Ais' thoughts from this side of the hiatus

I've been totally digging this hiatus. It gives me a chance to breathe, to chill out... to actually be able to have a Saturday to fuck around or have fun instead of being consumed with the logistics and background work of posting the story.

Although when we first started the series, I didn't mind the extra responsibilities that came with the story (coding, putting on the website, releasing announcements, etc), by now we have so much going on that I really need to revamp how we do this because it takes way longer than it should. (boo on PHP, still need to redo the site with that. I'm almost thinking I should just pay someone at this point since it'd get done way faster than me dragging my sorry ass along the way...)

Some scenes have, with time, become more complicated to write. And others are as easy and fun as the first scene like that. Sonny and I have both determined that there are scenes with certain characters that we both look forward to writing. It's hard to really explain the difference, and I could try but it would involve spoiler central so I'm not going to even start, but suffice it to say there are some chapters that take us awhile to finish because neither of us are as enthused and others are written and finished in no time. We're actually working on one of the mostly fun chapters now.

It's so weird to me how this has all happened. First of all, it doesn't seem like over a year (or wait, is it closer to two now?) that we've been working on icos. I never would have thought I'd be writing something this long and involved without having conceived of it far ahead of time. I still have the fantasy novel I've been kicking around in my head since I was like 12 so it's so odd that there's this random story that I had nothing invested in and was just writing with a friend for the hell of it, that's become something this long and involved. I really like it, though.

Even though we take these breaks now and then, I just want people to know that they don't need to worry about us no longer writing. I know we said we may not have come back from hiatus without reviews but we mostly meant there was no point in putting the effort into editing, coding, posting, releasing alerts, etc, if no one was interested in reading it. We would have continued writing the story regardless. Even if we stopped posting from now on, we'd still be writing the story in the background because it's truly fun for us overall. Because we know where the story is going and there are scenes I want to get to.

It's almost a detriment because I keep being interested in scenes in the future so sometimes I put less effort into the present scene because I just want to get it over with. That's what editing's for, though.

Point being, we're still writing. And I do want to say we really, really, really appreciate all of you who read, even if you don't review, but we appreciate +++++++ times more those of you who do give feedback. It's not because we're trying to be punks and forcing people to say shit if they don't mean it. It's because hearing from readers that the story is fun, interesting, inspiring, etc, to them is a really good way of recharging the battery, so to speak.

I very rarely continue putting effort into shit when it's just for me. But when I know that others are involved, I get more interested. It's probably because if it's just for me, it feels like it can wait-- which is probably why I don't have that fantasy novel any closer to being finished than when I was 16.

But icos is out there in cyberspace now and that changes things, it makes me more inspired to keep working. Because, while we write it for us, we share it for you.

At any rate, as a quick update... I'm still trying to finish that damn Owen side story and I've started a Viv/Ced one set in 1998. We're currently working on Afterimage Chapter 26. So far it looks like we may start posting the beginning of 2009 but I don't know yet for sure. (It shouldn't be later than the first week of January as far as I'm guessing but I don't know yet whether it'll happen before. There are still some editing issues that need to be resolved in chapter 7.)