CURIOUS TALE SATURDAYS: ARCHIVE

The Great Galavar

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Other Updates

Saturday, Oct. 10, 2015

This week it was all about The Great Galavar. I spent a huge amount of time on it—most of my waking time, from Monday onwards.

Monday and Tuesday I spent making formatting improvements to the website and getting the initial look and feel of the Great Galavar pages to my taste. Given that the site layout was already essentially complete, this took a surprising amount of work! It was mostly little details that a non-artistic person wouldn't care about, too. Heh!

Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday I spent most of the day transcribing each and every one of the 43 Season 1 installments from my journal. In fact, as of final editing on Curious Tale Saturdays this evening, I'm still transcribing Great Galavar episodes. Most of them are already up on the site, although there are no links yet because none of the landing pages have been prepared.

We're talking eight-hour days, five of them, to get me to this point. The amount of time this took was huge and far out of proportion from what I thought it would take. I never properly accounted for it ahead of time, either. My intention this week was to prepare a synopsis of Season 1 of The Great Galavar, gather a list of glossary terms from throughout the 43 episodes for eventual placement in The Relance Project, and work on the new revamp ahead of next weekend's first episode from Season 2. At no point did I say to myself, "Hrm, I'm going to need to spend a whole friggin' week just doing website formatting and episode transcription."

(This bodes ill for the Curious Tale Saturday transcriptions, of which there are far more than 43. That project will inevitably take a long time.)

There's an old saying I just made up, about timetables being a bureaucrat's way of guaranteeing the wrong completion date. I'm sure it doesn't come through in these written words, but I find it quite amusing that I spent the entire week—without any slacking, even—working on The Great Galavar, and somehow still failed to get to the point of even beginning my intended week's work on the same.

Yes indeed, since I'm still working on the transcriptions, I never got around to all of that other stuff. I had no time for extracting glossary terms. The revamp is sitting right where I left it, untouched for the last several weeks. And although I could do a last-minute rush job to get the synopsis ready on-time for its previously scheduled publication tomorrow, I'm simply going to push it back a week. (More on that in a moment.)

Indeed, I spent so much time on The Great Galavar this week that I figured I should give it today's Curious Tale Saturday slot, instead of a previously piece about Silence's sword forms. That's because the News page isn't fully operational yet and there's really no better place at the moment than Curious Tale Saturdays to give you these kinds of details.

In light of my exertions this week on The Great Galavar, I've made an adjustment to the upcoming publishing schedule. Because I want the whole Great Galavar section of the website to be fully operational when the first Season 2 episodes start rolling off the press, I'm going to delay the next episode by two more weeks, to October 25. In the meantime, next week I'll put the rest of the Great Galavar section together, and I'll devote the following week to completing my revamp.

Thus, next Sunday, I'll bring the whole Great Galavar section fully online—including the Season 1 episodes, for those of you who want to spend a week rereading the story to get ready for Season 2. The Synopsis, Cast, and About pages will also be complete.

The Bigger Picture

After I'm caught up on The Great Galavar, two weeks from now, Mate of Song will go back into active production. Ironically it'll be just in time for NaNoWriMo, and to the fullest extent possible I want to spend the rest of the year working primarily on the adventures of Afiach Bard and her horse Spinach.

My other plans for CuriousTale.org are mostly on schedule. I lost about three weeks due to sickness, my sister's visit, and my move to California, and an additional week to this unforeseen formatting and transcription work, but at least with that work now I'm back in full swing.

The e-book version of the Prelude will be out at the end of this month. And as you've seen, Wiki Weekends is already underway as planned. Missing so far is Community Service. This past Friday was supposed to be its debut, but I wanted to spend a lot of time on it and The Great Galavar ate up my whole week, so instead it'll debut on October 23. (Remember, Wiki Weekends and Community Service are biweekly.)

At the moment, the major unknown is whether, and to what extent, I'll need to take time away from The Curious Tale to make money. This six-month sojourn of mine is explicitly intended (in part) to make me enough money to buy a car, and that's a tall order. Ideally I would be able to get enough patrons over at Patreon to work on the world of Relance full-time, but realistically I'm not going to achieve that in six months. Thus I've already put out feelers for my regular freelancing services and will devote as much time to them as clients are willing to buy from me.