Hackberry Hollow

As we announce a future blog post that will announce a future announcement, we are actually announcing two announcements today. The first announcement is announcing the aforementioned announcement, and the second announcement is that we are trying to use the word “announcement” as many times as possible in this announcement.

Because we’ve been working so hard on getting the script for Hackberry Hollow done for our test audience, all of the concept art has been pushed off the home page. It is high time that we set up a gallery so you can quickly view the best artwork created during pre-production so far.

This graph appears to suggest that things have been going slow, but that’s far from the truth. The past few weeks have been full of Quadrant I stuff. In addition to that we’ve also been busy working on our other Hackberry Hollow project: alternate sources of revenue.

We hit our halfway mark for the script writing process. It’s coming along!

We would also like to announce that when counting the number of completed chapters, one of us has to remove their shoes. Obviously we will need to change our methodology once we pass 40 chapters, and then once again when we pass 42 chapters, but for now this is working for us.

Ultimately we will be getting actual fresh eyes to look at our story (i.e. the expanded test audience), but during the writing process we need to look at our story differently and more critically in ways that we haven’t before. What I mean by this is as a writer you naturally need to be critical of your ideas, your story, and the characters in it as you are developing it. That critical eye is dictated by your understanding or theory of story, and what you think the main conflict of your story currently is (because that may change as you work on it, and it certainly has with Hackberry Hollow…twice). That naturally critical eyes is what I’ll call the baseline self-critique level. But what causes you to step up and/or expand your level of self-critique to look at the story differently and improve on your story’s shortcomings?

Yeah, the chapters we’ve been writing recently have been much shorter. In fact some were so short that we ended up merging them.

Hard work and long Skype sessions pay off. We’ve been writing like crazy and it looks like we are still on track for our year-end deadline.

I added a new feature to the graph; it now shows how long each chapter is by line length. That’s very useful information because it definitively explains why our writing has been going slower than we had hoped. Quite simply, the chapters we’ve been writing over the past two weeks have been really really long.

During our “Finish the Hackberry Hollow Script by New Years” writing sprint we’ve been doing a lot of typing, and I mean a lot. We’ve talked about our process and some of the tools we use, but did you know that both Adam and myself don’t type using the QWERTY keyboard layout? We both use Dvorak.

Today we are kicking off a (probably biweekly) progress report of sorts. This graph shows were we are at in writing the story as well as what has been recently finished. As you can see we’ve been busy.