It's been an interesting week. I got offhanded compliments from my boss acknowledging something I've been trying to get him to understand for seven or eight years. He hasn't quite grasped the larger ramifications yet... but he's starting to get it. "You get what you pay for." Most people tend to get that with personal consumer goods, cheap products tend to be of lower quality. They don't meet your needs exactly, the fit or taste isn't 'tailored', and they tend to decay more quickly because the materials and means of putting them together is poor. But the idea tends to extend to things on a much larger scale. You cannot expect department store microphones and sound equipment to perform like the stuff you see on Broadway... 

The principle also applies to employing people. You can't pay people unskilled labor wages (or lower, because  the jobs are offered on a contract/stipend level which somehow bypasses hourly minimums)... and expect to get their best effort. Especially some of the skill sets involved in theatre, where you have to be both a craftsman or engineer and a creative/artist at the same time. 

Of course... offhand compliments don't mean I'm going to get a raise or anything... that would be too much to expect *sighs*

Over on this little web presence called The Crystal Hall?

Well... this week, it looks like we're got a couple shorter pieces for you. From Light-of-Fury, we've got a Gen 1 canon piece called "Learning to Hunt." and from Morpheus, Part 2 of his introduction backstory for Bianca "Written in Blood."

Next week (sorry bookies)... we'll wrap up the first of the two Gen 2 intro stories (New York Comes with Calimari) with Part 3. So a re-read of parts 1 and 2 over the weekend to jump right into the conclusion on Monday might be warranted for those who didn't like the parts handled separately. As we then move forward with Gen 2, we might treat some of the remaining parts of Road to Whateley (which is technically core story 1.2, Calimari being 1.1) as noodle incidents until E. E. and Bek have a chance to finish it.

Spring already. Time flies when you're having fun. It also flies when you have mutant devisors and gadgeteers building clocks with gravitic propulsion systems to measure the effects of relativity and the flow of time at various fractions of c. But that, I suppose, is beside the point.

For tonight's release, we've got the final bit of Morpheus' "A Glow in the Darkness" (Part 3) and from our Gen 2 authors, we're going to give you a little insight into the backstory of another of the characters introduced in Calimari. That's Nagrij's character, in "Down the Rabbit Hole."

And if that isn't enough, I'll be adding a couple fan fiction pieces to the published section tonight... although a few pieces that have been submitted are going to get bounced back to their authors for another rework, a few of them are ready to go and I've finally had some time to get to them. Be sure to check out the Fan Fiction section for all the newest releases (I'll append a list of them to the front page news later).

Kristin

And here are those Fan Fic pieces. I'm sure that some of you have spent some time reading WU fan fic in the forums or on another site... it is my hope that as we move forward that more of the fan fiction authors will look into getting their completed pieces archived here alongside the other published work. We'll continue to provide a forums area for in progress works and experiments into writing origins or power gimmicks, but as more finished stories are developed... stories that are Whateley stories in everything but their canon status; I think this section will grow rapidly. And from it, I hope to find and recruit more of the good authors hiding in our community to participate in canon story development.

For now, you can find the latest Fan fiction over here in the story section. Today's releases, if you haven't gone looking for them in the past, are:

Phoenix-Spiritus - "So Shalt Thou Show Me Friendship" - A near-canon piece with Hank and Lily.

Pioneer - "Two Become One" (Part 1) - A more divergent origin story using the WU as its setting.

and three pieces from Domoviye - "Never" "How Far" and "A Light in the Dark" - Three separate near-canon origin stories.

Enjoy!

This week, we've got two more really great pieces for you:

From the Original Timeline, we wrap up the end of school year piece from Elrod "Odds and Ends" with Part 3. Did you solve the mystery before Whateley security did?

And from the the G2 timeline, we're going to take a moment in our Road to Whateley trip to flashback to just a few months earlier... before AJ spent time with his mother at Karedonia... with "The Curse of the Dragon Queen"

Not much to report this week. A few tweaks here and there on the site as I have time to clean up how things work... mostly streamlining while I try to think of work arounds for more complicated bits and pieces. 

From the story side of things: I've got a new story and character from Morpheus to share with everyone. Also, coming up in the next month or so, We'll wrap up Odds and Ends (and with that, close out the first year of school in the original timeline). I've got a piece introducing my Fall 2007 freshman character, Esoteric... and Morpheus has been waiting eagerly to sweep in and fill most of the cottage himself.  I understand we also have a couple summer break stories in progress. Some of the titles I've seen people mention progress on include "Boys of Summer" and "I Don't Think We're in Kansas Anymore."  

On the Gen 2 side of things, E.E. and Bek are working to get the next part of Road to Whateley out the door to you... which will let us release the last part of Calamari and move on to the 'third' story in our Gen2 plotline, where we reintroduce you to Whateley Academy. Then we might release a few Gen 2 origin stories. There's Bek's origin for A.J. "The Curse of the Dragon Queen", and Morpheus has Bianca's backstory "Written in Blood" ready; and there's Tia's story from Nagrij tentatively called "Down the Rabbit's Hole"...  Of course, we probably won't get through ALL of those before we move on to story four of the main plotline, which will be from my character Shieldwall's pov... called "Good Cop / Bad Cop."

While a lot of this isn't done 'right now'... most of it is getting close and the only reason I'm not releasing things faster is that there are a few linchpin pieces that we want to release 'in order' that are going to act a lot like the latches on the overhead storage compartments on airplanes when we finally do get them up. I think it's safe to say that 'most' of the rest of the year should be very positive in quantity of stories released... especially if I can get the fan fic team moving forward (not that THEY are dragging their feet, it's mostly ME that's the bottleneck in that system right now... and I want to solve that problem).

Some of you might have noticed or caught the forums post announcements about some changes that I finally got around to making. I've tweaked how some story submission things happen, which doesn't really impact most of the visitors to the site but it DOES cut down on the number of things that bottleneck at my approval. It means both fan fiction and canon authors can start projects without me being online and ready to change some settings on their newly submitted story before they can do any editing or have their peers look at the story for feedback. That'll help the behind the scenes process lots.

I've re-arranged some of the menu and sidebar positions a little. The Login panel is now upper left and is there all the time, it SHOULD also now include a note that you have mail if you get a Private Message. 

Over on the right hand sidebar, you might have noticed that I added a little Sudoku panel. It interferes with some of the features in the forums, so I turned it off there... but if you're just killing time... now you can play Sudoku while waiting for the story deadline to happen.

I'm planning a few more fixes to the menu bars. I'd like to get everything organized in a way that doesn't need a drop down (like the one under Content) and I'd also like to get the User menu out of the left sidebar. It doesn't have much in it if you aren't an author or admin, anyway. So as soon as I figure out how to get the menu modules to do what I want them to, you can expect those to streamline some.

And, of course, continued thanks to Phoenix-Spiritus and Valentine and other fan fiction authors who have helped out with the migration of the story collection/archive to the new site. I think we might have passed 3/4 or even 4/5 transferred in the past couple days... and the list of remaining items to migrate gets visibly smaller almost every day. Please be sure to thank them for their help, I do what I can, but if these folks hadn't helped, we'd still be months away from being finished.

Finally... the main reason people show up for these Front Page News posts... today's story release. We're going to go with the continuation of Elrod's Combat Finale based mystery and the hunt for the gambling leak. That'll move us closer to the official end of the Spring semester and the arrival of a new class of freshman. So here is "Odds and Ends (Part 2)" ... if you are looking for Part 1, you can find it along with Part 2 in the Content->Canon Stories category list.