Today's release hits on both generations. First, from the Gen 1 timeline; Morpheus continues with Part 3 of his piece "Round and Round" ... and jumping back in time, MageOhki brings us Chapters 1 and 2 of his piece "Rises the Sun" ... which gives us some insight into one of the more enigmatic of the Gen 2 characters. 

Enjoy!

Work has been keeping me busy, between running performances of Shakespeare's Tempest and designing and getting ready for a production of Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie. But even with all that going on, I managed to get a little reorganizing done here this week. Some of you may already have noticed that instead of a single 'Latest Release' category in the right hand sidebar, there is now three separate blocks: one for Canon Main Timeline, one for Second Gen, and a third for Non-canon/Library stories. These are in addition to the WhatIF stories recently released, which are visible in the block in the left sidebar.

Please remember that these sidebars are not the only way you can access the stories. You can also get to them by going up to the Main Menu in the upper right corner of the site and clicking on the button for STORIES. By default, this puts a 'blog style' collection of the most recent Original Timeline stories on the screen for you to look at... but more importantly: Once you've so, the submenu that is located at the top of the center section of the site will include buttons for each of the main categories of stories: Orig Timeline, Second Gen, WhatIF, Featured WhatIF, Library, and a page showing some published (available for purchase) works by the authors. Selecting any of those sub-sections, will bring up a sorted table listing of all the stories in that category. The default sort is 'most recently released at the top'... you can click on the column headers to change sorting methods. There's also a text box at the top that lets you filter out anything that isn't by a specific author. If you want to see the stories in the order that they were released, for example, you would just click on the header for the Published Date column. 

Just a warning note. There are a LOT of stories in the original timeline list. If you try to list them ALL on one page... there is a good chance that Joomla will error out in the process of trying to build a page/table that large and you won't be able to view that category list again until you clear the row count cookie from your browser's memory. Stick to the 100 row maximum and paginate through several pages of 100 stories.

Now for today's releases: we have two stories for you today. The first of these continues the arrival of a couple of Morpheus' girls at the Whateley Academy, for the Fall of 2007. This is Part 2 of "A Little R & R" featuring Ribbon and Roulette. Also, we have another piece from JG. "Blood Sister, Blood Brother" continues the integration of the Outcasts into the current plot arc/progression. Enjoy... and don't forget to drop into the forums and thank these authors for their great work!

As some of you may have heard in the forums last week, the author team has taken a look at the current two story release per week set up. We have found that it just isn't working the way we hoped and have discussed some options on a release schedule going forward that will better enable us to balance both sustainability and allow for greater activity on site. For some reason, the authors thought it would be wise to let you all know the news as soon as possible... transparency and all that... but they didn't really go into all the details. So, going forward for the moment, we will no longer be doing a "two story Monday" release system. I know this is disappointing to many of you, but the truth is; the pace isn't really fair to the authors.

So... for today, the March 13 release will be Part 3 of Elrod's Kayda 10: "There's No Place Like Poe" and from E. E. Nalley, we have Part 2 of "The Bear, the Bitch, and Everything." We hope you will enjoy these... wait... what?

Oh... I see. We said that we were discontinuing the Two story Monday release schedule and then promptly release two stories on a Monday. Well, I suppose I'll explain where the confusion lies, there. See, we've discovered that the authors are generally producing stories at a rate where even with two releases per week; we are accumulating a larger and larger queue of pieces waiting for release. Even at two stories per week, our current 'waiting' pile is at about FIFTEEN weeks. That means a story completed next week might not get seen by readers until JULY! So... completely unfair to the authors who await feedback before moving on to bigger and better things.

As a result, moving forward we are adopting a system of THREE stories released per week. Two of these will continue to occur on Monday evening. A third story will be made available each Friday afternoon. I'm going to tentatively say at 14:00 PST. That'll give you four days to read the Monday content and a weekend to finish up and check out the Friday release. If we continue to average out with 20k word releases, this should result in 50-75% of a novel's worth of content per week... 1-2 novels per month.

We hope this exciting news comes as a salve to sooth your disappointment that we are dropping the Two Story Monday release schedule and replacing it with a more sustainable one. In the meantime, enjoy the content from Elrod and E.E. ... we'll see you back on Friday for the next release! Don't forget to leave a comment or a forums post for your authors, thanking them for all the hard work.

I've spent the last couple weeks preparing, recording, and repeating sound effects for a production of "The Tempest" that has turned out to be quite lovely. If you happen to be in or near Sacramento, I'd really recommend checking it out; it's one of (if not 'the') best bit of work on Shakespeare that we've done in the eleven years I've been here. That's mostly due to a very bright and savvy young director who came to us from New York: smart, insightful, and good to work with.

My next project (while I run eight performances per week of this one through the end of March), is to design some sound for a production of Tennessee Williams' "Glass Menagerie" which is being directed by another young, savvy director who we've managed to attract recently. We've also got some really great people lined up in the cast for it. While it's bound to be a great production, it is a pretty commonly done piece, though, so there are some down sides.

We'll solve that by closing out the spring with our world premiere piece "The Donner Party" which is, yes, based on the pioneer (Oregan Trail style) trip of the Donner Party that resulted in the majority of the group being trapped in the passes in northern California and whose only surviving members did so by consuming the flesh of the dead members of the party. And no... its not a parody/comedy. Much of the music is actually quite operatic, or reminscent of period protestant church music with simple but beautiful multi-part choruses, highlighting the struggle and sacrifice.

This advertisement has been paid for and... :P

So. What's going on here at the site? JG is still rocking the place, working like a madman. E.E. and Elrod are taking up the challenge, trying to avoid being out produced. Morpheus is sharing a pile of things he's had ready for a while, that were waiting for the universe timeline to catch up to him.

What are you getting for today? Well, the first of the things is going to be JG's catch up piece on Murphy. This one is called "Murphy's Laws of Whateley" ... the second piece for today's content release is part 1 of E.E. Nalley's "The Bear, the Bitch, and Everything."  These are both in the Gen 1 timeline/collection. 

Today has actually been fairly relaxed, despite the news title. Dan's put together a story release plan that (assuming all the things meet deadlines), has us scheduled out through the beginning of April. That leaves me the simpler task of doing last stage format cleanup and writing the news update for the front page. With the schedule in place, we also have a number of weeks where we're going to be giving you all more than one story a week again, not unlike last spring. We may have to pull back again after that, but with the added active authors and enthusiasm behind the scenes; we may be able to do more two story releases than singles moving forward. 

However, forum use is still a little down.. and there's a potential for reduced site registration/login now that browsers have started to post whether sites are 'secure/unsecured'... please note that the site is just as secure as it has been all along. We've never used https... and five years ago, about the only sites that did were sites that took credit cards or were banks/shopping sites. But the times are changing, there is a push for more security/encryption online, so the browsers are now showing which is which. Warren and I have been researching things and may have found a way to adapt without costing us a couple hundred dollars per year on certificates... its going to take a little time and I have no intention of making quick changes that will hurt us. Just be aware that OUR site security doesn't mean your private data is at risk. Public posts in the forum are public posts... the only 'private' or secure information you provide is your login name and password. So any data loss on our part would really only be about access control to the site. 

That mentioned, I'll get to today's story releases:

For the Gen 1 timeline, today, we have a much anticipated arrival of one of our second year students from Morpheus: in "Round and Round" Part 1.

From the Gen 2 timeline, we've been joking around about Nebraska in the forums for ... ages. Here's the real scoop there... or, rather, its beginning: from Nagrij - "Hunger"

Enjoy!