So. News. Not actually all that much. I'm still sitting here staring at the novel, knowing pretty much where it's going next, but now stuck a page and a half into Chapter Thirty-six after a line which should kinda end the chapter, but kinda can't. I need more caffeine before I can get into this today.

On the bright side, I've read through the three hundred pages currently in the file, and concluded that, yeah, the setup phase is complete. I think. Book One, as it were, has been written. So it's all kinda downhill from here. The zombies haven't precisely taken over the world yet, but they have infiltrated to the degree that, like any decent amount of vermin, the conclusion is foregone.

The conclusion itself, obvious though it probably is, will remain nameless. It's not exactly a binary matter anyway. Or, it is; but the subplots aren't. Even War and Peace ultimately distils down to The enemy attacks; the enemy retreats in the final analysis.

Which brings me to the next concern. The book necessarily halfway written [there's a pagecount issue here; beyond a certain number of pages, printing costs start requiring the thing to cost fifty bucks for the enduser], the story itself really isn't. Given everything I'd really intended to do here, the damned thing should probably be about fifteen hundred pages. And that's impractical.

So, now, I'm writing this not only as the rest of the tale, but as a sort of realtime edited simplification of the rest of the tale, and hoping that, in under six hundred pages, it doesn't turn out to end too quickly. I think it can be done, and, as mentioned before, I could probably upload Deleted Scenes of chapters which really should be in the novel, but can't be due to spatial limitations. Not yet, anyway. Maybe someday, in some Uncut Version of The Stand type of release. But probably not this decade.

I'm also partitioning a few gigabytes of my brain out to pondering The Next Brilliant Idea. Whatever that ends up being. I've got three or four concepts for novels, including the kinder, gentler version of SB95, since that was way too strange to release as written; I'm also pondering either a sequel or a replacement for One of Those Nights, since I never fully released that one [I think I uploaded the first three or four chapters in 1997] and it could really have been done slightly better than it was in 1996. For those who have no idea what I'm talking about at this point: A) you're probably in the majority; B) it's a sort of ?ongoing storyline about a normal, everyday [and somewhat smartassed] private detective who, for whatever reason [most likely that I'm the guy writing it], only ever lands oddly paranormal gigs. As much as that nearly sounds like a book report about Dirk Gently, it's actually not, this guy being an entirely different sort of character in a more character-driven storyline.

The other two ideas are still too undeveloped to talk about. Enough so that they could end up being one single book, in the end. I'll know more about that if I ever get to it.

Then there's the site, which is still a transitional form, at the moment. I'm pretty sure that this PHP/CSS bloguesystem thing is about as finished as its gonna get in Version Eighteen. The messageboard's loose approximation of the theme is still in progress, and, honestly, more Hunter's problem now than mine, my job now being the completion of this damned novel. Though I might make a couple of modifications to the board's remaining V17 structure, to make it simpler to reach gremlin.net/main here from there; as it is, the easiest thing to do is to click on the gremlin.net logo to return to the index.html and progress from there, which involves added steps. I'll wake up a little more and see about adding an imagelink to main into the remnants of V17 throughout the older parts of the site.

And, as always, I have other sites to finish in some way or other, some of them waiting merely on revisions for some time now. I'll get to those too. Eventually.

I'm never gonna get everything done. It might be simpler to concede that and go back to playing Sims2 all night.