Jeez, you're touchy tonight. My point was that publishing that story out of order, instead of publishing in sequential order as is usual, led to unease in at least one reader because it didn't follow on from the last story published. That unease, even if not consciously recognized, *could* contribute to the apparently overall "meh" reaction the story appears, at this point, to be receiving.

Jeanne

	Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com 1st Courier of the Heavenly Prophets for Tianxia "Never give up, never surrender!"

Well, look, not only is this not as hard as you're dramatically portraying it here (the first date stamp in most of these pieces, including Storytime, is the first thing apart from the opening titles), the What's New item explicitly spells out where it fits! I'm not seeing how "readers, keep your bearings" is such a tyrannically unreasonable expectation on my part.

>Jeez, you're touchy tonight.

A bit, I suppose, sorry. Low morale generally, frustrated specifically, and the "well, excuse me, I wasn't expecting homework" attitude wasn't helpful either.

(Also, and this is not specifically directed at you, Jeanne, but this is where the discussion seems to have got to generally: When did we arrive at the place where a particular installment suddenly had to be Necessary? That's what most of the objections I'm seeing tonight appear to amount to: "It just didn't seem to be necessary." Are we seriously judging pieces now by whether you had to read them in order to advance to the next loading screen or something? If so, uh, dang. That's not gonna work out.)

>My point was that publishing that story
>out of order, instead of publishing in sequential order as is usual,
>led to unease in at least one reader because it didn't follow on from
>the last story published.

Well, fine (hard to avoid under the circumstances, without scrapping the thing entirely, and not doing that was the point of the exercise), but what was the thing about "couldn't you have put it in another story"? Of course I couldn't have put it in another story, they're all happening at some other time. I'm genuinely confused as to what you're driving at there, because the only way I can parse the question makes no sense.

I mean, I suppose could go back and assemble the extended Blu-Ray edition of Goodbye & Hello that has Storytime and Fire Hazards reintegrated into the narrative. Then I'd probably get other people going, "This one is soooo long. Why didn't you pull some of those scenes out into side stories? That scene where they're looking at pictures could have been its own thing, for example." :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I think that part of the problem is that there's so many plots and subplots and whatnot going on that we (the readers) want to see, that when something comes out that doesn't address those existing pieces that some people are disappointed. I personally enjoyed the piece, though it did take me a bit to sort out exactly how it fit into things (timestamps are one thing, actually wrapping my head around the temporal flow is another :)).

I'm not sure there's a good answer here, since you (the authors) are going to write what's on your mind at the moment, and it's almost never going to satisfy everyone. The best I can come up with is to use small words in big letters to indicate which stories are "main plot", which are "side plot" and which are "background color". (Note: tongue is planted mostly in cheek. I say mostly because it seems like some people (myself occasionally included) have trouble deciphering the implications the various musical terms you use in the titles, at least in advance. Movements are obvious, some of the others less so. Of course, now I also have to say that I like them, even if I occasionally don't get them right away...)

*shrug* You write, I read. It's all good in the end.

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

while it's certainly *nice* to have piece after piece of plot-advancing action, eventually, my adrenal gland is going to run dry :) it was a nice change of pace.

>I think that part of the problem is that there's so many plots and
>subplots and whatnot going on that we (the readers) want to see, that
>when something comes out that doesn't address those existing pieces
>that some people are disappointed. I personally enjoyed the piece,

once i figured out (see below) what was happening and when, it was a nice look into Korra's background and the history of the Sato family, and there did appear to be a couple of things that hinted at Things To Come.

>though it did take me a bit to sort out exactly how it fit into things
>(timestamps are one thing, actually wrapping my head around the
>temporal flow is another :)).

i have this problem, too... it's one thing to read it, it's another to insert it in the mental hash-map..

>tongue is planted mostly in cheek. I say mostly because it seems like
>some people (myself occasionally included) have trouble deciphering
>the implications the various musical terms you use in the titles, at
>least in advance. Movements are obvious, some of the others less so.
>Of course, now I also have to say that I like them, even if I
>occasionally don't get them right away...)

personally, while i find the musical-term titling cute (like the episodes title of Chuck or The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), aside from movements and entracts, they don't really inform me (nor would it make any difference... i'm going to read them all even if you decided to call them {forgive me, i have a 5yo boy} "vomit-poop 1", "vomit-poop 1.3", etc... {come to think of it, given the latest cast member, that wouldn't be terribly inaccurate... ;) } {these nested parens are purely gratuitous})

>*shrug* You write, I read. It's all good in the end.

hear, hear!

-Z

---
Remember kids: guns make you stupid, duct tape makes you smart.

I'm another of the 'No knowledge of the source material' crowd, and gotta say, the discussions I've seen here do not give me the 'must watch NOW' feeling. You convey the characters nicely, and that's all that matters to me. Unfortunately, as has also been stated, it does leave me at something of a loss in the department of appreciating the rebuilding you've done - BUT, I can say with some certainty that I do quite like them as a cold reader.

As far as this piece in particular goes... well, it has high points, and it has low points. As a background piece, it's beautiful - Korra's first ride in particular was a very enjoyable experience. I must say, however, that I am looking forward to some action in the next piece. Not because this one was slow - I understand that every writer has to do a piece like this every now and again, just to recharge the batteries and provide background for Things To Come - but because, well... -action-. You do action sequences really, REALLY damn well.

Fanboy note time: You and the others are, collectively, one of my three favorite authors. Period. Thank you for the amazing work to date, and I sincerely look forward to more.

Curiosity got the better of me, so I just did this - built a "Director's Cut" version of Goodbye and Hello, As Always that has Avatar Storytime, Fire Hazards, and Someone to Talk To in the stream instead of broken out into separate stories. It's 399 Kb.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Wish I could sit down and read this *right now* but I'll settle for this evening. Looking forward to seeing how the flow feels (and everything else)

Jeanne

	Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com 1st Courier of the Heavenly Prophets for Tianxia "Never give up, never surrender!"

I noticed that the What's New page is now tracking the various story moves in The Legacy of Korra rearrangement. Will you be doing something similar for Symphony when you get things a bit more set? I saw in another thread that you'd moved parts of stories to other stories back near the end of S4 / beginning of S5.

eta -
Dear Moderator, would you please move messages #14 and #15 (this message, and the one I was replying to, both by me) to a newly created thread using #14's subject? That was my original intent, but I screwed it up.

Jeanne

	Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com 1st Courier of the Heavenly Prophets for Tianxia "Never give up, never surrender!"

Hmm, well, in that case, I'll probably add a link to it in the index, as an alternate source for that material. The main reason for the cuts was different depending on which one we're talking about. Fire Hazards originally got split into a separate story because it seemed not to flow very well with the scenes around it, and because the overall piece was already pretty long. Storytime had something of the feel of a digression that we figured we'd get called out for including (and instead we got drubbed for leaving it out, which shows you what we know about managing expectations :), and it would have delayed the movement, which didn't seem like a good call for what is, after all, primarily flavoring.

(As for "Someone to Talk To", that got cut partly for length, which was silly in retrospect, given that the story without Storytime or Fire Hazards in it ends up being 289K. So I've put it back even in the non-Director's Cut version, because it ends up being referenced in the part that I'm working on now, anyway.)

Anyway! Good to know it made more sense, and that the nearly 400K length it ended up at wasn't a problem. I'll keep that in mind as I work on the next bit, which is shaping up to involve what would ordinarily become a side branch or two as well.

>I noticed that the What's New page is now tracking the various story
>moves in The Legacy of Korra rearrangement. Will you be doing
>something similar for Symphony when you get things a bit more set? I
>saw in another thread that you'd moved parts of stories to other
>stories back near the end of S4 / beginning of S5.

Yes, if there is in fact a major reorg, there'll be a change log for it. (The S5 Prelude reorg is more in the manner of housekeeping - it's mainly aimed at smoothing things for any new readers that might chance to come along - though that's more the reason why I forgot to What's New it rather than a reason I deliberately didn't. :)

>Dear Moderator, would you please move messages #14 and #15 (this
>message, and the one I was replying to, both by me) to a newly created
>thread using #14's subject? That was my original intent, but I screwed
>it up.

Alas, DCF can't do that. All I could do is delete them, not make them reappear someplace else.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I agree, I enjoyed this quite a lot. To hijack an analogy made earlier in the thread, it's like getting vanilla ice cream when you were expecting mint. But I rather like vanilla. I prefer vanilla, actually.

This story was an anecdotal, slice-of-life piece. No grand action, no major developments, just personal moments and character insights. But to me, at least, that's good stuff. That's always been my favourite part of the Eyrie stories.

Aside from the character interactions, the Diqiu material also represents a significant amount of worldbuilding. And that's nice to see as well. I'm one of those people who's only vaguely familiar with the Avatar source material. But I don't really feel that's a huge barrier to entry. A lot of what's been depicted in the stories is original.

(I'm also vaguely embarrassed that I had to look up how to spell Diqiu - I'm Chinese, you'd think I'd know pinyin phonetics by now.)

Admittedly, I also had to re-register on the forums to make the post, because I lurk so successfully that my account's been vanished twice now for inactivity. I'd wager there's a number of readers like that, who do follow the stories here, but don't offer feedback.

Granted, that's also supremely unhelpful to the authors, hence why I crawled out of the deep, dark, abyss of lurking to post this.

- Acyl