Wednesday, September 15, 2010

... the first Chronicle

Some of you may remember this post from around this time last year. (Shocking that it's been that long...) In it I talked about the first 'story' of Contravention of Thieves. Those who have been reading the blog since then know that alot has changed since then, but among them has not been my interest in doing that project.

Some very enthusiastic reviews of COT have prompted me to dust off my ideas for COT2 and take a serious look at what I wanted to do with the project. Readers of this blog know that I was considering doing COT2 as a series of short stories. That idea has evolved, just a bit.

There's going to be three different phases of COT2. The first I am going to do, and am already doing. The second I will probably do. The third I might or might not do.

The first phase is the novellas. I have five of these planned, though I may not do all of them. Each will probably run around 100 to 200 pages long, and would be fairly stand alone, able to be read in any order, and without having read COT beforehand. While two of these will be rather fanficcy and delve head-first into Thief-Universe canon, three of them will be Thief-light, bearing little to no connection to the Thief games, though closely related to COT and even CoSaS. I am even considering doing with these what I decided not to do for COT - create additional versions of all five with no copyrighted Thief material in them at all, (replacing names of things, etc.) making them each stand alone, publishable novels.

The second phase will be the short stories that act as direct sequels to COT. In fact, fans of COT could probably even skip the novellas completely and just treat these as COT's sequel.

The third phase, which is still sketchy, would be a project more like COT itself. I could possibly write a short novel linking together the plots of the novellas and the short stories, laying the ground work for the probably-never-to-be-written COT3 which I nonetheless have fun thinking about.

Or none of this could happen! (Only it already has begun... I'm 50 pages into the first of the novellas now...)

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

... a lighter look

It took a few days to grow on me, but I think I like the current design alot better than the last. The last was just too... dark and busy? I think that's what was wrong.

(I'm working on COT2.)

Sunday, September 5, 2010

... 22 weeks later, complete

Twenty four chapters, twenty two weeks. That's a rap (wrap?) on the online edition of COT-R.

It's great to have it all online finally, but I won't feel super-great until I've heard from some readers who have actually finished the whole thing. I know at least two are at chapters 19 or 20 or so, but I imagine most aren't nearly that far. I have one new reader who has been devouring the novel at two to four chapters a day (she started less than a week ago) so I have a feeling she'll be the first to make it to the end. (Maybe I can even talk her into writing a little review of it! Ooo.)

I want to give big news on the print version, but all I have are excuses. I want the fellow who is doing the fancy format job to get a chance to finish, but he's not the type that has a ton of free time. Lists of errors continue to flow in, so even after I have everything nice and formatted there's still going to be some time/work to see all of those edits done. Only two of the six covers are totally finished, with a third very nearly done and a forth started. So, as you can see, it's still going to be some time. It will happen, though.