Tales of MU schedule stuff.
Mar. 26th, 2012 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinSo, for several months from the fall through early 2012, I had a period of reeeeeally great updates to Tales of MU. Really consistent quality, really consistent timeliness, really consistent everything. And it had everything to do with having pegged the perfect interval between chapters at four days. I made a four day development cycle that gives me adequate time to come up with a concept, write it, then go back over it and not just polish it but strengthen it however I could, by tying it into ongoing stuff better or by emphasizing an arc or theme within it or whatever else it needed.
It works great when things are going great and when things aren't going great... well, I still have enough time to bang out a chapter.
And there were enough times where a chapter didn't take the whole four days to be substantially finished that I was working a chapter or two ahead, something that never happened before.
And every month, the whole thing either fell apart or came close to it, for the simple reason that months have irregular lengths that are only evenly divisible by four ~6% of the time. If I just made the schedule "every four days" this wouldn't matter, but I thought it was important to have an update schedule that was pegged to the calendar. Making it every day divisible by four leaves about a week that's just dead, from the 29th of a month through the 3rd of the next, so I added an update on the 1st. That gives me two "short" cycles in a row, and that keeps tripping me up, and setting the tone for the rest of the month.
And I have a tendency to make it worse by trying to do other things at the beginning and end of the month.
The parts of this plan that work really work, and the whole thing came about through a process of embracing what works and discarding what doesn't... but like Professor Bohd explained in her class on purifying elements, no matter how much of X you take out of Y, there's still some X in there. Perfection is a process, not a goal.
So it's time to throw out what's not working.
I have two different ideas for how to do this. I'll call the two plans EMBRACE THE CALENDAR and SUCKS TO YOUR ASS-ENDAR and outline them below.
Plan One: Embrace The Calendar
Plan One is to keep the schedule mostly as it is, with the following changes: one, drop the scheduled update on the 1st -- Tales of MU main story updates on the 4s of every month, period. Two, use that extra time at the end of the month to really do up the side story Kin & Distant Relations right.
Plan Two: Sucks To Your Ass-Endar
Plan Two is: forget the calendar. New chapter every four days. There is no overarching schedule to fall behind on. Something happens and I fall a day behind in finishing/posting a chapter? New chapter four days after that. I don't scramble to finish the chapter in three days or try to and then give up and post it in four days anyway and have to keep adjusting the schedule to compensate.
On the surface I see a lot to recommend embracing the calendar. The presence of actual dates feels predictable and stable. But in practice? I get the impression a lot of readers haven't learned/internalized the schedule, so much as they know that when I'm following it the chapters come out pretty regularly, they can check it once a week and have a chapter or two to read, etc.
Ditching the calendar means that whenever a new chapter goes up you know you don't have to wait more than four days for the next one, which is something nobody's complained about. It means I'm always focused on making the next chapter solid and strong and what it needs to be instead of trying to make up for what happened with the last chapter.
Really, I started this post as a "weigh the pros and cons" type thing and expected to have a great big debate with myself, but the more I type the more I think it's clear what I need to do.
I'll have to work out details for things like how to slot side stories/other tales into the flow of things. But for the main story? Yeah, I'm going with "every four days". It works. It works so well.
It works great when things are going great and when things aren't going great... well, I still have enough time to bang out a chapter.
And there were enough times where a chapter didn't take the whole four days to be substantially finished that I was working a chapter or two ahead, something that never happened before.
And every month, the whole thing either fell apart or came close to it, for the simple reason that months have irregular lengths that are only evenly divisible by four ~6% of the time. If I just made the schedule "every four days" this wouldn't matter, but I thought it was important to have an update schedule that was pegged to the calendar. Making it every day divisible by four leaves about a week that's just dead, from the 29th of a month through the 3rd of the next, so I added an update on the 1st. That gives me two "short" cycles in a row, and that keeps tripping me up, and setting the tone for the rest of the month.
And I have a tendency to make it worse by trying to do other things at the beginning and end of the month.
The parts of this plan that work really work, and the whole thing came about through a process of embracing what works and discarding what doesn't... but like Professor Bohd explained in her class on purifying elements, no matter how much of X you take out of Y, there's still some X in there. Perfection is a process, not a goal.
So it's time to throw out what's not working.
I have two different ideas for how to do this. I'll call the two plans EMBRACE THE CALENDAR and SUCKS TO YOUR ASS-ENDAR and outline them below.
Plan One: Embrace The Calendar
Plan One is to keep the schedule mostly as it is, with the following changes: one, drop the scheduled update on the 1st -- Tales of MU main story updates on the 4s of every month, period. Two, use that extra time at the end of the month to really do up the side story Kin & Distant Relations right.
Plan Two: Sucks To Your Ass-Endar
Plan Two is: forget the calendar. New chapter every four days. There is no overarching schedule to fall behind on. Something happens and I fall a day behind in finishing/posting a chapter? New chapter four days after that. I don't scramble to finish the chapter in three days or try to and then give up and post it in four days anyway and have to keep adjusting the schedule to compensate.
On the surface I see a lot to recommend embracing the calendar. The presence of actual dates feels predictable and stable. But in practice? I get the impression a lot of readers haven't learned/internalized the schedule, so much as they know that when I'm following it the chapters come out pretty regularly, they can check it once a week and have a chapter or two to read, etc.
Ditching the calendar means that whenever a new chapter goes up you know you don't have to wait more than four days for the next one, which is something nobody's complained about. It means I'm always focused on making the next chapter solid and strong and what it needs to be instead of trying to make up for what happened with the last chapter.
Really, I started this post as a "weigh the pros and cons" type thing and expected to have a great big debate with myself, but the more I type the more I think it's clear what I need to do.
I'll have to work out details for things like how to slot side stories/other tales into the flow of things. But for the main story? Yeah, I'm going with "every four days". It works. It works so well.