Club PA Newsletter #101 (Patreon)

Michael got mega-hooked on these rodents, and others did as well, to the extent that we probably gotta return to them at some point.  Part of the reason I used to decry "dreaded continuity" was because I felt like we had a responsibility to cover whatever was happening at the time, but another reason is because it's about a million times easier and for the most part people don't really mind that much.  I knew what was going to happen in about two weeks worth of strips in the space of twenty minutes or so, even down to the lines that would anchor them.  It turns out you can project what might happen next based on what happened before.  Causality is a hell of a drug!

It's also partly because, as I said in the post a couple days ago, I have a lot of experience with Omin and Jim.  Omin is just a slightly confounded projection of myself, like most RPG characters, and Mike is basically Jim minus the wands and the cape. I know that guy pretty well.  So when I'm writing this novella thing the biggest part is just getting them to shut up.  They're using up all their good material before the cameras are on.

Once I realized that I could determine the length of the book I started writing it immediately.  I was sort of intimidated by the thing at first.  My friend John Scalzi, the first person to ever advertise on Penny Arcade and a prodigious author himself, told me you "write short to write long" in a way that made me think this must be a known phrase in his writerly circles.  I said that I was scared about it, by the scale of the task, and he was like, you've been writing for decades.  You've proven that you can write in volume.  That was really nice to hear!  I could print all that stuff out, I guess; it wasn't my intention, but apparently I've been writing an autobiography.

Back to the word mines,

(CW)TB