Moar concert.

My previous post wasn't much of a write-up on the concert itself... I spent an awful long time last night figuring out how much I wanted to say about my memory and how long I wanted to say it. When I sat down, I figured I could bang out a post and then finish writing the MoarMU I'd been working on...

Anyway, the concert was in Lincoln, Nebraska. I live in Omaha and I don't drive, which meant I was going with friends. By a stroke of pure elemental awesomeness, the concert was scheduled for the day my friend gamingdragon was going to be coming up from Kansas anyway, because it's her birthday today, which meant I was going with more friends. A total of five friends in a tiny little car originally intended to hold... remarkably human-like aliens from a planet where everything is on a 9/10ths scale with its earth relatives.

Said car is also not the speediest thing on the planet (remember, the miles on its homeworld are also 10% shorter), and I'm the only one among our group who had ever been to Lincoln, which was no help, so we left two hours before the concert. This was a brilliant bit of timing on our part, as it enabled us to arrive at the precise moment when the slanting rays of the sun were making it almost impossible to spot the letters in the window of the Dancers Oasis Studio as we drove past it three or four times.

All was well that ended well, though, because we ended up getting there with half an hour to spare. I was able to convey wishes of affection from the s00j-fen I knew who couldn't be there, and s00j turned around and did the same since many of those people she'd actually seen in person more recently than I had. I introduced my friends... forgot that I'd wanted to tip s00j off about the birthday... and then a rollicking good time was had by all.

The venue was actually a belly dancing studio, which had some influence on the set list... she started off with Taglio!, which I love hearing live. It's one of my favorites of her songs because it's about a subject that fascinates me (Dancing. Yes, dancing.), and because Cities of Coin and Spice (from which the title character of the song hails) is perhaps my favorite of Cat Valente's books. She also did Snake Star Song. She closed with We Are Shangri-La. In between, she did (in no particular order) Carousel, Crystal Cave, The Drowning, and other songs, including a ninja song that was federally mandated by the "equal time" provision of the "ninja/pirate clause" of the Internet Meme Act of 2005.

She also performed Betsy Tinney's seminal neo-blues raccoon standard... possibly the greatest neo-blues raccoon standard of all time, and certainly the one with the best name... Tough Titty Cupcakes, which must be seen, heard, felt, and experienced to be believed. I think I had the pleasure of seeing, hearing, feeling, and experiencing it for the first time myself in New Orleans, when Betsy herself would have been cell-in' along on her cello, but I may be making stuff up.

My eye (or rather the skin around it) was bothering me with a violent twitch during a lot of the concert. It didn't do much to diminish my enjoyment, though.

And, when it was all over, gamingdragon thanked s00j and mentioned her birthdary herself, and we were all treated to a wonderful birthday serenade.

My roommate, who's been stuck working a lot of extra hours to make up for a coworker who was out on an injury, wasn't sure she'd be able to make it down, but yesterday the coworker returned and she got out right in time to walk through the door just as the concert was about to begin. That was awesome for her, and it had the bonus effect of making the trip back a lot more comfortable. :P

On the balance.

I've received a lot of positive comments about the Veil Ball arc in Tales of MU, now ongoing. The same thing happened during the Two's Day story. At the same time, I think for some people these embody what's frustrating to them about my storytelling: the characters go somewhere and they do something and for the space of several updates, things are happening and conversations are taking place and sights are being beheld and characterization is on full display, but in the linear progression of plot not a lot is happening.

I think of this as a "webcomic arc"... not that you can't have a webcomic with a tight and linear progression of plot, because you can, but webcomics as a medium are where you're most likely to see them, because the medium of transmission and method of production puts fewer constraints on such sprawl.

I've read critics (speaking either of webcomics or of me) attributing these bouts of "filleritis" to the pressure of coming up with updates on a set schedule leading us to throw together stories where nothing is happening. I can't really speak for anyone else, but I can say that this is very much not the case with me and it's specifically not the case for this arc. I know what's happening next, and things are coming up that are very "plot heavy", for the value of "plot" that such critics would recognize. I end up doing multiple installments of things like the Veil Ball because it pleases me to write them and because it pleases others to read them.

By the way, mild spoiler: nothing much happens at the Veil Ball, at least for the definition of "much happening" that would look at the installments of it already and say "nothing much is happening here." The point of the excursion is: one, a chance to put characterization on display in a slightly different context, two, a chance to bring characters who don't normally interact all that much together--and there's going to be some more of that before the story night is over--and three, it is... as Mackenzie herself has stated... her last fun night before some fairly heavy shit goes down.

I could dispose of the party by having a few descriptive lines highlighting the more interesting costume choices and the unlikely sight of Sooni bonding with the littlest storm giant and then a wrap-up line from Mackenzie saying that there were some awkard moments but she had a good time. If MU were to be edited down to fit into a novel, the whole sequence would probably be cut down and compressed considerably, especially as it comes right before a more plot-relevant party.

But when some readers are sitting there going, "This is the best update ever.", I can't agree that it's a mistake to chronicle things like the Veil Ball or Two's Day in their entirety, at this level of resolution.

But... at the same time... there are stories I want to get to that don't take place within the first three months of school, and I do understand the frustration that some people have, and I also understand how a 400 installment backlog is daunting to new readers.

So what I'm really looking at now is the balance... interspersing "webcomic-esque" arcs between stretches of "novel-esque" arcs. It's something I've already done a bit, but I'm going to be a little more conscious of. I don't think doing this will do anything to combat the impression that things like party stories are "filler", but I don't actually care about combating that impression.

I talked about my memory in the last post... I've also made allusions in the past to my lack of sense of direction and sense of time. As hps_sterling has gotten me interested in cognition, I've started to think about how my lack of time sense affects other things. I've often observed that unlike most people, I don't get sick of hearing a song... if I like it, I can listen to it over and over again and never be put off it. I can eat the same food every day and not get tired of it. I can watch the same movies over and over again... not just one favorite movie, but any movie I like, and never get tired of it. In fact, in the past I've lost hours at a time to watching the same video clip from a movie over and over again on YouTube. (The "blind hermit" scene from Young Frankenstein.) Not sitting there clicking on links to see related videos. Watching one video.

It's not that my memory is so horrifically bad for everything that I don't remember having watched it... but each time feels like the first. It never gets old.

The same is true for books and comics. Or jokes. The fact that the same joke never gets old to me probably does a lot to explain how great I get along with my father.

So, anyway, what all this has to do with writing is that 1) I don't have anything more than intellectual/theoretical awareness of the fact that people who enjoy wathing Two be cute/irritating in a particular way today, yesterday, and the day before might enjoy it slightly less tomorrow... I know it happens but it's not really within my realm of instinctive understanding... and 2) no matter how long the story has been going on for, it always feels to me like I'm just starting.

I get staggered at a fairly regular interval when I look at the number of updates, when I estimate the number of words (over a million), or when I start counting back months and see how long I've been at it, or how long since I've been doing it full time.

Now, some people might look at all this and go, "This is interesting, AE, but what you're doing is obviously working so why change it?" And they're right. These imaginary people make an excellent pre-emptive hypothetical point. But I'm not interested in just coasting... I want to build and I want to grow and a little streamlining going forward will help that. I'm going to keep in mind the fact that what I'm doing is working and not go crazy with reinventing wheels and throwing babies out with bathwater and other suchlike metaphorical things.

So, anyway, all of this is about half of why updates are going to be spotty this week and next after I was so on-point the preceding weeks (but I expect to be even more so in the coming weeks, as I'm getting more skilled and more disciplined with my reminders to myself)... I'm taking advantage of the fact that my friends are in town and making me do stuff to re-evaluate things from a new perspective, and also to prep things for the coming streamlining. I'm working on some "Story thus far" summaries that will let people catch up (or refresh their memory) one book-worth at a time... this will also be helpful in breaking up the second half of MU into individual books, which will let me turn around and get them released in print as some people have been clamoring for.

(Next week I'm going to have guest spots running in MU... I didn't have sufficient warning to get them ready for both weeks. Next time I'll need to take a week off will be in September. I'm going to be mentioning that on my blog as an ongoing reminder to myself, so I can handle things a lot more cleanly.)