User blog:Gideoncrawle/Two Long-awaited Wiki Premieres: LTDI and Mrs. Gideon

It is my great pleasure to announce two long-awaited wiki premieres:


 * 1) My TDI reimagining, The Legend of Total Drama Island (LTDI) will officially launch on Saturday, 3 September, with the posting of the contestant intro chapter; and
 * 2) My dear wife finally became a registered user on the wiki last Friday, 26 August. (I know her page says 8/27, but that's UTC time. We have a 6-hour differential in the Denver area.)

LTDI Ready For Launch! (sort of)
I have been making decent progress on LTDI, but I still have a long way to go. Not only that, but it seems that I may have significantly underestimated its final length. Of course, any such estimate is little more than a guess at this point; but it’s now looking like the final word count may well be 300K or more, up from my previous estimates of 200-250K. Furthermore, I’m running out of good previews scene, i.e. scenes with both good standalone appeal and minimal spoiler potential. (I have previewed scenes from as late as the boot camp episode, so observant readers already know that certain campers won’t be early outs.) For these reasons…

*cue drumroll*

I have decided to break with policy and start posting actual chapters before I’ve finished writing the story.

*cue brass band fanfare*

As many of you know, I had settled on this policy mainly as my defense against writing myself into a corner; but with the first three chapters nearly finished and the story’s major incidents pretty much set, I’m no longer too worried about that.

I made this decision two or three weeks ago, at which time I set the Labor Day weekend as my target window. (That’s a U.S. holiday, for those of you who don’t live in the States.) My original target date was Sunday, 4 September, but TAU informed that that his birthday happens to fall on the 3rd, and he would view a release on or near that date as a sort of birthday present from the wiki. Since I now know that the first chapter will be ready by then, I see no reason why the 3rd wouldn’t work as well as the 4th. Happy birthday in advance, TAU.

Scheduling
I will post chapters in two phases:
 * 1) Precompletion phase: Whilst I am still working on the story, I will be posting chapters every 6-8 weeks, which is the same schedule that I’ve been using for the previews.
 * 2) Postcompletion phase: When the story is finished, I will ramp up the posting schedule to weekly or biweekly unless I see a consensus that my readers want a different schedule. If I later see that too many readers are falling behind, based on ongoing poll/comment traffic, I may alter the posting schedule or put the story on brief hiatuses.

My current estimates are that the finished story will have 35-40 chapters, although it could well be more, especially if the total word count tops 300K; and I’m guessing that most of the chapters will be 4000-7000 words. I will naturally consider these factors when setting the postcompletion posting schedule, because even a weekly schedule could mean a postcompletion phase lasting almost a year.

These estimates are very rough, because (as I have noted elsewhere) the fact that I’m using The 1,001 Nights as my structural model means that every chapter except the last will have a cliffhanger, and the placement of the cliffhangers will be what mainly determines the number and length of the chapters. This means, among other things, that there is no set ratio between the number of episodes (28, because I’m including TDDDDI and a reunion) and the number of chapters.

A word of warning: because I don’t want to split the contestant introductions, the first chapter will probably be the longest in the entire story, at about 11,000 words plus about 1,000 words of notes/trivia. (I may toss in a couple of subheadings so that short-read people don’t feel that they have to tackle the intro chapter in one sitting.) The reason the intro chapter is so long is that, although LTDI is a TDI reimagining and so uses the canon characters, I have written the intros as if the reader has never heard of TDI. I did this partly for stylistic reasons, and partly because one of my competition story pet peeves is authors who treat the introductions as a chore to get through as quickly as possible, and thus blow through the intros with only 2-4 sentences per character.

Guessing Games
In addition to the usual Winner Guessing and Final Three Guessing, I will have two additional guessing games, which I will set up after I post the first chapter. These are:


 * Guess the Storyteller’s identity. (The Prologue identified her as one of the female campers); and
 * Guess Brett’s paternity. Readers who did the math after reading the Prologue know that Brett is the right age to have been conceived either during the game or within a few months thereafter.

I don’t have any ideas for prizes, so for now the guessing is just for bragging rights. In addition to the usual “put your name beside your choice” model, I will also have a poll for each game except the Final Three guessing, which has too many possibilities for a poll.

The purpose of the polls is twofold. First, readers who arrive after all the choices of record have been claimed can still make their opinions heard. Second, readers who pick a less likely choice because nothing better is available can use the poll to tell us what they really think.

Wifey on the Wiki
My dear wife registered on the wiki two days ago, under the name JustLittleOlMe. A fair number of you have already met her, largely because she spent much of her first two evening in chats, both Wiki chat and Chatango. She’s really taken to the chats, partly because she thought it a good way to get to know people quickly. I don’t go on chats much myself, because real-time chat requires two things—short statements and quick replies—that I’m not very good at.

Since her username is fairly long, most of you will undoubtedly want to shorten it. In the chats, she was quickly assigned the nickname “Jay” (from “Just”). JLOM also works well, but don’t use JLO, because that’s too easy to confuse with J-Lo, which is someone else. (That confusion arose in one of the chats.) She has also suggested “Lil”.

My DW is also content to be called “Mrs. Gideon”, but she has made it clear that she does NOT like the sound of “Mrs. Crawle”.

Mrs. Gideon expects to be mainly a reader/commenter like TAU, assuming she doesn’t get addicted to chat. She originally said on her User page that she would probably never write a story, but that lasted all of two days before she got a story idea that seemed good to her. (At first, I didn’t expect to write original stories, either, and we all know how that turned out. Never say “never”.) I don’t think it’s giving away too much to say that her story was inspired by The Canterbury Tales, although how closely it ends up following that model remains to be seen.

In just two days, wifey already as 12 people on her Friends list, split more or less evenly between people she met on the chat and people who think that her being Mrs. Gideon is good enough for them. (I told her that she would be warmly welcomed, and you guys certainly didn't make a liar out of me.) So be sure to welcome JustLittleOlMe to the wiki, if you haven’t already. Her personality is similar to Sunshine’s.