User blog:Gideoncrawle/4th Wikiversary: End of an Era

The Big Announcement
Last month, when I posted my (belated) 10,000th Edit blog (which, judging by the number of comments, most people either didn’t see or didn’t care about) I mentioned an impending life change. That change has since come to pass, so I can now tell you about it.

Last week, at the age of 54, I officially semi-retired from the workforce.

What this means is that I’ve gone permanently part-time. I still have the same job with the same company as before, but my work week has dropped from five days to only three—and the main reason I’m working that much is because I need 20 hours/week to keep my benefits, most notably my employer-subsidized health insurance. (If I didn’t still need that subsidy, I could just about afford to retire completely.) The 40% hit to my wages won’t cramp our style because our savings rate was higher than that.

So what am I going to do with all that extra free time? I have several plans for it, some of which will affect how I interact with the wiki. Most importantly, my two main hobbies, sports photography and fanfic-related activities, won’t have to compete for my time nearly as much as in the past. It will probably be several weeks before you wikizens see much difference, though, because it’s crunch time for my photo work related to the high school basketball season. Not only that, but for the next two weeks we’ve got that huge time sink called the Olympic Games. (For the record, my favorite events are downhill, ski jumping and biathlon.)

Once all that’s out of the way, though, I intend to start reading other people’s stories again! *cue collective gasp* I will be catching up on stories that I used to read, checking out some new stories, and even starting some related projects such as the long-promised grammar sweep of Rhonda’s main story.

Story Updates
Naturally, I’ll be using some of my new-found free time to work on my own projects. Although I have (mostly) kept to my bimonthly posting schedule for The Legend of Total Drama Island, it was never my intention to continue that slow schedule until the last chapter is posted. Rather, the plan was to update bimonthly only until I finish writing it, and then to ramp up the update schedule to biweekly or even weekly for whatever chapters remain at that point.

Over the last year, my progress has been very disappointing. The master plan requires that in any given cycle I write not only the next chapter but also some scenes from future chapters. Among other advantages, writing scenes for later chapters as inspiration comes to me is what allows me to write a scene that appears in Episode 17 and then foreshadow it as “another story for another time” in Episode 5, for example.

The relative lack of progress is due in part to story-related projects on other sites:


 * 1) Last April, I began porting my stories to fanfiction.net. As part of that process, I’ve been rereading and revising each chapter before posting it, since fanfiction.net’s support for on-site editing is halfhearted at best. (You pretty much have to repost the whole chapter.) I’ve made quite a few revisions, which will eventually be posted here on the wiki as well. (These changes are mostly minor things like changing wording and fixing punctuation.) The problem for my writing progress is that I’m a very slow reader, and perforce an even slower proofreader, so the revision process is very time-consuming. I ported Tenth Night earlier today; and with the current monthly update schedule, the ported version should catch up to the wiki version this summer.
 * 2) About a year ago, I set up pages for my stories on TV Tropes. This was roughly a six-month project. A great deal of work related to LTDI remains because the works page is only half of the job. Troping your story and setting up a page for it is all very well, but if you want people on that site to know that your page exists, then you have to crosswick it by adding the examples from your story to the relevant trope pages. The works pages for Legacy, CatVoD and TDI-G&S are fully crosswicked, but LTDI’s page has around 400 trope examples and “only” about 90 crosswicks, Putting in a single crosswick is simple enough, but so many takes time. LTDI’s tropes list is also about three chapters behind, since I haven’t added to it significantly in several months. I expect to get this project up to date in the next few months.

In addition to getting my LTDI writing back up to speed, I’m also planning to revisit the compilation that led me to join the wiki in the first place, Total Drama Island, by Gilbert and Sullivan. Although TDI-G&S’ main page has been officially finished for years, I never got round to finishing the supplemental work on the character pages.

In addition to the huge number of verses that fit specific incidents in TDI, there are also many verses that fit characters for their natures rather than for specific events. The Guide to Incidents won’t lead readers to these verses, and I’m fully aware that most readers probably don’t read through all of the verses from beginning to end, so the character pages are a logical place to put these “personality/nature” verses. This work is mainly copy/paste, but it will be a truckload of copy/paste.

I’m also planning to enhance the main TDI-G&S page by inserting more screenshots and video links. I originally limited the number of these enhancements to keep the load time down; but some time ago Wikia tweaked the embedding code so that image files and video links don’t have nearly as much effect on load times as before, so I can safely give the page more multimedia enhancement.

LTDI Teaser
As matters stand now, I expect to be able to post the Fifteenth Night chapter as scheduled on 1 March. This chapter will cover portions of Episodes 9 (paintball deer hunt) and 10 (cooking challenge). The cooking challenge episode will include two noteworthy events: the first actual appearance of the fabled giant lampreys, and the arrival on the island of a new intern named Dawn.

Dawn’s role will be a good deal more important than I originally envisioned for her. When I first decided to include our favorite moonchild, the plan was for her to appear in only two episodes, the first being episode 13 (the extreme sports challenge). She was originally to have one fairly big scene and a couple of smaller ones, and I wasn’t sure whether she would ever be identified by name. Now, though, she will appear in at least four episodes and will have a major scene comparable to Alejandro’s scene with Beth during the cliff diving challenge.

Should Dawn be able to see Sunshine? Yes No

LTDI Art Request
Finally, I have a request for all you artistes out there, since I have no artistic talent myself. I would dearly love for the LTDI page to have good pictures of the post-makeover Lindsay, Katie and Sadie. Those of you who have read as far as Eighth Night know that these three give each other makeovers and keep their new looks for the rest of the summer. The story describes Lindsay’s new look in a fair amount of detail, but describes Katie and Sadie only has having “matching big hair and sundresses”, with better makeup, and “looking five years older than they had the day before”. Lindsay’s new look is described thusly:


 * [The accident] had left Lindsay with enough undamaged hair for a short, feathered cut. That hair was now dyed a rich nut brown, a little darker than Courtney’s, with a touch of auburn in the highlights. The shorter style seemed merely to invite more attention to the bombshell’s other features, not that those features had ever lacked for attention. She still wore a halter top and short skirt as before, but they were more darkly and richly colored than what she had worn previously. All in all, she now seemed more earth goddess than sun goddess.

Conclusion
So there you have it: four years in the books. Here's to hoping that it doesn't take me another four years to finish LTDI.