Thrilling Tales: now spiffier under the hood, and nearly ready

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

So about a week ago I started in on the site revisions at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. I had a list of tasks in my hand and a smile on my face, and I said to myself:

"Well, self! This won’t be so bad!"

…without realizing that these were the exact words spoken by Xerxes when he led his army up the Pass of Thermopylae.

Like Xerxes, I now know that a few days of hard work, relentless cursing, and some treachery can take you a long way.

Whenever it was possible I isolated my little explosions from the public areas of the site… but despite that, there were plenty of momentary glitches (sorry!) . I had to keep the site’s cache turned off for most of the week, too, and that slowed things down a bit.

But now…. now…. I stand atop a heap of dismembered bugs, glitches, misunderstood syntax, and incomprehensible documentation as though they were so many fallen Spartans. The dripping blade of my text editor is raised in triumph. A harsh, humorless smile creases my face. Now, is that Thebes over there?

Before I do the final two housekeeping tasks, there’s just one thing that I think could be better optimized… and since it’s the page that’ll display the most recent entry in a (linear) story, I think it’s an important one. It’s that page you’d want to bookmark to see the latest updates immediately. So, like I said, important. I’m pretty sure that if I can be just slightly smarter I can make it load faster.

But there’s some neat stuff that finally works. The linear stories have an additional set of navigation links that make it easy to go forward and backwards through the story, or to go straight to the first or latest page. (The normal Save/Restore system works, too, just like in the interactive tales.) I’ve also added a comments panel to the linear story pages, which is neat and pretty well secured against spam. The comments panel is hidden by default, but with a click you can unfold it to read or add comments. And though I know you don’t care about this one much, I can now define custom rotating ads to appear on individual static pages, or have unique ads for each story.

The other major revision was a big change to the way the pages are built, so that they’ll be better indexed by the search engines. That was the first thing I did and it went live early in the week, so that as the search engine bots come through they’ll be finding what they think is new and better content on all the existing pages. It’s the same content we’ve been looking at all along, of course: those poor bots just didn’t understand that it was there.

So I’ve got just a few more days to go before it’s all done and (even more) tested, and then I can begin to add the actual content for the first thirty-three pages of The Lair of the Clockwork Book. They’ll be time-released to post on Mondays and Thursdays, starting sometime in the first half of February. Honest!

Thrilling Tales: the Clockwork Book art’s ready… now on to the site revisions!

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

If that’s me, with my faced scrunched up against the window of the airship’s gondola, it only means that I’ve just finished the first illustration for The Lair of the Clockwork Book… which in a remarkable inversion is also the last one I needed to do before I had enough illustrations to start posting the pages at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. That’s thirty-three, so far, for anyone who’s counting. Well. I guess that’s just me.

Click on it to see it bigger, unless you’re reading through RSS or syndication: the popups, alas, work only at my blog.

So my next step is to work through my task list, making a bunch of changes to the Thrilling Tales site so that it can support this new non-branching story and while I’m at it I’ll also make a number of other enhancements to the way the whole unlikely thing works.

Still on track for the launch of the Clockwork Book story in early February!

Coming in February: The Lair of the Clockwork Book

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

It’s as official as I can make it… without popping ahead to February to check, anyway. But since I’m down to the last six and a half of its first set of illustrations I’m confident that if you check back in early February you’ll find the first of the semi-weekly updates for The Lair of the Clockwork Book at the Thrilling Tales web site. It even says so on the site’s front page, so it must be true.

I should have all 32 of those first illustrations done quite soon. Then I’ll need to put on my web development hat so that I can work through my list of web site changes to support the new linear stories, streamline some story-specific features, and make the site easier to index. That’s a long and complicated story in itself; but I decided to gamble a bit on exactly how smart Googlebot is, and, well, it turned out to be more of a chimp than a mad scientist. Poor old bot.

So ’round about the beginning of February, look for new Clockwork Book pages on Mondays and Thursdays. I’ll have swiveled in my seat at the same time, spending eight weeks on Part Two of The Toaster With Two Brains, after which it’s back to the Clockwork Book for me.

Lair of the Clockwork Book Update, other thrilling news, and Adventures in Plumbing

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

Here’s the final illustration for Osgood Finnegan’s (first) tale in The Lair of the Clockwork Book. It’s yet another laboratory, or a workshop, anyway, in a steampunk setting that predates my Future That Never Was by about two hundred years.

Click on the picture, and behold its relentless embiggification.

I’ll have to leave Osgood to his work in there. I’ve got about ten more illustrations to go before this Thrilling Tale can go live at the web site… then I’ve got perhaps a week of web site updates to do so that the site can support this non-interactive story, and at that same time I’ll make some other housekeeping changes that will make all the stories taste better to Google’s finicky palate, while also enhancing a couple of other things under the hood.

But all that’s grinding to a halt for a day or two. It looks like I have a Plumbing Adventure to take care of first. I’d call it an Emergency Plumbing Adventure, except that I can’t think of too many plumbing adventures that aren’t emergencies. That would be the kind I’d rather have, I think.

Thrilling Tales update: Osgood Finnegan and I are not in Tahiti

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

So here’s some proof that I haven’t packed up and taken off for Tahiti. Or is it? I guess I could get Internet access there, now that I think of it.

But, no – really!- I’m here in the wintry seclusion of the Secret Laboratory where I’m still making progress on the first thirty or so illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. (Quick recap: once those first pictures are done the story will start its regular updates at the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site, while I get to work on Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS – until the Clockwork Book starts to run low on updates, at which point I’ll scurry back over to that project again.)

I’ve got over half of these first images done with just a handful to go until I’ve finished Osgood Finnegan’s story. Once that’s done I’ll be a lot closer to the story’s launch than it seems.

That’s because the remaining images – though there are quite a few – all take place in the Clockwork Book’s room. As I’ve mentioned before, things go much more quickly when I’m using the same location a bunch of times.

I doubt now that the story will start by the end of the year, as I’d planned. But I shouldn’t be late by too much.

Signed copies of ‘Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves’ are back in stock; also, other stuff

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

A little while back I actually ran out of signed copies of Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves – but now I’ve got another batch of ’em, so they’re available again at the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site. (The unsigned copies, I hasten to add, were always available and still are.)

I’m not sure that my signature means anything but you also get a pair of spiffy Thrilling Tales bookmarks.

And since we’re talking merchandising here (well… I am, anyway, and you’re doing whatever you’re doing while I do it), there’s also a splendiferous series of Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual T-shirts, not to mention the uncanny Thrilling Tales beverage containment devices, which themselves are totally eclipsed by the outright wonder of the Thrilling Tales posters and 2011 Wall Calendar.

Which is quite a lot of wonder, now that I think of it.

So while you wonder about that, I’ll let you know that the first tale in The Lair of the Clockwork Book has now got all its illustrations. I’m working on the second set, for something that I think is called Osgood Finnegan and the Orb from the Stars, or Osgood Finnegan and the Mysterious Stranger, or Osgood Finnegan and the Tale That Has Yet To Be Named.

Indecision’s an awful thing.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time building and texturing Osgood’s 19th century wagon, so I guess I should cram it into as many of the illustrations as possible. Though that would be cheating.

Thrilling Tales: the adventure continues

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

I’m making pretty good progress on the illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book, even though I’m not as far along as I’d like. I’ve just finished the last of the pictures that takes place in Lew Stone’s lab during his adventure (which may be called Big Headed Guy and the Big Ball of Doom) but I’ve taken longer to get them done than I’d hoped.

Because I Think Too Much, I’ve been considering why that is, and why that is interests me, although your mileage may vary.

The biggest difference between this and the mildly interactive Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves is that this story’s linear. When Lew powers up the Chiralitron and begins his experiment he will always do that, in the same way, and the same thing will always happen. This is Captain Obvious speaking, by the way.

As a side effect of this linearity there are fewer things that can happen – and so fewer illustrations – in any one location in the story. Why isn’t fewer faster?

The problem is that building a complicated environment takes lots of time. Making a single picture in that environment takes awhile, too, but nowhere near as much. So the more illustrations that happen in one place, the less time – on the average – they take. You could say that I’m amortizing the time I’ve spent building the pieces that make the pictures.

So I built Lew’s pristine laboratory and made the four pictures that take place there. Then I had to build Lew’s demolished laboratory and make the four pictures that take place there. If I’d needed to make twelve pictures in each state of the lab, the average time it took to make the pictures would be lower. See?

Why didn’t I, then?

So it’s not terrible news – things are just a little bit slower than I expected. This really bothered me until I did the math and understood why. But for the final set of pictures in Lew’s story I have some very different settings to create and those, thankfully, will go much more smoothly than the sets up to now. I’m concerned about what that does to the Clockwork Book‘s launch date – I’d hoped to start posting the story by the end of the year – but I don’t think I’ll be set back by all that much.

Thrilling Tales: Lew Stone’s Lab, Continued

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

I think I’ve got the major elements of Lew’s laboratory pretty well set: there was a lot of shifting and moving involved because at one point, which you’ll see if you embiggify the image, Lew’s experiment is underway and you have to have a pretty clear view of what’s going on.

I still need to do a little rework on the Chiralitron (that’s the big machine in the left foreground) and run some cables across the lab. But it’s pretty well set at this point.

Of course I’ve paid so much attention to that important view that when I pull back out to look at my other angles I’ll find some more to add. But it’s definitely getting there, if by "there" you mean here, but a little more so.

The first couple of dozen illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book include Lew’s adventures, which begin in this room and end up somewhere inside the orbit of Venus. I decided to do this bit first because I want to be fully back up to speed when I work on the opening scenes and the illustrations of the Book itself.

Thrilling Tales: Yet Another Mad Scientist’s Laboratory

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

I’ve got a small backlog of neat things I haven’t yet linkblogged to because once again I’ve got my nose pressed to the wheel, which is sort of uncomfortable, and honestly, a little embarrassing, should anyone notice… but I digress. That sentence was meant to end with a description of what I am doing but you can see a little piece of that above: click on it to see a bigger version of the whole scene.

This is a work in progress view of Lew Stone’s laboratory for his story in The Lair of the Clockwork Book. I guess it’s my third mad scientist’s lab for Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. I’m enjoying the way they each have a different atmosphere because all three scientists are such different people. Cornelius Zappencackler’s lab (even more fireproof!) has a cozy and cluttered character; Doctor Rognvald’s lab is shadowy and sinister; and Lew’s lab, shown here, is a bit lighter and more… well, rational, because Lew’s greatest problem as a student is that he isn’t really insane enough for his vocation.

I have a couple of devices to add, all part of Lew’s experiment in progress, and then some additional set dressing after that – and just to make things more interesting I’ll also need a demolished version of this room. Because, you know, that’s just what happens.

In other news, I took a few hours off yesterday to explore. I was looking for a good used book store in my adopted area – after six years I’ve yet to find one that makes me want to take a deep breath of dustiness and mustiness, make myself at home, and trade in my excess books. I think this is the biggest thing I miss about living in California: near pretty much any of my old neighborhoods in Long Beach, San Luis Obispo, San Francisco, Ventura, or Los Angeles I always had a fantastic assortment of used book stores to haunt. Here, on the other hand, I’ve found just one that was sort of interesting. It’s a sad state of affairs, I can tell you.

There’s just one more possibility I know of, out toward Cleveland, that sounds promising: but I’m not sure if I’ll get there before Winter sets in.