...Interesting.

Well, it's not me (obviously). Maybe it's some, bored and benign computer guy somewhere?

Oh my god it's 4:40 I was supposed to put all these hats away.

Uggghhhhh.

Not me, no.

I would say wait a little Ruwin.
Because there's the thing with the thing that we talked about that has to do with the thing, and I'd like the thing to be in a position to come shortly after, but haven't actually done much with the thing yet. You should probably message me so we can talk more openly about the thing.

thing thing thing thing....

... thing. I'm done now.


Aside from that, I'm very close to being in a position to post my "exorbitantly large worldbuilding project 5" probably sometime next week.
And I want to take a stab at polishing some of the artifacts in the From the Vault.

Also, I know it hasn't been up for a while yet, but by Sunday I plan to put Janhapuhr up for vote, so anybody that wants to step in to comment on it has a few days to work with.

You know, I am somewhat impressed. Guardians of the Galaxy has actually managed to get meta very subtly.
There is a specific moment when Star-Lord kicks a reptilian alien's ass and says "Suck it Ninja Turtle"... and Ninja Turtles came out last week. And it suuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.

They... they dissed their competition IN the movie.

At Ruwin:
We would say to leave thine work, as large as you say it is, for at least twice as long as is thy norm.
It is, perhaps, a moot point for us, though; since we have not had the time to read anything outside of the voting forum for some time now.
Nevertheless, the size of thine work would mean coordination to keep the load of the... villains... relatively light. We see Barinellos has already given thee reason for pause.
For which, we at least, are grateful.
One thing we need to see for ourselves is what a comfortable limit on total words are for a week. We can perhaps do that relatively simply, though it might be a small while before I can give thee a figure.

Hm... I see all of your points, and I have to say this:

I THINK I'LL POST IT NOW!

Kidding. I'm kidding.

So, next week, I'm planning on starting to post my very large plane design that I've spent weeks putting together, but I'm going to be doing it in snippets, usually one entry at a time so as to not overwhelm everybody. I just wanted you guys to know, and maybe help me set up an equitable update schedule so that nobody feels like they are being inundated.

Really looking for feedback from you guys on this, because I know some of you have been feeling like our production has become a bit... daunting to deal with lately.

Ugh, I am really burned out on planes right now. I haven't managed to look at your other recently posted plane, or Tevish's planes for that matter.

I will definitely try, though, but honestly I can't promise much more than my opinion.

Actually, this one is pretty much completely self contained and totally devoid of an input need. Opinions are pretty much all I really require for it.
Well, that and the desire to create stories there.

Sounds good to me. I can give you the first one, though the second one we can just both hope for!

Is this that one we talked about? I'll definitely be tuning in for that. Curious to see how you implemented Those Things.

How long are the snippets you're posting? If they're roughly the length of the Vault entries every other day could be good.

Roughly a little larger than the original FtV per entry, but next week is likely to be a bit... heavy, so then, at least, I'm probably going to just lightly lob them in less frequently.
No getting around the size of the first one though. It's gotta be bigger than average to set things just right for everything else.

Okay, I did a few checks:
Total Wordcount for July 27: 35,014
(Roughly) Total Wordcount for Agust 10: 28,177

Don't forget that Iun Ilana, Aralheim, and Rangridsaga (together totaling 13,501 words) got ported over to August 3 due to lack of turnout. I think those are pretty high numbers, myself. I think it would be good to shoot for a rough maximum of 30K words total. Of course that means communicating wordcount somewhere. Ruwin's original Two Bullets document (which conveniently isn't broken into six parts, sits at 21,475 words.

If I'm understanding correctly, I would definitely want the new story to be alone when it goes up. I imagine the new story is already sitting close to 30K words already.

How does that sound to everyone else?

I can get behind this, although I will point out that War of the Wheel is currently just under 100k words, and I have about half of it left, and this rule would make voting for it impossible...



Of course, I think we all know that's going to need to be a special case anyway, so the point is moot.

I'm fine with an approximate 30k cap per week.

...

...

Interestingly, the final document for the next story is only 20,149 words long - less than Two Bullets, by a small margin.

And yet, it is nearly ten pages longer.

Interesting.

I wonder if I should be cutting extraneous paragraphs anywhere...

I'm alright with a word count limit. I'll try not to run it up very often. T_T

I don't have to look to tell you that this one's on me. I really like short paragraphs. Picked the habit up when I was learning to write AP style, and it stuck. I try to use graf breaks as a proxy for when the character's line of thought changes. If I hear a pause in their thinking, I tend to break to a new graf.

It's just part of my style, I'm afraid.

EDIT: For very long stories (I'm mainly thinking about WotW, but this could also apply to work on the scale of Ruwin's latest masterpiece), it seems like it might make sense to allow two weeks for voting. Or even more, possibly, in the case of WotW. I don't like stretching out voting too much, because deadlines do have an ability to focus the mind. But if people have to rush through a work in order to get their vote in, then that seems to run contrary to the purpose of voting in the first place. It seems like a longer vote is the less bad option in that case.

Yeah, it's all a personal style. I typically write mid-to-long paragraphs, myself, but it depends on what I'm trying to accomplish. Basically, I think as long as they don't get so long that they're nearly impossible to follow, it should be fine. And the converse is also true, as long as paragraphs aren't so short that there seems to be no cohesion, they work just fine, as well.

Raven, I'm curious: Do you or other instructors use "graf" as a shorthand, or is that just a copyeditor's thing?

I have heard some of my colleagues use it from time to time, although I have no idea if they do so in their classes. I've only heard it in conversation. I will use it very occasionally in casual speech, but usually I will just say "paragraph."

Re: leaving longer works up more than a week: I believe it's in the rules that leaving works up for additional time is at the discretion of either the Archivist or M:EMperor. Personally, I'd rather just put the work in the weekly pm with some sort of note about it being large and may be up for multiple weeks; it might present a bit of illusion that at any time it might be called, so that people don't get lazy and put off reading it.