itself, well, Monday’s coming. It’s nearly here.

* As the years go by, I find myself doing that more and more.

[tags]thrilling tales of the downright unusual, the lair of the clockwork book, retro future, illustration, illustrated, stories, fiction[/tags]