Messages

It's definitely easier to follow Ember's character as opposed to the others, especially since the story has mostly been from her perspective so far.

Also it's good to hear from you again Daniel! I hope your story has been getting the attention it deserves.

Well, it gets a lot of attention from spammers. 160 spam comments so far, and a heck of a lot more (496534) stopped by my anti-spam plugin. Nearly impossible to tell how many people are actually reading it (Google Analytics cannot separate spam traffic from reader traffic). Probably not many. Need to run some Project Wonderful ads or something, but ads need art, and I'm still trying to figure out what my species look like. (Might also need to rewrite early chapters because I had no idea where I was going back then)

Looks like Bloodline's doing pretty well, though. You've got at least 7 people who like the comic enough to actually pay you to make it!

I guess Ember's my favorite. Partly because she likes books and is inquisitive and such like I am, and partly just because she's the only one I really have any sense of. None of the characters really stand out at this point, but that's normal. Characters that "really stand out" are ones like Adrian Monk, Hannibal Lector, Sheldon Cooper, et cetera. The crazy/disfunctional ones. I find them to be very entertaining. Flaws make the character, and with more normal characters, you don't get to see their flaws right away.

Takes me a while to get to know characters, though, and I have a feeling we'll get to know them better now that the plot's really picked up. See their reactions in the aftermath of the escape attempt. (I'm having some trouble telling Cole and Bernin apart due to physical similarities. Maybe one could fall into a vat of permanent red fur dye or something?)

First of all, I assume you do NOT mean "top level domain" (e.g. ".com", ".net", ".your-top-level-domain"), though hear you CAN actually buy those now...

I'm using GoDaddy for alicrow.com right now, for basically the same reason as Xepher said. Seems pretty nice so far, though I agree they've got a whole bunch of crap they'd like you to buy. For example, $12.49 a MONTH for a Microsoft Office 365 package. Perhaps they make their money from that crap so they can offer good prices on the important stuff (domains).
I'm actually thinking of purchasing some related domains (probably alicrow.net and alicrow.org) now. I saw in an earlier (like, 7 years ago) post that Xepher was regretting not getting xepher.com (by the way, it's available for $1895 (one-time fee), if you still want it). It probably won't be an issue, but considering a domain is about $10-15 a year, there's not much harm in buying some extras. And then fool around with them. Use them for testing or something. I recently built a desktop that I've been ssh-ing into, and remembering the ip address is kind of a pain, so I'll probably use the .net for that.
Anyway, guess I'd recommend GoDaddy and maybe a few variations on your domain just to be safe. You can buy the domain for multiple years at once, so I'd recommend buying it for the next year or two, but not any further. That way you're not stuck with it if it turns out there's a problem with your beautiful PenIsland.com domain name (though I can't fathom what would be wrong with penisland.com, the #1 source for tropical pens!)

Thank you.
As promised, here's your virtual BACON!!: http://mwadc.xepher.net/BACON.swf

By the way, I'm surprised at how few applicants you get. Looking at the forums, seems I'm the first one in 9 months or something. But you used to get tons of applications, right? Back in 2005? What changed?

I'm good with "mwadc". Like you said, I have a domain name I'll be pointing to it, so it doesn't matter much. Unless there's some reason why it would be better to use a longer name, I'll go with "mwadc".

Looking through my records, it looks like I wrote the first chapter 4 months ago. Meaning that's when I wrote the chapter that made it up there. The last year and half, at least, have been spent trying to refine this idea into something I have utter confidence in my ability to keep going.

With this story, I'm not locked-in to a specific area of exploration. If I ever get tired of writing about religion, I can write a few arcs that focus more on something else. One arc I have in mind is going to focus on LINARA (LINARA Is Not A Recursive Acronym), the company run by Alex and some friends, and a revolutionary product they create... and Microsoft's attempts to acquire it and rebrand it as their own. (grrr, stupid acquisition firm).

Frankly, I only need one fan: me. That's enough to keep me going. I write mainly for myself. I want others to enjoy it, but if they don't, that's not going to stop me. I write, first and foremost, because I want to write. To express myself.

The weekly schedule starts at the beginning of next year. Beyond that, I don't really know. Maybe 2015 will begin a twice-weekly schedule. Maybe thrice-weekly, if things go really well. The chapter length isn't changing, though. I write short chapters. I think that's advantageous for something on the web. People have short attention spans. With shorter, easier-to-manage chapters, people who stumble onto the site are more likely to give it a read.

As for attracting an audience, I'm looking into Project Wonderful, because it will allow me to take out ads on the site I go to. People who would be interested in my writing are likely interested in a lot of the stuff I read. I'm going to attempt to attract webcomic-readers (it may or may not work), because they might enjoy my conversational writing style.

I'm also using TV Tropes, which is where I go to find webcomics. They say "there's no such thing as notability", so I put examples from MW:ADC on a few pages there. Getting about as many hits from that as I get from webfictionguide. And TV Tropes will give more hits as the story progresses and I add more examples to the wiki.

I'll admit that a lot of this is new to me. I'm going to have to experiment with things and see how it goes. But I'm not giving up. Even if nobody ever sees this, it's still fun, and it'll show off my creative skills to potential employers (I'm looking to get into independent game development, since that's pretty much the only way to combine computer-geekiness and creative writing).

[Username:]

Username: mwadc
Email: dpiros at comcast.net
Site Description:
The site is for my web serial, Mysterious Ways: A Divine Comedy, currently located at http://alicrow.com. For now, the site is updating every other week, but it's going to move to a weekly schedule once I have a good buffer built up.

Concept:

MW:ADC is a science fiction + fantasy web serial that seeks to defy conventions. It rejects the stock fantasy setting, and instead focuses on a world with both magic and advanced (a decade or two past our world) technology. It mixes humor and philosophy, with the aim to entertain first and foremost, but optionally to provide readers with a new way to look at life and encourage them to question things they take for granted.
The story centers on a group of mortal gods trying to uncover the grand secrets of the universe, and find their place within it.

The group includes (not all have appeared yet):

• Alex-- A fire god who tends to alternate between too-light-hearted and nervous breakdown (I suspect bipolar disorder). He's also an angel, and a Wiccan (Eclectic Witch, technically).
• Lucifer-- A 'cubi god of Truth who insists morals are a mere societal construct, and hold people down. He enjoys inflicting mental torture on people, and eating souls deep-fried in peanut butter.
• Tanner-- An adorable were-kitty god of naps. Enjoys napping, tummy rubs, and more napping.

Also staring:

• AIINACS-- a sentient A.I., and fierce GNU/Linux supporter. Released most of his source code under a modified version of the GPL that forbids porting it to Windows or OS X.

Basically, it's a wild, ridiculous story that explores the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and provides commentary on religion and society. And makes fun of things.

About me:

I started writing about three and a half years ago, after I ran out of good books to read. Two years ago, I self-published my first novel, Project New Age, which is available on amazon.com, and has sold a whopping total of three copies!! <sarcasm>Yay!! What a success!!</sarcasm>

Yeah, turns out, marketing is everything. Nobody knew about my book, so nobody bought it. After luring several potential customers to the site (with promises of virtual BACON!!), hearing how much they love the preview chapters up there, and then hearing "I don't have much money...", I decided the hell with being a professional author. I don't want to make money off my writing; I just want to write, and have a devoted cultgroup of readers to give feedback and praise and worship me. For that, I figured a web serial was the ideal solution.

On that note, one of the main reasons I'm attracted to xepher.net is because of the community. And the newsbox. DMFA (for a while longer), Project Future, Last Resort, and other great works are hosted here, with a newsbox on each page, full of links to other creative and wonderful sites. I found both Project Future and Last Resort from the newsbox on DMFA. And it lists all sites equally, unlike sites like webfictionguide that show the popular stuff at the top, and the stuff that needs promotion at the end, where nobody ever sees it.


Okay, not really sure how much content I need to have on my site in order for you to make a decision, so if there's not enough up there, then I'll do The Challenge.

P.S. I'll give you virtual BACON!! if you accept me.
P.P.S. Since you're probably going to ask, I can assure you that I'm capable of managing the technical aspects of a website. I'm an Electrical and Computer Engineering major, have plenty of programming experience (though mostly in C++, not HTML and PHP), and I'm running Linux (which proves that I'm a geek).