Two Sales, on T-Shirts & Archival Art Prints, through February 27th

Filed under Works in Progress

This is really two different sales that happen to end at the same time; it’s statistically so unlikely that anybody who thinks about it will realize the only way this could happen is if time-traveling creatures, who are almost certainly hamsters, have been meddling with the fundamental causality that keeps our universe from imploding and, coincidentally, makes it necessary for us to wear T-shirts and hang pictures on our walls.

The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.

But enough of that boring physics lecture!

SALE THE FIRST: through midnight, Mountain Time, on February 27 you can save up to $35 on a T-shirt order from The Retropolis Transit Authority, Saga Shirts, or Hot Wax Tees. It works like this, with these coupon codes you should use during checkout:

…and because these T-shirt sites use the same shopping cart you can mix and match, either until the hamsters destroy the Universe As We Know It, or until midnight (Mountain Time) on February 27. Which, for all I know, is the same thing.

SALE THE SECOND: Until midnight (Pacific Time) on February 27 you can get 20% off any of my archival art prints – either the Retropolis prints from the retro future, or my Celtic Art prints.

That sale just happens automatically: you won’t need to exert yourself or anything.

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]

One Day T-Shirt Sale at Retropolis Transit, Saga Shirts, & Hot Wax Tees

Filed under Works in Progress

It’s time for another mathematically perplexing T-Shirt sale at the Retropolis Transit Authority, Saga Shirts, and Hot Wax Tees. (This includes the brand new and remarkable Clockwork Book T-shirts).

Here’s how it works: when you place any order – that’s right, no minimums – the web site does a complex and bizarre computation based on the item you’re ordering and some stuff that’s way too confusing to try to explain. Then it takes a percentage off your order.

For dark colored T-shirts, it works out to 36%. For light colored T-shirts, it works out to about 29.4%. Or so my experiments told me… when they were still able to speak.

All you need to do to get that discount is to enter the coupon code FEBLUV11 in the shopping cart.

It’s all over at midnight (Mountain Time) today, February 5th. Not to pressure you or anything. But, you know, get clicking, would you?

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]

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.