Somehow it seems appropriate to me that there has been an up-tick in readership over the past week as I've come to the end of part one and move into part two.
Hello to you if you are new! You won't actually be noticing the change really if you are new, so perhaps I should just keep my mouth shut!
Before I move into the change, I just want to take a moment to send out a thank you. There are a small handful of you that have taken my "You are the Editor" premise to heart. Thank you all, but I want to specifically single out a gentleman I went to high-school with, Andy Binning. I have always thought of Andy as a smart and kind soul, and his input into Necropolis continues to reflect that image. He has provided me we a lot of feedback. I took almost all of his typographical input. His more subjective input I have taken in pieces. Sentences that he had trouble parsing being the primary example. He had some broader thoughts which have yet to be evidenced in the book, but many of them are still banging away in my head, influencing me in subtle ways. Thanks to you, Andy. Thanks to everyone who has pointed out any errors. And thanks to everyone - it is still a fairly small number - who are reading along.
Now... what is changing?
Well it's pretty minor, actually. You can expect installments to come a little further apart for a few months.
There! That's it!
You may know this already as many of you are friends and acquaintances. I am a film-maker. I've spent most of the last five years working on my first feature film. We shot it in the summer of 2007; we screened it for cast and crew in January of 2010; that summer we had some cool experiences winning a few awards at a number of festivals (which technically is still going on - this very weekend it is screening in Tel Aviv!); and then everything came to a crashing halt. I won't bore you with a break down of our breakdown, but it went on for months - just sitting in the doldrums between festival release and distribution.
Then, one day back in late February we got an email from our sales agent. Super Channel wanted our film - we had five weeks to get it to them. No problem, our film was done, right? Well, no. I'm skipping a lot here, but suffice to say that there was a mountain of legal work that needed to be done to satisfy the insurance company that was providing our E&O (Errors and Omissions) insurance. If we weren't first timers on a very limited budget there could have been a lot we could have done to simplify the process and avoid hassles - ones we had basically created with our own ignorance. It was a mind-boggling recursive process that was nothing less than Kafkaesque. Indeed, on St. Patrick's Day morning I didn't want to face the day (for the first time in my life) as I was virtually certain we were done and that the film would never see the light of day. Remarkably, by that afternoon the clouds had cleared and we equally virtually certain that we would see our film on television. Long story short, there was a week or so of intense (but not so challenging) technical stuff to work out and we were done. On April 6th of this year I officially became a broadcast film-maker. If you are in Canada you can see the film on Super Channel - their license continues 'til October of 2012, so in theory you can see it until then. We are currently in pretty high rotation.
Following all of this, we have jumped into DVD preparations - not two days ago I was in Victoria recording a very cool audio commentary with our star, David Nykl; our science advisor, Stan Orchard; and the editor of Junior Skeptic Magazine, Daniel Loxton. We are also working on a small theatrical tour of the film. In other words, I am STILL very busy.
Before the proverbial shit hit the fan I was well ahead on Necropolis. I had chapters and chapters "in the bank" ready to post. Well, that buffer is getting eaten up at a voracious pace, and I don't see where I'm going to have enough time to keep ahead if I don't space out installments a bit. Most installments have been (not counting various authors notes and other communications) four days apart up until now. From now until at least the end of June I am going to extend that by 50% to six days. The way I see it, either I do that or I risk having a BIG window of no posts when I "catch up" to my current writing and have no time to build upon what already exists.
Additionally, I think having a buffer of written but yet to be released material actually improves the writing. It gives me more opportunity to go back and make changes which don't confuse the reader - and thus far it seems that the things I most need to change are those that fall into the buffer of "written but yet to be released material."
So, I believe that this is for the best. I will endeavour to pick up the pace again as soon as possible. I am still writting new material, I just don't get to write as much as regularly as I would like right now.
Meantime, if you get a chance, either check out The Beast of Bottomless Lake on Super Channel, or pre-order a DVD!
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