Toreas Blog

After two rewrites, here is chapter 10. It has turned out a lot longer than I originally expected, but I hope that is to the liking of you, the reader. You get to witness some conversation between Zara and Eric, where they both say more about themselves than ever before.

The next 3 chapters are very important. A lot happens in them and I’m in the process of working them over now. I probably have to rewrite large potions of it, so this might take some time. For me the sequence is one big thing, so I treat it like one gigantic chapter for myself. I’ll try to finish by next weekend though.

I have been reading the next chapter over and over again in the past days. I’m very unhappy with it. It has two important bits in there and neither is really conveyed the way I would like them to appear. But I am at a loss for words or what I should change.

So tomorrow I will attempt a rewrite of the chapter. Thanks to using a version control software, there is no problem in overwriting the existing one, I can always retrieve the old one. If the attempt gets worse than the original, I’ll just revert to the old version and give correcting that one another stab. All of this though delays the chapter more than I wanted to. The plan was to release this soonish, but now it will have to wait longer.

Go and read the shortish chapter 9. Where are Eric and Zara?

This chapter now has been posted using a new system I have created. It accesses Mediawiki and Twitter so far directly. I’m also planing on having WordPress and even Facebook integrated into this. So now all I do is fill out a form where I say this is chapter 9, paste the text of the chapter into one box, edit (if I want to) the twitter message which is prefilled, edit the blog post and push a button.

Now it will create the page on the wiki for chapter 9, change the template for latest chapter, so clicking the link on the main page will lead to the latest one, change the template that shows the latest changes in the upper right area of the main page, recalculate all the stats with this new page added and automatically update the wiki page about statistics and then post the new status to twitter. Next stop, making it post to WordPress.

But this has some time. For now, I will concentrate on writing the story. This software already takes care of the most time consuming aspects anyways, the rest is just laziness on my part.

I like to commit to something fully and then do it until I come to the conclusion it no longer works. I also like to do what I say I will do. So if I were to say that I release one chapter a week, I would commit to it and do it. But I can’t.

Right now, it comes down to about 1 chapter per week, which averages in the 2300 words region. To say it in book terms, that’s about a normal sized novel of roughly 120’000 words per year. Or in about 3 years I have enough material to fill one of larger fantasy novels out there. It also means that in about 17 years I should be roughly done with writing out the entire story that I have in my head.

Committing to a schedule would mean I have to be bale to keep the schedule or I would not do it, simple. If there is a schedule, people want things on time, I know I do. Right now, I’m writing a script that will take care of updating the wiki pages correctly when I add a new chapter, put a note up on twitter and maybe I can even interface the blog for this as well. Then I would just paste the latest text into a box, write the short blurb for the blog post and submit the texts all in one quick go. It will update the stats, the story page, the front page news and links, just everything I do currently by hand.

If I had a schedule I pre-load the next chapter(s) and have an automated script publish them for me, always at the exact same time.

But I don’t have one, because life happens. As of this moment, I have not written a single line on Toreas for almost a week. I have been thinking about it a lot and ideas and wordings I need to place into my text editing tool of choice, but I have not yet found the time to sit down and do it.

So for now, the schedule stays irregular at about “roughly once a week”. If I get a buffer of 30 chapters or more, I will start a regular schedule until I see the buffer runs too low. Preferably I would like to release often, even twice or more in a week, but I just lack the time the writing requires to manage that.

Been a busy week and a busy weekend. So finally here chapter 8 for your reading pleasure. We are back with Zara and Eric on their journey. There is one small, or rather large problem ahead though.

Chapter 9 should be out this week some time. As it is a bit busy I might not be able to wrap it up until the weekend.