Development : all entries
Goals for 2012
posted 2011.12.30 at 15:38 | comment
In brief:
1. Finish DCR.
2. Website tweaks/overhaul/etc.
3. Get back up to speed on Transitional Voices.
Expanded:
1.A. 4.12 has been rendered and I have draft renders for 4.13. Draft as they were generated under rushed circumstances and may require either a significant amount of work or a fresh approach to make them acceptable.
1.B. While 4.12 has been ready for Photoshop ops for roughly a week, I haven't - and won't - have the time to work on it for awhile. Hopefully early this coming week, probably longer. 4.14 will require fresh CGI and I have other 3d modeling obligations to see to before I can start on that, so the "back end" of Chapter Four is going to take awhile.
1.C. The chapter five script is done. Transcribed, too. Several pages have layouts. I plan to have the script for this chapter fully developed before chapter four wraps so that production continues without a break. CG requirements are minimal, the panel count is relatively low (compared to Whitehouse, anyway), and it's short. Bit of a Stephenson ending but avoids a lot of repetition - most of what isn't in the script is filled in over the course of The Dualist.
I'd like to have DCR wrapped by June if possible.
2.A. While it's tempting to apply the current state of web fu to the ATC site, if I hold off until after DCR wraps, my fu will be even stronger. I'd sooner do one overhaul than two.
2.B. Given that, any mutterings about possible changes now would be moot, as where my head will be in a few months and where it is at the moment will hopefully be two very different things.
I'll probably stick with the current aesthetics - major aesthetic changes will hopefully be limited to improvements to the existing CSS.
3.A. TV.2 (Water) has been percolating in my head since 2008. I'd be lying if I said it was ready to fall out, but I do have a pretty good idea of what the chapter is going to look like and what kind of work it's going to entail.
3.B. Hopefully my experience with DCR will pay off and Water will be a 28-36 page jaunt instead of a 40+ page production slog. We'll see!
Item one - finishing DCR - is priority. With 32 pages left as of this writing, one of them rendered, another probably rendered, ten more laid out and the remaining 20 already existing in script form, and the fact that I managed 48 pages this year... it's looking doable.
The Traditional Between-Chapters Laundry List
posted 2011.08.15 at 09:04 | comment
Production of DCR.3 wrapped this weekend, clearing the way for me to Get Serious about DCR.4. Originally titled Seasons in the Abyss, now tentatively titled Diatribe, the chapter has a full outline and partial script and will need an extensive amount of development within the next month if I'm to shoot the images I'll need for the opening at an appropriate time of year. I'm in a position to chew on this while getting work done on paying projects and wrapping up a few other things - script development isn't nearly as onerous as page production, especially given the fact that it's half done already.
When I tell writers that writing comics is the easy part, the writers who write frequently bristle and get pissy with me, whereas the writers who also work on the art side of a project have a tendency to agree. They're different challenges - while they use different parts of the brain in different ways, there's no disputing the fact that once something pops into your head, writing out a description takes a hell of a lot less time than drawing, modeling, photoshopping or otherwise rendering the image - especially if, as the writer, you know exactly what you want on the page.
This applies to the next chapter in spades. While script development has been relatively straight-forward, visually realizing what happens in chapter four is going to be one hell of a challenge. The beginning and end are straight-forward, chapter five is straight-forward, but the middle (the majority) of chapter four is something I'm still trying to wrap my head around from a feasibility standpoint. It's some seriously major plot stuff, both for DCR and for the story as a whole, and I'll need to be at the top of my game just to get the layouts right.
I don't know how long the script will take - I'd like to shoe-horn it in over the course of the next month in addition to other obligations, and would like to have the critical assets modeled and page production under way by some point in October. I don't want a repeat of DCR.3, where the cover goes up in November and I spend the next four months in an alcoholic haze. I want this thing to go cover to pages quickly, and I'd like production to be as regular as the latter two-thirds of DCR.3 was.
That said, there's a few website-related details that need taken care of over the course of the next month, as well as some back-end bit-shifting. Here's the list:
1. The Hemera crew needs to be added to the Cast page. I may split them into ICG and Addicaines, I may lump them into Heirotus, I may use this as an excuse to play with tags a bit further down the road. There's a skeletal writeup already done - I just need to flesh it out and select headshots.
2. I need to audit the metadata. Technically I need to do it for all three books, but DCR and TV get priority, as between the two I'm looking at just under 80 pages that need to be proofed versus the 350-plus of The Dualist. Metadata for both books will be back online within the next couple of weeks. The Dualist will take longer - I'm currently thinking of it as a winter project, and I'm thinking on ways to re-jigger the CMS templates to hide/disable unaudited sections while rolling out the revised material.
3. As part of the audit I'll be creating disk-side metadata files for each page. I've already done this for DCR.3, and for TD2E in bulk. In this case I'll be extending it to all pages, and that'll be part of an effort to get the file hierarchy for The Dualist reorganized - something I'll be starting today or tomorrow. The original pages are in an original chapter directory that's a sub-directory of each new chapter, and long story short that's made it a bit disorienting to find color palettes and other reference material on short notice.
4. I've been threatening to edit and add to the glossary/Universe and refusing to actually do it for so long that this is effectively the list item that cried wolf. There's a lot of work to be done, and there's enough material on "paper" to justify spending some time at least editing the existing entries. While I doubt this will actually happen (beyond adding the Hemera crew), there's always the possibility that it might actually get done at some point.
5. DCR.3 needs to be typornographed. Rather or not xeno will actually remember to do this is anybody's guess.
One is happening soon, Two is happening soonish, and half of Three will be done today or tomorrow. The third item means nothing to readers, so it's best to get it out of the way quickly. Five isn't a xeno-only thing - if you find a typo, feel free to contact me or leave a comment!
So.
That's the short term between-chapters plan. With a bit of luck and a lot of effort this stretch of downtime will be a short one, and I'll be back on the stick before the year is out!
Finally, Synopses. And a new About!
posted 2011.01.22 at 19:34 | comment
(Synopses being the proper plural of Synopsis.)
I've been threatening "proper" chapter synopses for awhile - years in some cases. It took awhile, but my head finally hit the proper place and out they came. Now DCR, The Dualist, and Transitional Voices all have proper book, part, and chapter descriptions. They're all on the terse side - some detailed, some vague, all done, and all accurate. I've also done a bit of cleanup of the production dates and page counts for The Dualist. Things look nicer, read smoother, and are generally more approachable, talking about plot instead of production for once.
I've also been working on a rewrite of the About page. When complete it will be an actual About - an overview of what you, the reader, are getting yourself into. I say "when," as despite being very nearly complete, the text still has a couple of massive Sabrosa-sized holes in it. I'm blocked pretty hard on what it'll take to fill them in, and I'm not posting the writeup until I'm happy with it.
As with all things comic related, I have no idea when that will actually happen. Given the completeness of the text, late January or early February seems reasonable.
Give 'em a read - if you spot any typos or other issues, comment on this post, email me, or message me on IRC!
Update, 20110203 : The rewritten About page is live. Woohoo!
Tightening the focus.
posted 2010.08.16 at 16:01 | comment
This weekend was enlightening, to say the least.
The trailer (which I've muttered about on IRC, in metadata and to various people in the meatsphere) is still a good idea, still something I want to do, and definitely not an August Project. For one thing, August is half over and I'm still working on the July workload. For another, holy shit on toast - while my hardware can barely handle 720p, my current disk capacity can handle, at most, twenty or thirty seconds of it. As for rendering... thirty minutes of setup, five hours of grind for a five second preview render that looks good aesthetically but falls way short in the animation department and I'm back to thinking Best Use Of Limited Time.
Right now, that ain't it. Another six months of heavy grind on pages and I'll definitely have something to talk about. Six pages from now, DCR will be done with transitional material and setting. All Plot, all the time. Three and a half chapters of it. Finally.
In light of that, I think production of actual pages needs to be the priority. After most of a year (or two years, depending on how you look at it) of shifting, splitting, multiplying, changing priorities... putting another distraction in front of the story seems like something I need to stop doing.
Like, now.
That said, any work or real solid decision-making on the DCR website is also A Distraction, at least at the moment. As such, DCR strips will post to the DCR site until the end of chapter two, which is a good time and place to shift gears - consolidating the comic projects onto the ATC site and retooling the DCR website as.... something else.
It also means "Advised To Clean"
posted 2010.07.26 at 02:02 | comment
July has been a busy month. It's not over - not by a long shot. The workload that nuked comic production back into neutral will be bleeding over into August - how long that'll last, I don't know. With luck and proper planning, things will be getting thing again in a couple of weeks.
I'm Re-Jobbed, at least for the time being - I don't know how stable it'll be or how it'll shape up in terms of workload, but for the time being it's looking good. That'll have positive benefits in the near and hopefully long term - in the immediate term, I still have a ton of freelance work to wrap up... and as soon as those projects are finalized and the clients are happy, I'll be hacking out new business cards and doing some work on the DCR website.
What kind of work, I don't yet know, exactly. An overhaul at the very least, potentially a total repurposing. Something involving less duplication of effort.
On a web-related note... there's still a ton of work to do on the ATC site. Mostly in Universe, but comic chapter descriptions still need a rewrite, analytics is still being a goober, I'm cleared for ads I still need to figure out where to put, etc.
The DCR chapter two script is inching along - upcoming scenes are now on their third or fourth draft, the next few pages have been finalized and have layouts, and I've managed to get some plotting work done but nothing in terms of actual work. That comes later, after the bits in the previous paragraphs have been dealt with.
My love is stronger than most explosions.
posted 2010.07.01 at 20:01 | comment
16:48 < xeno> <- Wagner : Die Valkure
16:49 < xeno> solios: you need to learn flash animation and do a short of wangfish launching like rockets synched to ride of the valkyries.
16:49 < xeno> it would rule.
16:49 < solios> hah.
16:50 < xeno> with a silhouetted Val conducting
16:50 < xeno> a la fantasia
16:50 < solios> hah.
16:50 < xeno> or mst3k
16:50 < xeno> fagbot: doot my brainmeats.
16:50 < fagbot> 2.25 and a handjob
16:51 < xeno> pretty much
16:51 < xeno> except it's more like .45
16:51 < xeno> solios: it would only need to be about 2.5m, because at that point Sven would be chasing her around with a straitjacket
I do need to learn some Flash, but not for that reason. And I *do* have an ATC video thing in the Serious Consideration pipeline. Bits of storyboards, some editing and CG ideas, but no time to work on it at the present.
If I can get my clone out of storage - or pull off some other form of time management miracle - then maybe I'll be able to do something about that little project this month.
Further bulletins etc etc.
Rub a dub dub.
posted 2010.01.20 at 19:14
Over the past week or so:
The ATC data structure has been Organized. This means some Big Things - namely integrating DCR - and it also means a lot of little things. It's a big deal for me in terms of navigating and backing up the project, it's a necessary step between where things are and where I need them to be, it's been a huge pain in the ass... and it has absolutely no bearing on the website or its contents. For the time being, anyway. The organization has had the following effects:
1. All panel renders have been converted from straight tiff to tiff with LZW compression. All - okay, probably most - panel file duplicates and panel CG file duplicates have been weeded out, and all panel-relevant CG data has been filed in the relevant page directory. This has cleaned up the CG source directories, added some size to the page directories, and through elimination and compression cut the project from ~270 gigs plus an additional ~18-20 gigs of Transitional Voices render data down to - at present - 253 gigs.
Which is slightly easier to back up.
2. TD1E has been integrated into the TD2E data structure. It's cleaner and easier to navigate. Somewhat. That whole "chapter zero" thing still throws the math off when it comes to navigating on the fly.
3. Candy (a thing long-time readers may remember), Logos, tattoos, shirt decals, etc. have all been properly named, organized, and filed.
4. As has the CG. Which took an entire day, in part due to a weird networking glitch that caused XP64 to repeatedly BSOD - but also due to the task running in parallel with panel-related CG organization and mass LZW compression (which would have been unthinkable without a handy Photoshop droplet I took the time to debug). Everything that's "done" has been properly organized and version-synced, some minor repairs to a few files were made, one file (the S-VHS deck) will need extensive work before I reuse it for anything other than parts, and most everything is "boxed up" and ready to move forward.
5. DCR templates have been "verified" and extensively reworked. DCR.1 page files have been {mostly} cleaned up, standardized, and prepared for the impending rewrite. DCR.2 has a temporary cover and the four complete pages of that chapter have been assembled and prepped for rewrite. The DCR.2 bits will go up when the new website - which I haven't started on yet - is finished.
So.
The cleaning was a follow-on from the year spent "cleaning" The Dualist and TV, and has lead into the prep-work for DCR (which I'm now ready to start on).
I get that done, and I get the website done, I run a backup to DVD-R (instead of other hard drives), and I'll finally be in a position to....
... well, to keep finishing stuff. Namely DCR.2. Still finishing? Boo. Making new stuff and actually progressing the story for the first time since 2008 to finish stuff? Yay!
Over the next few days, I'll be concocting a hopefully-complete list of the CG objects I'll need to build in order to get things moving again. Then I'll deal with the website. Then modelling.
New art in March, with any luck!
Aaaalmooost there...
posted 2009.12.09 at 15:44
The Dualist (Second Edition) - Main content complete.
Transitional Voices : Earth - Rewritten.
TD2E needs a bunch of covers - a couple are done, a couple are ready for art. TV needs a couple. One, at least.
Then the website, restoring more or less everything removed with version 2008.1.
All told it looks to be approximately 18 months of downtime between the last new page of TV and the next new page of DCR or TV.
Damn!
As part of another required test protocol, we will stop enhancing the truth in 3 ... 2...
posted 2009.10.19 at 11:21
Semi-weekly status "update" :
1. The TV.1 rewrite is plodding along and is presently at just over the half-way point. The rewrite is shaping up to be important from an exposition standpoint, though I may re-draft some of the chunkier bits before committing to it. Re-lettering will be done either after TD2E or while waiting on TD2E renders and in either case won't be uploaded until after TD2E is complete, as the rewrite now Assumes You've Read The Dualist, rather than just toddling along where it left off.
2. TD2E script is still done.
3. Texturing of remaining CG is coming along very, very slowly. The to-do list consists of two objects, an environment, and two dummies. One of the objects is done, one of the dummies is almost done, and no work has been done on the second dummy or the environment. The second object has finally heaved itself off the launch pad and, after a couple of false starts, is finally starting to shape itself into something. While I've made substantial progress over the weekend, I still have no idea how long the thing is going to take. I'd like to have the base work done by the 25th and the "flavor" done by Halloween... but I don't know how likely that is. The last vehicle I textured was the Hemera, almost a year ago... and it was considerably more forgiving.
Also, vastly less central to the story.
The single biggest hurdle of vehicle mapping - for me, anyway - has always been figuring out the final color palette. I'll know generally what I want something to look like when I start out, but getting The Exact Colors is always a lengthy period of trial and error. That part of the ordeal is over with - now it's down to refining the design and getting it Done.
Confessions of an Asian Foot Goddess
posted 2009.10.01 at 12:36
As there's been no visible progress since my last status update a couple of weeks ago, and as it's a new month (this year is whipping by even faster than the last five!), I figure it's time for a general status update.
In no particular order:
1. The TD2E script is complete. The remaining original TD1E pages still need to be relettered - Getting the script done was a horribly expensive process and I've been doing freelance in order to eat for the past couple of weeks. It sucks, but there it is. These pages will be lettered as soon as my current list of commissions has been whittled down.
2. The TV.1 script is partially rewritten, thanks largely to writing inertia and having packed the remaining pages of TD1E in with the TV binder for portability. The TV.1 rewrite is plot-identical to the first edition, though several core bits of character personality, backstory and exposition have changed. The goal is to finish the rewrite within the next few weeks, and to start work on it as soon as The Dualist is re-completed.
3, I CAN HAS PC. Finally. No more limping along in VMWare without hardware 3d support. Still need to replace my "light table," but that's a trip to Lowes/Home Depot with the paycheck after this one. A sheet of plexi won't be expensive, but a round trip to the waterfront is three to four hours of my life. And I need that time for other things at the moment.
4. There has been no work done towards the next edition of the website. I know what I'm going to change and how I'm going to do it, I just don't see the point in stopping everything else to get it done. Webwork will hopefully happen in December or January - by then I should either know how to implement the "spoilers [on] [off]" and "devnotes [on] [off]" options I'd like to put into the new site, or I'll have figured out how to live without them.
5. DCR.2 and TV.2 plot work is back on deck. As I'm quickly coming up on finishing with TD2E and TV.1b, my imagination is lurching forward with the story. With TV.2, I'm weighing story and CG, trying to think through what needs told and what needs shown and figuring out how to balance them in a fashion that will keep new CG to an absolute minimum. With DCR the concerns are similar, though it's long been a question of "is it worth it to model the outside of 'gheny?" I hope to have that answer before the year is out.
5.B. While I'd like to keep DCR as "the thing I do when ATC is rendering," there's a very real possibility I'll be forced to Choose One in order to make meaningful progress through 2010. DCR is the likely candidate - while DCR and TV are roughly the same length, DCR has much lighter production requirements and almost all of its vehicle CG is complete.
6. Production-wise, the new pages I've mentioned previously (total : 10) are still being held up on the CG front. Fortunately at this point the geometry is effectively complete and it's a matter of texturing. How long this process will take, I don't know. Fortunately, the two objects I need to progress TD2E are also two important objects I need to progress DCR, so I'm in sort of a win-win situation here - sitting on my ass is now holding up both projects.
Fortunately, one of the two bits I need, while not necessarily complete, is at the Good Enough point and will be usable for production in TD2E. I've stuck it in the "Extended" section of the entry to keep it off the front page, as at this point it's technically a spoiler.
Read the rest of Confessions of an Asian Foot Goddess.
One, one, and...
posted 2009.08.26 at 01:26
One page of TD2E left to pre-format. A good-sized chunk now need new panels and there's ten new pages to create, but hey- one page left to pre-format.
That's the "II" I've mentioned previously.
Touched c1 of Transitional Voices for the first time in Awhile tonight - knocked the Ornix Shirt Fixes down to one. One. Page, that is. Several panels of one page.
One that's been really strangely assembled, even by my standards.
So, one of each. Not counting the rewrite TV will need - as I'm all about getting the brute photoshop out of the way now, that bit can wait.
Will upload the new TV pages as soon as the last one is fixed.
Photoshop gruntwork is almost done; writing gruntwork is on deck. So much gruntwork.
As for the "three" implied in the title - huge whopping chunks of my internet have caught the lame tonight. Or this past week. Or... since Sunday. No idea how to debug and pretty sure the problem isn't on my end.
Ornix's shirt : the math.
posted 2009.07.18 at 14:26
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.
Read the rest of Ornix's shirt : the math..
Order of Operations
posted 2009.05.19 at 15:25 | 2 comments
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.
!New horizons
posted 2009.04.23 at 13:01
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.