Future Imperfect: A Day of Infamy was released way too soon. Ever since then, as we've worked to fill in the time leading up to it, it's been getting more and more unwieldy and difficult to work around. There are an increasing number of factors in the status quo at the beginning of the story that are getting in the way of developments in bits occurring before it. Just to name one example, it's a near-certainty that the captain of the starship Valiant will not be living on Tomodachi in the spring of 2412.

This leaves me with three choices.

1) Preempt the pending developments responsible for the discontinuities. This would be ugly, awkward, time-wasting, and very annoying to me - and that's in the best case. In the worst case, it'd screw up the process to the point where the balked plots simply won't come out any other way.

2) Let those developments go forward, then come up with individual handwavey excuses for each and every situation to just coincidentally resemble the old status quo when ADoI opens. This would be... well, stupid, really, especially given how many different things I'd have to do it for at this point. Also, though it might just be workable as regards Utena being on Tomodachi, there are other pending developments that simply couldn't be reversed in this manner anyway.

Okay, I suppose technically there's also 2a) Some combination of 1 and 2. This would combine the disadvantages of both and also roughly double the workload. Just... no.

3) Rescind A Day of Infamy, take it back into the shop, wait for the timeline to catch up with it, retool it so that it fits back into its spot in history, and re-release it. This would be a lot of work. It'd also be a bit, uh... Lucasian of me. I expect it would tick some people off, too.

On the other hand, I've done something like it once before without the world ending, and quite frankly, Cybertron Dreams didn't need renovating half as much as ADoI is going to by the time Symphony No. 5 is over with.

(Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.)

So that's what I'm going to do.

To make matters worse (for you guys, anyway), I have no timeframe for this. Things seem to be happening much more slowly now than they did a few years ago, so I can't even make a credible guess as to when S5 will reach its climax, let alone how much longer after that it'll be before I get my ducks in a row for a full revision of ADoI.

Ah, well. Can't make an omelet...

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Will the to-be-outdated version of ADoI remain available? It's a large, and to my mind well-written piece, and it would be a shame for it to simply vanish in the night.

It'll be an interesting historical piece, if nothing else.

-Jason

That was "now" then, this is "now" now...

(By the way, is there a reason the text on the forums is really really big right now?)

You hinted at that before, so I'm not too surprised at this.

>
>This leaves me with three choices.
>

(and the winner is...)

>
>3) Rescind A Day of Infamy, take it back into the shop, wait
>for the timeline to catch up with it, retool it so that it fits back
>into its spot in history, and re-release it. This would be a lot of
>work. It'd also be a bit, uh... Lucasian of me. I expect it
>would tick some people off, too.
>

I'll have to disagree with you about this being in any way similar to George Lucas. I will agree with this opinion if and only if the revised ADoI comes out and is clearly comparable to a vacuum cleaner.

>
>To make matters worse (for you guys, anyway), I have no timeframe for
>this.
>

I can survive this. You're better off not trying to make things fit into a mold that doesn't work - creativity needs room to stretch.

Good luck with this.

Peter Eng
--
I'm only a Charter Member because of the DCForum upgrade, and because there's no rank below "Clueless F!wit."

Honestly, even with the lack of timeframe, this doesn't bother me.

For one thing, there's a wealth of new material that's cropped up in the intervening years that I'd love to see work itself into Day of Infamy.

And, on a second, more selfish, note...DoI's initial release was before my time. This new Day of Infamy version will be something I can enjoy and share "oh holy shit!" moments with the rest of the folks around here, rather than worry about raising the dead in order to comment on it.

So, while others may be frustrated, I'll simply await the new DoI with much anticipation. And prep my keyboard for the massive snippet by snippet commentary this'll eventually cause it. :)

Rescinding ADoI, of course, doesn't therefore imply that Road Movie to Naboo, the as-yet-unfinished sequel to RMtN, Cybertron Reloaded and Blades have to be rescinded as well. The situation in RMtN, for example, could work just as well if the Federation Civil War had been ongoing for several years at the time the story begins.

There's no reason, though, why Yuri can't still make the key discovery that exposes Clark's real nature and agenda after the war begins instead of before. (Incidentially, in the case of reading some unrelated stuff on the TV Tropes wiki, I believe I now have an idea as to what the "shadow" is that Gryphon was alluding to in the Post-UF section of the forum - in the post where he put up "The Hollow Men" - some time back. Given the prominence of B5 as source material in UF, and given that the Vorlons may be about to get their turn on center stage, I THINK I know what may be coming...but then again, I could be completely wrong. :) )

BTW, I saved ADoI to my hard drive several years ago when it was first released, so no need for me to fret about losing that particular piece of writing.

-Joe-

One of my favorite early 20th century writers did that all the time; she'd written the original books in her 20s and in her 40s decided they needed to be drastically changed. She went on to write into her 80s, but her best stuff if undoubtedly her do-overs. She'd changed publishers by that time, so her original work wasn't tossed, but was kept on the shelves next to the newer versions (which had to go get new names to boot).

That said, I'm keeping a copy of infamy 1.0; like quite a bit of EPU work, it might not stand the test of time, it will make and interesting historical (and nostalgic)read someday.

t.

Trigger Argee
trigger_argee@hotmail.com
Manon, Maccadon, Orado, etc.
Denton, never leave home without it.

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." - HST

And, I like the big text, too. My eyes are also getting weaker, so I've been manually hitting the "Ctrl + " combo when I read fanfic anyway. This makes it easier, and I really appreciate that.

Best of luck,
-T.Z.
==================================================

"I believe that when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.
Then find someone whose life gives them vodka and have a party."
--Ron White, stand-up comedian.

==================================================

To jump on the portable reader bandwagon, Apple have this new gizmo out that they're calling the iPhone 3G. With the right app (Bookz) installed it works amazingly well as an ebook reader. Much better than the reader I had on my old Nokia N70, whose tiny screen utterly destroyed any attempts by the author to format or use paragraphs.

On a side note: being that I tend to local mirror this stuff --for uploading to my psp whenever I want to re-read the stuff-- as i'm habitually reading and re-reading just about everything I like, and this is one set of fiction I've been following --much like all the EPU works-- since the mid to late 90's and while indeed some of it doesn't quite grab me the way other parts do, I've yet to be completely let down by any of it. This is by and large something that I can't honestly say for anything else of this magnitude --Trial By Tenderness starting around chapter 100ish, anyone?--.

So I won't think of this as comparing in any way to the high-handed inanity Lucas tends to get away with --even if his fans do whine, as I've seen some do while buying everything he's spewing these days... -- but rather, a finished version of a rather well done beta. ;o

Write on, write on.