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Commissions and Projects

Today's BoM chapter—"Of Curses and Even Worse Things" —may be new to readers of the non-interactive Archives, but it is a very old one. Tomorrow will bring another old chapter, and then on Friday there will be a revised version of yet another old chapter. Then, finally, some new stuff.

In the meantime ...

Yesterday I mentioned that after I finish some commissions I'm going to do something else for a little while. Here's more: I will be returning to a project I started a year ago, persevered in for some little while, then gave up in exhaustion: "Marvel Spider-Man: The Alternate Series" 

My bright idea: Take episodes of the recent DisneyXD animated series, mix them up in a new order, revise some of them, drop and replace others with new episodes, and create my own version of the series. This would eventually lead up to me writing my own version of the series's "Superior Spider-Man" storyline, which at that point had not aired in the US.

I learned a few things from the exercise, the most important of which was that I absolutely suck at outlining. I'm not saying that the outlines themselves are bad. (Though possibly they are.) I mean that the process was ghastly. My brain works by improvising stories into being, and it seizes up like a bad engine when I try to construct the whole thing in advance in my head. I knew from previous experience that I didn't enjoy that kind of work, but the attempt to write three dozen outlines quickly ground me down to nothing. I wrote twenty-one treatments (and posted only nine of them) before giving up almost exactly a year ago.

In March I resumed posting the treatments I had written, and I intended to continue writing, but after only one more treatment I gave up again. That left the thing four episodes short of filling up the first season.

Exhaustion and frustration with the outlining process was one reason I stopped working on the project. Another was that the "Superior Spider-Man" episodes simply were not available to me. I don't have cable, so I relied on Amazon to supply the first 38 episodes, and for the last year that is all that has been available on Amazon. But in the middle of July Amazon finally brought out the rest of Season Two, including the "Superior Spider-Man" arc. I haven't bought it yet, and I still want to get this project done before I do, because I still want to write my own version of that arc, and then compare it to the official version.

So that's my plan: Finish up the commissions, then bulldoze my way through some more alternate "Spider-Man" treatments. How far will I get? I don't know. That's the other big thing I learned from this project the last time I tackled it. Don't make grandiose plans.

If this is the first you've heard of this project, here again is a link to it: "Marvel Spider-Man: The Alternate Series" . And here are some links to some of the more substantial blog entries where I talked about it:

The idea occurs: "Spider-Man, Spider-Man, Messing Up My Writing Plans ..." 
Progress report as I watch the first season of the show: "When Everyone Is Spider-Man ..." 
More reflections on the first season: "Spider-Man: Pros, Cons, and Amateurs" 
My ambition grows: "Decisions, Decisions" 
The plan is described: "Immediate Plans" 
How I go about writing a treatment: "Project Development" 
And after lots of initial optimism, I hit a wall: "I'm Not Dead Yet"