User blog:Gideoncrawle/One Year on the Wiki

Random Quote
''“Are you telling me this guy belonged to a video club, and he needed a card so they’d recognize him? He’s got six eyes and three noses. If it were me, I’d remember him.”''
 * --from the British sci-fi comedy, Red Dwarf, episode “D.N.A.”

What a Year!
One year ago today, I became a registered user on this wiki. After setting up my user page (in a much simpler format than what you see now), I posted the first two chapters of a short story I called Legacy. The wiki would never be the same.

As I mentioned on my very first blog post, writing original stories wasn’t even on my radar when I first became aware of this wiki back in January 2009. I had planned to become a registered user for one reason and one reason alone: because it was a convenient place to post my mammoth crossover, Total Drama Island, by Gilbert and Sullivan (TDI-G&S). All that changed when I got an idea that became the premise for Legacy. Working on the bus as I commuted to and from my job, I wrote Legacy in about two weeks—about 60 percent of it in just the first three days—and the rest, as they say, is history.

That wasn’t the only way my wiki experience turned out very differently from what I had originally envisioned. I knew that TDI was (allegedly) a kid’s show, of course, but I also knew that it drew a lot of older viewers, so I was expecting to find more young adults here. As it turned out, though, Sprinklemist was, and as far as I know, remains, the wiki’s only other adult past college age. (The wiki does have a handful of college kids, or at least college-age.) Curious thing, though: not only do a lot of the kids on this site write pretty well, but I have also found that I don’t have much trouble relating to them, in spite of (or possibly because of) the fact that I have no children of my own.

Furthermore, I am both surprised and gratified at how many of the younger users here actually understand TDI-G&S. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised—kids who write fanfiction might be presumed to be a precocious lot, after all—but my real target audience with TDI-G&S was TDI’s peripheral demographic: older teens, young adults, and parents.

For these reasons, combined with the fact that I’ve never seen photos of most of wiki’s users, I find it easy to lose sight of just how young some of my “wiki family” really are. I sometimes have to remind myself that many of my cyberfriends are only 13-15 years old (about the same as my niece, who turned 14 in October).

Speaking of my niece, you guys have no idea how much you owe her. It was for her that I first started writing TDI-G&S shortly after TDDDDI aired in the States. I thought it would be a good way to introduce her to the G&S operas, because she’s a big TDI fan. (For logistical reasons including a messy custody battle and a mother in questionable mental health, she hasn’t seen TDA or TDWT yet.) As for the operas, she was (and probably still is) too young to understand Gilbert’s satire, but she’s old enough to understand that some parts of the operas are funny.

(My niece, incidentally, has also tried her hand at writing fiction, albeit not fanfiction. When she was 12 years old, she started work on a story about a pack of wolves in the Arctic. It was a pretty decent story, although she tended to use too many adjectives. Sadly, the unfinished story was lost due to inadequate backup procedures.)

As I have noted elsewhere, I originally intended to distribute TDI-G&S only to a few friends and relatives; but as the project grew and grew, I increasingly felt the need to share it more widely. So here I am.

Legacy: The Little Story That Could
When I posted Legacy to the wiki over a three-week span in February 2010, I expected that most people would regard it as a good story. What I did not expect, though, was that it would, in just a few months, become widely viewed as one of the wiki’s greatest works. Here are some of the comments I got, mostly on my talk page or on the Featured Story ballots (as opposed to the story’s talk page):

“There's a sense of elegance to it that one day I hope to achieve with my own writing"
 * --Fadingsilverstar16, author of Life After Lies

“amazingly described”
 * --Tdiandrockmusic2, author of Violet Hill

“an incredible writing style”
 * --DJ Spenstar, author of Total Drama Infinity

“Very realistic”
 * --Goldenshane, author of Total Drama: The Production

“What’s not to love about this?”
 * --Reddude, in naming Legacy the wiki’s best story of 2010

“[''I]f Total Drama Island wasn't copyrighted, you would be able to publish Legacy”
 * --UltimateTORINOR, author of Total Drama the New Challenge

“the best fanfic I've ever read”
 * --TDALindsayfan1

“one of the best stories I've ever read, including actual novels”
 * --Sunshineandravioli, co-author of Total Wikia Elementary

Legacy’s not perfect, mind you. I’ve always felt that the ending is a little weak (hence the now-abandoned sixth chapter that is the subject of a companion post to the one you’re reading now) although I’m proud of it otherwise.

Legacy put me on the map in this community, but it did not do so immediately. For several weeks, my story struggled to find an audience. This was no surprise, of course, because I was brand new to the wiki and so was almost totally unknown.

TDIRM was the first to notice me. When I posted Legacy’s first two chapters during my first day as a registered user, he happened to spot it on the Activity Feed. He read what was available of the story, and initiated the talk page with a glowing comment. To this day, TDIRM plugs Legacy to new and returning users.

To promote Legacy, I put it on the Featured Story ballot. I won’t go into a detailed chronology here, having previously done so elsewhere; but long story short, Legacy became the June 2010 Featured Story on its third try, after nearly beating out three nearly-finished and just-finished competition stories the month before. At the time, it was the shortest story (barely 10,000 words) ever to be Featured, and I like to think that it paved the way for TDIRM’s flawed but well-loved vignette, Violet Hill, to finally be Featured three months later, after almost a year on the ballot.

Not only did Legacy become widely regarded as one of the wiki’s best noncompetition stories, it was also one of the most influential. (“Seminal” is the word, for those of you who didn’t know.) It led several readers to ask me for tips on writing style, and that in turn led to a series of Writer’s Workshops, of which my Workshop on writing style and Sprink’s Workshop on character creation and development were the most successful.

And now, a word from our Sponsor
Since TDIRM likes to plug my story, I’ll return the favor. He has recently started a crossover story called Winds of Change (WoC), a “TDI Never Happened” story which puts several TD characters into the setting of the flight simulator game, Ace Combat 4: Shattered Skies. He only has the first two chapters posted as I write, but he’s off to a very promising start. His writing technique has come along tremendously in the 18 months since he wrote Violet Hill. If you haven’t yet checked out WoC, you owe it to yourself to do so.

Not Just a One-hit Wonder
After two months of prep work, I officially shed the “one hit wonder” tag in June, when I started posting episode chapters for TDI-G&S, a gargantuan project that was a year and a half in the making. While it didn’t take the wiki by storm the way Legacy did—I’m not sure that anything else I write here ever could, given Legacy’s “first mover” advantage—it appears to have enough readers and enough traffic to be considered popular. I still have high hopes for TDI-G&S to be a Featured Story one of these days, although for now it appears to have settled into a “perpetual bridesmaid” role. If I could just get everyone who’s supported it in the past to support it in the same month, it could probably win.

Although I don’t get a lot of story ideas, they do come occasionally. I believe this has come of spending so much time on TDI-G&S, as that project obliged me to think about TDI far more than I otherwise would have, and to do so for an extended period. Fleshing out those story ideas perforce keeps me thinking about TD, so the process feeds on itself.

This “virtuous circle” bore fruit last summer with my second short story, Courtney and the Violin of Despair. Like TDI-G&S, CatVoD (as it is commonly known) didn’t take the wiki by storm, but it does appear to have become popular, and it too gets enough support on the Featured Story ballot to justify renominating it every month. As with TDI-G&S, CatVoD would also have an excellent chance of winning Featured Story honors if I could just get all its supporters to vote for it in the same month.

In addition to these, I completed two vignettes (that’s Old School for “one-shots”) for the Fake Souls anthology. The first, featuring Heather was an early work of mine, written and posted during the period when I was still posting Legacy. I wrote the second, featuring Izzy, last fall. Being who I am, however, I naturally had to do something different with these. My Heather chapter added a twist that I think (and at least some readers agree) took the anthology’s premise to a new level. As for the Izzy chapter…well, how often do you see Izzy depicted as a pitiable character?

Random Video
thumb|350px|right|TDI-G&S theme song

One day, several weeks ago, when I was on YouTube looking for G&S videos to add to my LAL playlist, I encountered a video that immediately made me think of Gigi, that self-described “Disney nerd”. The video didn’t match anything on the playlist, but it did match my TDI-G&S theme song—a quartet from The Gondoliers that is essentially a G&S counterpart to “I Want To Be Famous”. Since some of you haven’t been reading TDI-G&S, I’ll show you the video here.

The Product, Or the People?
Although wikia are supposed to be about the content, rather than the community—that, indeed, was the most common argument against making Wikia look more like a social networking site—the sense of community is what has led me to spend as much time here and to rack up as many edits as I have, becoming one of this wiki’s best-known personalities in the process. It is therefore fitting and proper that I recognize some of the people who have made this site so hospitable for me.

TDIRM and Sprink, I have already mentioned. Frankly, it’s hard to do much around here without having contact with Sprinklemist, who is pretty much the face of the wiki.

If Sprink is the face of the wiki then Sunshine (or, to be more precise, her “ravioli pixie” alter ego) is the closest thing this wiki has to an official mascot. She is my favorite artist on the wiki, which is why I’ve been willing to wait 10 months for her to finish her fanart for Legacy, and her online personality reminds me a lot of my wife.

Reddy was the first to offer me status as an official Friend back when we were both little known (his wikiversary being only a couple of weeks before mine), so I reciprocated, offering him the top spot when I decided to set up a Friends list of my own. A few months later (July ballot, voted on in June) we had a remarkable Featured User battle, which will probably be remembered for some time to come by those who witnessed it. I can usually count on Reddy to support my stories on the Featured Story ballot. (Granted, he tends to cast his support widely, and so tends not to affect the balance of power, but still…)

Shane was another early supporter of my work. His comments about Legacy on the Featured Story voting page were invaluable publicity when that story and its little-known author were still struggling to find an audience. In recent months, our paths haven’t crossed as much as we might like, but he’s made it pretty clear that he doesn’t see me as a one-hit wonder. (And, one of these days, I will read TDTP. So far, I’ve only been able to read a couple of chapters.)

In my early days on the wiki, my two closest cyberfriends, in terms of correspondence volume, were Gigi and Spenny, Sadly, Spenny is largely whereabouts unknown these days; and Gigi, whom I have come to love like a daughter, is likewise less active here than she used to be.

As I noted, I currently have two entries on the Featured Story ballot. Although neither has anyone who has supported them every time, both have people who have been supporting them more or less regularly. So, thanks to:

Ult, Mrdaimion, Toad, Reddy, Kevin, Shane, and TDIwriter, for their support of TDI-G&amp;S; and

Crystal, Lalainee, TeamMu, Zinc, Reddy (again), Kevin (again), and Intrudgero for their support of CatVoD.

(And, of course, apologies if I missed anyone.)

Random Poll
Does anyone else think that “Gideon Crawle” would have been a good name for Duncan’s pet spider? Yes. It would have been fitting for that crawle-y thing. No. Where do you get off slinging such horrendous puns in front of children? Yes. It may be capital pun-ishment, but I still like it.

The Year Ahead
Some of you may have noticed that I have been significantly less active on the wiki during the last few weeks than I have over most of the last year. I regret to inform you that this diminished level will probably be “the new normal” for the foreseeable future. On the brighter side, I think you’ll agree that it’s for a good cause.

Long story short, I need to find more time to work on my competition story. To date, I have been writing The Legend of Total Drama Island mostly during my bus commutes to and from my job, and on my lunch breaks. My commute is long, but it includes a transfer, so I can only write for about 20 minutes at a time, 3 or 4 times a day. This isn’t terribly efficient, since I have to recover my creative train of thought each time, although I make enough progress to justify the effort (typically about 1,000 words every 2 or 3 days).

At the rate I’m going, I’ll only have about 100k words (“only”, he says—that would be the wiki’s third-longest story page right there) by the end of June, and it’s now looking like the finished story will be at least twice that. This means that, if I want to launch LTDI before my next wikiversary, I’m going to have to find other times to work on it. As it is, I’ve had to move my target launch window back from late spring (which I always knew was ambitious) to late summer, and even that looks ambitious now.

(Because I have moved the launch target, I may compromise a bit on my policy of not starting to post until the story is done. I’ll have more on that with the Valentine’s Day preview.)

Unfortunately, the only additional times I’m likely to find to work on LTDI are times when I would otherwise be on the wiki. To really ramp up my progress, I’ll need to be able to work for an hour or two at a stretch. At the same time, I can’t really assign much non-wiki time to this project, because I don’t want my dear wife to become any more of a “wiki widow” than she already is.

My other big project is the Gilbert &amp; Sullivan playlist that I put together for Gigi’s seminal story, Life After Lies. Gigi and I have been very fortunate in that the last few chapters have provided a great deal of playlist fodder, due both to the length and the subject matter of said chapters. The playlist is now 3 times its original length, with over 40 songs, a total playing time comparable to feature-length movies, and more lines of verse than any of the G&S operas have. I am hoping to add even more when Gigi posts the remaining LAL chapters, although I can’t guarantee being able to do so; for the LAL-G&S playlist is an unauthorized “tribute” work, meaning that I have no inside information on LAL, so I learn of Gigi’s story plans at the same time everyone else does.

In addition to my major projects, I have a couple of ideas for one-shots that I am likely to flesh out over the next year. My third current one-shot idea, wherein the original contestants are 40 or 50 years old and still competing because Chris won’t release them from their contracts, is less likely to see the light of day (although I haven’t officially abandoned it) because I’ve cannibalized some of its ideas for other stories, most notably LTDI.

Coming Attractions
Tune in next week for my Valentine’s Day special: “hot & steamy” LTDI previews, including my take on the infamous NoCo scene.