I'm doing a sort of Cornish gazetter as part of the NagaDEmon challenge, so I'd like to get it at least to ashcan before November 30. Could people please answer a design question for me?
Do you prefer plot hooks clustered geographically, like in the earlier books, or by realm, like in the later books?
A concrete example: if I have a story about the sorcerers of the town of Zennor, should they be with all of the other sorcerers of Cornwall, or with all of the stuff around Zennor? You -can't- have both. Should the faeries of land's end, and the ghost ship, and the floating witch coffin all be together, or should the witches be all with the witches, and the faerie fairs all together, and the ghosts all together?
At the moment, it's realm by realm, because my source material was realm by realm.
A few other notes on my plans, so people can give me feedback.
The page size should be printable for Americans, because there are more American Ars fans than the rest of us. For me, A4 would be easier and if you were all going to read online, I'd go that way.
It'll be free. Atlas has given me permission to have a Patreon and do kickstarters for my podcast, and so there was a temptation to make it a patreon bonus, but it'll be free and public. GFF Patreons will be listed in it.
I won't be doing the thing where the file looks medieval. The fonts will be modern, and the art will be colour photographs. I can't make it look like Frankie Magazine, but I'm tempted. The medieval style is fine for some people, but I think it may make it easier to onboard people to have some material that looks modern.
The two column format for Ars books makes them cheaper to produce, but this is a primarily electronic document, so that's not an issue. This means I generally won't do two column / no art. It'll be more magazine like, but magazines use small fonts to save paper and my fonts will be 10-12 point for standard text, because I can. I'm not sure what my fonts and colours will be. I'm tempted to try Dyslexie, but I may do that later.
I may do an audio version. I don't know.
The book assumes Heirs to Merlin is canonish.. Blackkthorn is where it is...the fallen Cornish covenants are in there somewhere. I could go the other way, but creativity is stronger when constrained.
I won't be sticking to the line style of pretending to be in-world. I'm going to refer to the real world, and not just in the introduction. I see this as a tool, not a fiction or colour piece. Also, I know you may not use 1220 as your start date.
Maps are tricky: the rest of this is free, but proper maps may cost me actual money. I might Kickstart it, or I might just pay for it and ask people to pop money in a tip jar.
Devon is not in. Scilly is. Scilly needs a lot more work, but I'm ready to go for ashcan draft.
I'm not sure about my composition tool. Traditionally I used OpenOffice because I needed to send the files to a publisher, but I could be doing it directly on a live, visible page on Wordpress, if people would find it useful to watch the progress. The final document will be composited in Canva, because it's free and I teach classes in it, so I know how it works. That will create a pdf that can be stored on the GFF page.
Final length is undetermined at this time. I don't have the physical constraints of a book, so it can be as long as I have material for. The research material posted or queued on GFF is about 50 000 words, but that will get far smaller when I boil it down.
Stats inflate the number markedly. Because I'm not paying for space I can technically put in a lot more stats than you are used to, but time is an issue. There's also an issue of on-page balance. As an example, there's a one-paragraph summary in one of the posts which notes that the death token of the Vigo family is pretty clearly a Punisher - a type of demon claiming to be an angel of wrath. If I stat that, it becomes a dozen times longer than the paragraph it refers back to. I either need to swell out the plot hook, or just cut the stats and say "See page XXX of RoP:I".