Writing the Special Editions Part IV: Hitting the 15MB Wall and a POLL

 

I'm hitting a wall.  And it's 15MB high.

How big is 15MB?  Well, that will get you about one minute of an HD movie.  About one quarter of a podcast.  About ten high-quality photos.  

On the ebook publishing site Smashwords, that's the maximum file size allowed for an uploaded book.

Smashwords is the site I've used for all my books, primarily because they allow me to publish free ebooks (since I can't charge for my BSG spinoffs) and because they convert the source file into just about any format for ebook readers.

When I finished Lords of Kobol Special Edition, I was concerned about the file size since I added a bunch of pics and such in the commentary.  The total at the end of it was 13.7MB.  

I knew, when it came to Colonies of Kobol Special Edition, I would be in trouble.

I have since sorted all 526 chapters from the three volumes into near-chronological order and I finished the laborious task of bookmarking/hyperlinking the chapters for the Table of Contents.  I was well over the limit.  I reduced the quality of the pics to blurry-ass JPGs ... still over.  I deleted all of the maps ... over again.  I deleted all but the two most important (low-quality) pics in the book ... 14.8MB, as you see above.

"Whew," you're thinking.  "You did it!"

No.  No, I have not.

I haven't even started the author's commentary yet.  For me, that's the most important part.  I really enjoyed reading Lords of Kobol again and writing my thoughts about it right afterward, sharing stories of its creation, where ideas came from, pictures and maps, homages I included, linguistic jokes and tricks, and so on.  Since I just finished Colonies a little over a year ago, all of that info is fresh in my head and I won't have to rely upon my archives of old Word files or ancient blogposts to fill in the blanks.  I have PLENTY of thoughts to share on Colonies, stories to tell about its inspirations, LOADS of linguistic insight, connections to the TV series, pics and maps and flags and covers, and much, much more.  I desperately want to have that info readily available for readers in the same way it will be for readers of LoK.

Unless Smashwords changes their file size limit, I can't.

But ... I have an idea.  And a Plan.  (You BSG fans should like that.)

Here's the Plan: I'll publish what I have now via Smashwords next March.  For most readers I'm sure, they'll be happy to have all three volumes in one ebook and with the chapters sorted in chronological order.  For those readers who want all of the additional information (and to salve my own ego), I will have, standing by, a FULL VERSION of the Special Edition ready to be downloaded from some file sharing site.  This will be the version of the book I'd make if Smashwords had no limit.  I will place links to that version right at the beginning of the Smashwords 15MB edition so readers can't miss it.  Then, they can choose if they want the whole shebang or decide they're happy with what they've got.  

Meanwhile, I'll keep checking Smashwords to see if they decide to up their file limit in the next year.  The FULL VERSION will be ready to go, if they do.

TAKE A POLL: Which version of Colonies of Kobol - Special Edition are you likely to download?

VOTE HERE

NEW PLAN: I'm going with the epub file from the get-go.  I've tested it before and a fully annotated and illustrated Special Edition comes under the 20MB limit, so no worries there. 

Thanks for reading.

Writing the Special Editions Part III: Lords of Kobol is finished ... for now

Took about two-and-a-half months, but I've finished the first pass at Lords of Kobol: Special Edition.  If you haven't been following along, I read each of the books and created a kind of "commentary track" (like good ol' DVDs) in which I discussed inspirations, languages used, mythology, connections to the TV shows, and so on.  I threw in quite a few pictures and sketches and things, too.  I tried to keep the commentary fun but I'll admit, it was kinda like therapy for me at times so I got a little "real" once or twice.

All five books plus commentary came out to 1,314 pages in Word.  Thankfully, it's still 1MB under the 15MB limit imposed by Smashwords. 

I'll let it sit and macerate for a while.  I wasn't planning on publishing it until December for BSG's 20th anniversary, so I'll check back in and give the additional stuff another look before locking it down.  

"Will there be changes?"  Yes.  Deleted scenes have been added in, but with "DELETED" in the header of each chapter, so you'll know what's what.  I'll leave it up to you to decide if those are truly "in the story."  There were about three chapters altogether wherein I was displeased with how it read.  More often that not, there was too much "telling" and not enough "showing," so I altered things to do more of the latter.  Only one chapter required a true rewrite and it was for that reason.  I made a few other minor corrections (e.g. spelling) or additions for clarity's sake.  The end product, however, will be the definitive version of those books.

"Are you going to pull a Lucas and remove the originals from the web?"  No.  I won't go that far.  However, once the SE is published, that's the one I'll point people toward.  I cannot foresee a time in the future wherein I'll want to add or change anything else, so the SE will be the final word.

"What's next?"  Oof.  Colonies of Kobol.

Lords of Kobol was "only" one thousand pages.  Colonies is 2,000+.  AND, the Special Edition will put nearly everything in chronological order.  I am certain it will take me days, if not weeks, to arrange the chapters in the new file and then retitle the headers for each chapter.  And that's to say nothing of the bookmarking/hyperlinking for the Table of Contents.  All of that before I even start on the commentary portions.  Plus, don't forget about that 15MB cap for uploads to Smashwords.  I will have to degrade the quality of the images in the books (maps, primarily) to try and stay under that cap.  It's a good thing I wasn't planning on releasing that SE until next March.

I kid about the tedium.  It will be tedious, but I'll enjoy digging into each facet of Colonies again and talking about the various languages involved, why I made certain choices, etc.  

That's what I'll be up to.  Thanks for reading.

Writing the Special Editions Part II: The Trilogy is Finished

If you're just tuning in, I'm working on a "special edition" of the Lords of Kobol and Colonies of Kobol books.  I have collected all five LoK books into a single file and I have been in the process of reading it and commenting on the story as I go.  (The "commentary" portion will be available via a hyperlink at the end of each chapter.)  

Simply put, this has been a lot of fun.  I haven't read the trilogy since ... I dunno.  2017, maybe, right before I started work on Colonies?  Lots of good stuff and plenty to talk about in the commentary.  I "get real" a few times, talking about serious personal stuff and how it ended up in the book.  I also dug up a bunch of old files and have pics of sketches inserted in there.  I found the very first draft of the book so I can compare how it started versus how it ended up ... I also found a crazy timeline of events I created before I started writing in earnest in 2009.  It was pretty detailed and I put the whole thing in there to compare and contrast.

One cool item in that timeline I never acted on?  "Hermes - criminal stowaway."  Wha?  I have no memory of that and no idea why I didn't tell that story.  I'm somewhat disappointed I didn't.

At any rate, I just finished the commentary for Book Three, meaning the original trilogy is complete.  Next, I start on Prelude, followed by the "lost" Book Four.  

Things are still on track for a December release, as promised.

As for the Colonies special edition next March ... we'll see, but it's still looking good.

In the meantime, feel free to download and read Lords of Kobol right here.

Thanks for reading.

Writing the Special Editions Part I: The Writer Compares Himself to Tolkien*

* - Just a little, and that's Christopher Tolkien; not J.R.R.

If you're a Tolkien fan, you've likely at least heard of The History of Middle-earth series (as well as other, similar works).

My Tolkien shelf

In J.R.R.'s lifetime, only The Hobbit and the three Lord of the Rings books were published.  The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and other books came later, but here's the thing: they were compiled and edited by his son, Christopher.  After Silmarillion was published in the '70s, Christopher embarked on what proved to be a monumental four-decade-long task of gathering, cataloguing, editing, and publishing seemingly all of his father's writings on Middle-earth.  And this entailed much more than what we saw in both Hobbit and LotR.  Much, much more.

What does this have to do with me?

Well, whereas Tolkien wrote from 1914 all the way until his death in 1973, I started writing Lords of Kobol in 2009.  My efforts to organize and catalogue changes for Special Edition are much less monumental than Christopher's.  Still, it can seem daunting at times.  Here's a look at what files are open on my PC at any given moment:

Click to embiggen

On the far left, there's the LoK SE docx file.  I use the split-view so I can read a chapter up top and then type my commentary in the bottom portion.  I'm bookmarking and hyperlinking to and from the commentary as I go.  Note that the page length is currently nearing 1,200 pages.  About seventy of that is commentary, thus far.

In the center, that's the "LoK.doc" file.  The first draft of all three books in one.  Created in September '09 and finished in March '10 (six months ... which I still find hard to believe).

Bottom right is the "LoK discards" file.  It includes chapters written for subsequent drafts that went unpublished and even a couple of chapters that were published and got removed.

Top right is a series of PDFs.  Note the tabs: each one is a different version of Book One published across the last decade and change.  (I occasionally published a new version of the book a couple of times each year, but that was often to add links to another book of mine or to update website links and the like.)  This way, I can see that one chapter was present in 2011 when the book was first published, but that it's missing in 2014.  At that point I have to figure out why I removed it ...

(Not pictured: image viewer, which I have open so I can check maps and such.)

I created the SE file a few months ago, pasting in all five books.  Then I returned to Colonies briefly to write that one-off chapter detailed in the previous blog post.  Last week, I came back to the SE to organize things and I made the fully linked table of contents.  Over this past weekend, I started reading and commentating in earnest.  

We seem to be on track for that December release date.

Thanks for reading.

Writing Colonies XLVII: A New Chapter

"What?  You published these books months ago!  What do you mean 'new chapter?'"

Yes, yes.  That's all true.  There was, however, an unfinished chapter in Volume Two that I left on the shelf when I published it last April.  I had the germ of a good idea but I couldn't make it grow ... until I had another good idea a month or two later and knew they would go great together (like chocolate and peanut butter, I suppose).  Too late to write and publish a chapter once the book it goes in has already been released, right?

Well, I decided to go ahead and write it anyway.  I believe I'll save it for the Special Edition of Colonies, still slated to be released in March 2024.

"So what is it about?"

The first story germ I had was that this chapter would be a old timey spy tale centered around the production of the first battlestar-like space vessel.  That sounds all well and good but I couldn't get into the characters' heads until I had the second idea a while later: this takes place at the time of Virgo's "Catholic/Protestant" split, if you will.  If you're familiar with the English Reformation, you know that a key player in that split was Henry VIII and his desire to marry again and again.  The queen of Virgo is a key player in this chapter, too, but her desire is just for more power ("just").  With the political backdrop in place, I felt I had plenty on which to build the story.  I finished over the weekend and it's another fifty pages in the epic that is Colonies of Kobol.

You can read the whole thing next year, but I'll give you the first look at this proto-battlestar after the JUMP.  (Well, not so much "look" as it's a bunch of words from the scene.  It's a sample, everyone.  And, no, it doesn't look like that Ralph McQuarrie concept art above.  I just thought that painting was cool.)

An Update on New-New BSG

What's the update on the new TV show?  There is no update.  But that says more than you'd think.

It has been three years now since the Peacock-based reboot/continuation/whatever was announced with Mr. Robot's Sam Esmail in charge.  (I wrote a post about it back then, too.)  The Battlestar Galactica fandom was rightfully confused about what tack the series would take ... articles stated it was a reboot while Esmail seemed to say it was not and that it was in the same universe as the recent Syfy series.  Then that was it.  Peacock premiered without a new Galactica flagship show and the news has been scant since then.

Not yet.

In 2020, Michael Lesslie was brought on to write, produce, and basically create the new show with Esmail.  Barely a year later, he left to do something else.  No announcements have been made since that point as to whom might replace Lesslie, not to mention any kind of casting announcements and the like.  The most news came from the movie side of the equation.

"Movie?"  Yep.  Universal has been trying to put the battlestar on the big screen for years and the person they tasked with the job a few years ago is writer-producer-director Simon Kinberg.  He's produced some great movies (Logan, Deadpool, The Martian) but the most recent high-profile example of his triple-threat status was very decidedly not great (X-Men: Dark Phoenix).  He spoke to Collider at the beginning of 2022 and made it sound like both projects -- BSG for TV and film -- are still on track, that they are in "a shared universe," and that he's been collaborating with Esmail.  When it comes to the connections between their work and Ronald D. Moore's Syfy series, he muddied up the waters with this cryptic remark: "There are connections, but it is certainly not simply a continuation or a remake of Ron Moore's masterpiece."  Like you, I have no idea what that might entail.

But what about the film?  Kinberg said, "We are in the process of going out to directors and the hope is to attach a director and start prepping the movie this year."  That was January and it is now nearly November.  No announcements have been made on any front since that interview was published.

[There is one more piece of "new" news to share, but before I get there, I have to remark on the ambitiousness of having a synergistic TV and movie approach.  This was the plan for Dark Tower some years ago when Ron Howard and Brian Grazer were in charge of it.  Movie, some TV seasons, another movie, etc.  That obviously didn't work out, but my mind turns constantly and I can easily map out something like this for a Galactica reboot (an actual reboot, mind you): first movie deals with the fall of the Colonies; couple seasons of TV series showing character drama, struggles, etc.; second movie is action packed and deals with the return of the Pegasus; two more seasons of TV to continue character work and set up the finale; third movie ends it all with an action-packed arrival at Earth.  Fin.  But I digress.]

Now, there is more news but it's not from an obvious place.  It doesn't come from the genre websites or fan forums ... it comes from the boring business side of things.  Simply put, Peacock isn't doing well.  The parent company of Universal, Comcast, has lost about $3 billion on Peacock since 2020.  Even for Comcast, that's a lot.  "But, hey, if they're adding subscribers, then it'll pan out, right?"  Well, maybe, but a July article notes that they've stalled for months when it comes to adding new subscribers.  And they've started cancelling shows.  As lampooned on South Park's Streaming Wars specials, throwing gobs of money at creators and flooding innumerable streaming services with content is not a viable business model for very long.  

"You're being too pessimistic.  And that article is from July.  Surely Peacock has turned things around since then."  Hmm.  Here's an article from just a few weeks ago: It's Time to Start Worrying about Peacock.

Let me end by asking you to put on your Comcast business suit and think like the exec in charge of Peacock.  The streaming service which you oversee is hemorrhaging money and gaining precious little ground in subscribers.  (The scant numbers added came only because you took Days of Our Lives off broadcast TV and put it on Peacock, added some soccer, and shortened the window between certain movies' theatrical releases and their ending up on your service.  It's a kitchen-sink approach, but it worked.  A little.)  You've got to start cutting costs.  You can cancel more shows that are running now, but you've gotten to the bone.  What about the ones that haven't been produced yet?  The ones that haven't shot an inch of film?  Dramas and comedies will be fairly cheap ... maybe they can stay.  Science fiction?  Oof.  That's expensive.  Yeah, Battlestar Galactica is a brand name, but it's pretty niche.  Warner Bros. Discovery saved money via a tax write-off by cancelling Batgirl and that movie was about 90% done.  We can save money by stopping this show before it even starts.

So, yes, I can see why BSG may go on the shelf, if it's not already.  And the movie?  That might go forward because, if nothing else, it doesn't have the Peacock albatross around its neck.

What's Next? Special Editions

Well, I took a diversion down a different road with my Cylon War propaganda art, but what's after that?

I've mentioned it before, but I'll be diving into special editions of both Lords of Kobol and Colonies of Kobol.  Want details?  Here we go:

This will be all five books, plus about ten deleted chapters primarily from Book One.  I will provide a commentary (a la a director's commentary on a DVD or Blu-ray) plus images and such I used "behind-the-scenes" in the making of the book.  (A significant portion of which, I'm sure, are available in this blog's archives right now.)  At the moment, I'm still considering the best way to incorporate the commentary, and I'm leaning toward a link at the end of each chapter that will take the reader to the end of the book where the commentary in its entirety will reside.  I think that's better than creating a lengthy footnote at the end of each chapter ... that would make it hard to just read the damn book because you'd have to scroll or swipe past multiple paragraphs of me rambling on about why I made certain choices or a pic of a Kobollian Cylon.

Tentative release date?  

December 8, 2023

Why?  That's the twentieth anniversary of the Battlestar Galactica miniseries and its first airing on TV.

This will be all three volumes (sixteen books) in one.  No deleted chapters to speak of, but there will be at least one additional chapter that wasn't ready for initial release.  There will also be a healthy amount of other pics and info, "behind-the-scenes" talk, and so on.  I'm also considering the "link at the end of each chapter" thing to take readers to my commentary.

The BIG difference here, however, is that I am leaning toward putting everything* in chronological order.  Because I kept everything contained to the colony of focus, different portions of the three volumes happened at different times, occasionally even intermingling.  Here I will be lining just about everything up 1, 2, 3, so that it all fits.

* - There will be exceptions.  Most notably, Book Sixteen: Earth.  Without getting spoilery, I don't want to disrupt the narrative flow of that book by splitting things apart chronologically.  I don't think it would work or have the same impact.

Without the individual books there to keep everything straight, how will the reader know (beyond context) that this chapter takes place on Virgon, for example?  At this point, I am leaning toward changing the chapter headings to something like this:

XXV
EDGAR
1,034 Years After Colonization
(Virgon)

At a glance, you can see exactly when and where the story is.

Tentative release date?

March 20, 2024

Why?  That's the fifteenth anniversary of the broadcast of "Daybreak, Part II," the finale of Battlestar Galactica.  

And after that?  I will truly be done with the Battlestar Galactica universe.  (Maybe.)

Thanks for reading.