Alternia Comics

Okay, that's a terrible pun in the title and in another fortnight it won't make much sense. But so be it!

I've either had too much sleep or not enough caffeine, or too much caffeine and not enough sleep. I forget how it works. Either way, I felt it was high time a new news post was posted.

I've also added the second in, at most, three installments of Zombies in the Quad, a Crossworld short series about college kids and zombies. And college kid zombies. One or two zombie college kids in there too, for good measure.

I may be posting this a bit prematurely, but I've just posted Optinomicon Chapter 12. This marks not only my return to active involvement with the site, but also the last of my Optinomicon buffer.

I've recently quit my soul-crushing retail job and should have some free time in the coming weeks to get more of a buffer ready for my impending move.

It seems like I'm always moving. This will be the fifth move in as many years, and the third crossing state lines. I'm headed back to the Pacific North West, Seattle area this time.

So, due to turbulence, the website has seen some neglect. To what few readers we have by this point, we apologize. Our primary members have been:

-Recently returned from a tour of duty overseas

-Struggling in this new economy to find a job

-Busy with school/work/out-of-state visits

Thus, real-life unfortunately intruded upon our dream here.

However, We are not giving up. This week will see whole new updates for your regular serials, as well as some new world-content articles.

I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month again this year, and I'm posting the novel-in-progress online as I write. You can follow it at karakwrites.livejournal.com. It's a sci-fi story about humanity's steps toward the stars and is tentatively set the Ex Machina universe, though I wasn't thinking about that when writing this morning, so it's much closer to present day real world than anything else...

So what with the economy the way it is ...

... actually, I meant that as a joke, but the economy probably has a lot to do with this.

The writing team at AC is a bit tapped, and other concerns have us pulled in numerous directions. As such, we are slowing our short-story postings to the level of "occasional." Worry not! Your favorite serials will continue every other week as normal, and hopefully this will give us time to make better, more polished short stories for you all.

As you might notice, Monday's story serves as a decent introduction to the race of Unbroken within After the Collapse. With a bit of late-night creativity, Karak and I just made this into a sort of pattern.

Tuesday's post should give a good feel for Crossworld, affectionately dubbed "the world without continuity". As anything can - and does - happen within that world, do try not to get too confused as the world shifts around a discussion of time travel.

It seems we've taken a bit of a vacation around here. Alarin's time was double booked up to and through the Labor Day weekend and he was unable to find the necessary moment to upload his stories.

As for me, I was busy, but not quite as busy. I have no excuse other than sheer procrastination. I've made it a habit to wait until the hours before midnight to write the story that's due, and especially this last weekend that policy has backfired on me.

So, earlier this last weekend Alarin suggested I make some minor changes around here, mostly renaming "Long Story" to "Serial" wherever it showed up. This was all well and good until I changed something behind the scenes and messed up the World views that list the most recent Serial, Short Story and Article for each world (the links along the top of every page).

Because of the way I had those set up, and the nature of the change, the Serials section disappeared from those pages and the serialized stories were showing up in the Articles section.

I went a little overboard with the updating after Tesla's birthday week, and kept posting things daily until yesterday, Friday the 24th of July. Instead of one week of constant updates, you got two. Hooray for you!

But now we'll settle in to the planned five day a week story updates, and possible random updates on the weekends.

Monday continues the story of those wacky kids in their crazy underground habitat: Colony Beta.

Tuesday is another part in the continuing Adventures of Templeton Sledmeir and Elson Dowring.

Wednesday we'll check in with Em and Varrow in Optinomicon.

In celebration of Nikola Tesla's birthday today, we here at Alternia Comics are kicking off our regular content updates. New stories every day for the next week After Friday the 17th we'll slow down a bit to our normal schedule:

After the Collapse Mondays
Crossworld Tuesdays
Wednesdays Ex Machina
Mystic Frontiers Thursdays
World of Heroes Fridays

Serialized stories (novella or longer, posted a chapter at a time) will alternate weeks with short stories. All serials one week, all short stories the next.