Weekly Update - 7/17/24 (Patreon)

Look at that, we're actually on some sort of schedule again. Crazy dog. I mean, crazy crazy dog. Before The Storm won our poll, and I'm always happy to return to that story - I think it's one of my favorites, just because it lets me tap into my sci-fi pastiche love. I've tried to sort of straddle my favorite sci-fi things - my love of both Star Wars and Firefly comes through, sure, but there's also big shades of Farscape and The Expanse.

Speaking of which, anybody watching that new Star Wars show - The Acolyte? I just finished it, and I'm hoping there's a second season. It has a lot of potential and while there's things I disliked from a narrative point of view (the little tracker character has zero comprehensible motivation, among the most egregious), it does something important that I feel the Star Wars universe needs to stay grounded - the Jedi are fallible, and they make mistakes. Beyond that, the fight scenes were well shot and choreographed, and most of the characters had motivations we as an audience could follow. I tried to read some people's criticisms about it on a couple of different sites, and it always came back to the reviewer wanting something else, rather than engaging with the work on its own terms. I think that's the biggest challenge in working on a Star War - the audience already brings so much to the table in terms of expectations, you're bound to let someone down.

If you're looking to pitch a Quaranteam story to me and the rest of the QT writing community, let me give you large piece of advice (in addition to all the other stuff we have over here) - don't overwhelm us on first contact. If you've got an idea and you want us to work with you to develop it for putting it out there into the community, give your initial pitch relatively short - no more than 5k-10k words, tops - and use an outline to sort of cover the broad strokes about where you want to take it. It might seem like a small thing, but continuity is key, and the minute your story starts veering away from the context they're familiar with, the faster they are to tune out.

The strength of the Quaranteam universe is that we've all worked very hard (both the writers that you've seen and the ones who are still developing their stories) to make sure we have an internal consistency. The way you see an imprinting in one story is how they're generally going to happen in all the stories, and if you see an instance where it isn't following the normal rules, it'll be called out and explained as the outlier that it is. Believe me when I tell you that specificity matters.

That's why we tell you to come to us with your first 5-10k words, and not after you're 40-50k words into it, because if you've made mistakes in your first 500 words, that'll compound the further along you go, and you're going to end up rewriting a whole lot needlessly when we could've guided you through that minefield from the start.

For Friday or Saturday, I'm looking at getting the next Brewster's Brood chapter up, and maybe squeeze out another commissioned work before Sunday/Monday, although we'll play that one as it lies, considering I have a hell of a drive for a concert on Saturday. The current plan is for Breakpoint on 7/26, and QT2:29 on 7/30. That'll leave 7/23 as the second You Decide! vote for the month, so I'll put that poll up when I get up tomorrow.

I'm not going to lie - the current schedule is highly ambitious (it has me cranking out between 15k-20k words a week, which is a hell of a lot), and I'm doing my best to keep up with the pace, but slips will happen, and I appreciate everyone's patience when I was sick. So we'll see if I'm able to plow through and get all the work done on the schedule. I will do my best and hopefully there'll be plenty of things to enjoy.

As always, I try to keep you abreast of what's coming to the public sites and when:  7/20 - Pack 9, Neon Stonehenge 4; 7/27 - QT2:19, QTAA8; 8/3 - QTPT18, Threadbinders 8; 8/10 - Threadbinders 9; 8/17 - Neon Stonehenge 5. We're currently about 7 months behind on public releases as opposed to when they appeared on the Patreon, but that'll let me buffer out what with the absolute plague month I had.

Anyway, that's where we stand. See you in the funny pages.