In other news, I’m still working on things, but I’ve not finished anything so no updates to the site for the moment: you can put that down to me being far more critical of my work these days! I used to let a lot of shoddy efforts through, but I’m trying not to let that happen again (although, saying that, I’m starting to regret the stylistic choice I made for the profile images, so they may change soon… :S). I’m trying to post more to the Farcebook group, and have started posting snippets and quotes from what I’ve written (things too short to keep updating this blog with, mind).

I’m also determined to write some kind of Actual Blog, rather than just this ‘development’ one – but I’ve no idea what to write about! It took me long enough just to write an introduction, so if anyone has any ideas, suggestions or requests, get them in now before I become world famous and can only communicate with the fandom through infrequent tweets and convention appearances!

(That last part was a joke by the way, Mr/s McSerious.)

In Shelley’s case, this is more a revision that reflects her fleshed-out parentage. While writing a scene set “during the war” that involved her father, I noticed he was Scottish (it’s one of those things that happens when you’re a writer: the characters make decisions for you. In this case, Shelley’s dad decided he spoke was a strong Scottish accent, and that was that), so I made her surname more appropriate.

Should note that Shelley herself doesn’t speak with a strong accent in my head, although she’s inherited a slight Scottish twang from her mother. Of course, if you want to get pedantic about it, the Scottish accent as we know it simply wouldn’t exist in a thousand years, and nor would the English language, but that’s artistic license for you :p

Shelley

Daughter of a suspected witch, who is plagued by the accusations from the oppresive Godhand. She spends much of her time in hiding among the orphans, and keeps journals of her harrowing experiences.

Meanwhile: yeah, I’ve not updated quite as much as I’d hoped, but things take more effort than you’d think! Let’s just say I’ll most certainly not be providing artwork for every Compendium entry XD

Here’s the first, Katrina’s, to give you an idea of what to expect. Others will follow as I complete the artwork. I’ll also expand the profiles in time to include other, more OCD information, but that’s not important right now, and I don’t want to spoil/scare off new readers (remember: square one)!

Katrina

A determined young girl who helps her mother run an orphanage for those who lost their parents to the harsh realities of the world. She is a keen photographer, and dreams of travelling the world.

Since I’m attempting to be a little more transparent with the series’ development, I thought I’d share a couple of the different designs I’ve done so far. There’s been a few more, but they’ve either been left unfinished, or declared not up to standard! The first example is, by far, the most time-consuming, while the second uses a few sneaky tricks to avoid some of the work…

Aliza, a Dante fangirl.

A more grown-up Katrina.

And since we’re here: yes, Aliza is a sort-of new character. She’s been in the backstory since around 2007, but as part of the revision she’s been moved into the main story (along with some the plot elements associated with her).

Meanwhile, I’ve experimented with a more grown-up look for Katrina to reflect her status as one of the older students (at 17), and also because I’ve contemplated ‘maturing’ the art to reinforce that these aren’t the usual teenaged protagonists of modern pop-culture.

I’m taking a few days off over Easter (clearly the best festival ever, thanks to the chocolate – Ostara be praised!), but I will no doubt be working on another style next week. I should probably settle on something soon…

For those who haven’t kept abreast with the news, I’m starting from square one again, to address a number of problems and flaws I had with the original work, and to ease the burden of creating a better site. For example, creating a series encyclopaedia is a rather frightening task when you have 90 chapters worth of content to work from!

As for “is this it?”, then bare in mind that things will be expanded over time. There’s an obvious lack of graphics for the time being because I haven’t finished enough – at present I want to avoid reusing the old artwork, and focus on developing new stuff. It doesn’t help that I’m a LOT more critical than I used to be, and the quality bar has been raised from what I accepted a couple of years ago (both in terms of art and writing).

Plus I don’t want to dive into the deep end with pages and pages of content, only to find out something doesn’t work somewhere, and find myself face with a whole ton of things to fix (as has happened before).

And speaking of having a series encyclopedia, you may notice there’s already one taking shape. Although there isn’t much content at present, I’ll be adding stuff over time. You may have also noticed that you can change the colour scheme of the site now. It’s a basic change for now, but I plan to expand the themes in the future. I may well add themes for mobile/portable devices at some point, too.

Meanwhile, a slightly borked (some images aren’t loading) backup of the old site can be found here, if you still want to read the original serial. I’ll keep it around for a while, but it will eventually come down around the time the new series starts up, so make the most of it.

*EDIT*
It’s now apparent that the story navigation is broken, and the only way to fix it would be for me to go through every single page altering the links. Ah well. If anyone WAS stuck in the middle of reading it and wants to continue, let me know and I’ll try and sort something out. Not much point wasting hours on that if no one will benefit from it XD

Right, I think that about covers it. I still have a few things to work out in the coding (which is so much simpler than the mess I had before), but I believe the basics are done. I guess there isn’t much to have an opinion on, but do let me know if you have any problems or spot a glaring error or two. The problem with developing websites is that you can never account for everyone’s set-up…