The Book of Masks Homepage

I'm Not Dead Yet

So it's been awhile since I've checked in. Usually when I check out it means that I've been goofing off, but really, I have been working on my Spider-Man project. I just haven't had anything to report because it's been slow and rough.

I've said it before, and recently: I am not an outliner by nature. For me, outlining is hard. Outlining is hellish. It was all I could do to outline 20-minute standalone episode ideas that used material from the actual animated series.

But I didn't know what Outline Hell was until I hit the seven-episode arc I had planned for this alternate series, and it was an arc using mostly new material.

My God, it has been like trench warfare, and it has taken me the equivalent of four or five days' work on each of those episode ideas to get them written, and in the middle of the work cycle I had to tear it all apart and rearrange episode ideas in order to get the plot to progress properly.

And the rough stuff isn't over yet. I've got another three-part, mostly original episode idea looming before I finish the first season, and the second season includes another seven-episode arc, four episodes of which will be mostly new material. And that's just to get me to the point where I can start thinking about my own "Superior Spider-Man" idea.

So there is no way that I'm going to meet my original goal of getting that written before the actual Superior Spider-Man arc debuts on Disney XD. Oh well.

Still, I'm not giving up on it. I'm going to do what I can before August ends, then turn to BoM in September. After that we'll just have to see.

In the meantime I had stopped publishing new episode treatments because I didn't want to run into the stuff I was working on. I can already tell that some of my written-but-unpublished treatments are going to have to be revised in light of changes to my plan for the rest of the season. That means I'm going to have to wait until I've written episode 25 (I'm currently finishing up episode 20) before I do those revisions and can start publishing again.

But I have the impression that very few people are waiting with bated breath for my Spider-Man treatments.

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A little housekeeping: The author of the most recent BoM chapter emailed me yesterday to request that I delete that chapter so he can revise and repost it. Done and done.