User blog:Micfac08/DtR Wiki Updates

In this area, I will collect my own thoughts about Dreams to Reality project and share them with anyone who may be interested in them as I make my way through the motions of actually writing this massive story that's been flowing through my head, evolving and changing as I myself did, since the eighth grade. If this series ever actually takes off, I'm sure some fans would love to read some of this, so here you go, future fans. In the meantime, people are probably only wondering what the hell they're doing reading this.

August 9, 2010
About a week ago (August 3, 2010, for the history buffs), I finally decided that it was time to sit down and actually make something tangible of this incredibly massive story that has been forming and evolving in my head since I was 14 years old in 1998. Of course, what this series will be when it is written today is absolutely nothing like it was when I first thought of it, but the same basic characters are there, and the same basic plot is still in there somewhere, but with a lot of other storylines and characters thrown in the mix on top of it. I think the main reason why it's taken me so long to actually get moving on writing the rebooted series, set in the 2008-2012 timeline, is not only because I was so afraid of how massive it had become, but also because of a lack of tangible material I could go back and look at for reference in writing the new incarnations. I had started to write the new incarnation three different times since 2004, but never got further than a chapter into it in either case. Lack of proper planning for the Coral Beach side of the cast was really keeping me from getting anything other than Eagle Creek's cast's storylines going. It also didn't help that the computers I use like to crash and need to be replaced before I can back anything up, which is another fine reason for finally making a wiki for everything, so I don't have to keep going back and starting over should anything happen to my current laptop. It's not all just gone when a computer decides it's not going to cooperate with me anymore. Of course, I should back up the files like a normal person, but I like to do things the hard way in life, quite frankly, and backing up my files would make too much sense. So now we've got a wiki for this project, and... well, it'll need a wiki once I get the novel series off the ground anyway, so we'll just call the wiki in these extremely early stages "the series bible," because at this wiki, there's going to be a wealth of information about the cast of the novel series, and in many cases, spoilers may abound about potential future storylines, because the events of the novellas and web series actually take place further ahead on the timeline of the novels, which has been time-shifted nine years into the future from the web series, which was itself time-shifted two years into the future from the novellas. My own feeling about releasing such spoilers? Eh, it's all right. Most of what happened in the web series is actually either going to either not make it into the novel series at all, will take place at some other point in the timeline than late May 2009, or will be so fundamentally changed from its prior appearance in the web series or novellas that anything that happened in those two continuities should be taken with a grain of salt when pertaining to its relevence in the novel series anyway. Anything that makes it into the novel series from the web series virtually unchanged is... well, an Easter egg of sorts for any fans who happen to find it first. The bottom line is, the events that were covered in the web series covers such a small slice of what Dreams to Reality will become as a novel series that I'm not concerned with spoilers about those events being out there. In fact, I've been trying to tell anyone who would listen about this story for over a decade, so if anyone were to contact me and ask me what I have planned to do, I'll probably tell them (at least for a while). I'm telling you, this story is huge, and I could tell anybody anything about it and not spoil the entire thing.

So about this wiki itself... wow, this is going to be an enormous project. I've never worked on any other kind of wiki before, but I knew that it was going to be a big undertaking when I went into it, but... my God, this thing is even bigger than I thought possible. It took me almost two hours a bit ago to create the article for Melinda Flint as it stands today--in which the only information is data from the first episode of the web series and absolutely nothing else. So I'm sitting back and looking at this cast list from the first episode and arguing with myself how I should go about doing the wiki--should I just summarize all of the episodes first and then go back and fill in the gaps with the cast of characters, or do everything step by step, episode by episode, so that nothing ends up getting missed? Well, I've always demanded of myself to make this series more complex than it probably should be, so of course, I'm going to insist that I make this wiki so big, which is probably going to doom it to failure, I'm going to say it right here, right now, at 11:03 PM Eastern Daylight Time on Monday, August 9, 2010. This wiki will lie unfinished and unupdated within two months' time. It is probably true. I'll keep coming back to it, sure, and update here and there, but the sheer mass of this story is crushing, and I really cannot seem to get it moving because I keep finding new ways to scare myself with how big it is, like attempting to create a wiki cataloguing all 30 episodes of the web series and create articles for everything related to it before writing the novel series I actually want to be writing instead of languishing in series history like this. But if authors didn't have a way to put their ideas on paper (or virtual paper, I guess), I'm sure they'd be crushed under the sheer mass of their stories just like I have been with mine, so I think that once I get some kind of system down with the wiki, it'll start to flow faster until that entire continuity is chronicled, and I can use it to use as a frame of reference when writing the new incarnation. Hopefully that convenience will in turn help me to get the novels off the ground faster, and in turn help me make the series better and more successful. I'd like to think that I could maybe eventually get something for this major labor I'm pulling off by myself here at some point!

Updated articles for today are the character articles for Michael Bennett, Jamie Blonner, Jack Brock, Ashley Chamberlain, Brandon Danber, Christina Davis, Dustin Finley, and Melinda Flint. All of their character profiles are current up through and including... the first episode of the web series. Whoo-hoo, lol. I'll begin with Rocky Fronset tomorrow and make my way down the alphabetical list of cast members until I finish with them, and then begin work on the web series timeline, including data on events depicted in the first episode, and begin articles pertaining to changes in continuity between the novellas and web series, and in turn between the web series and novel series, before moving on to summarizing the second episode of the web series and updating the various articles that report on characters and locations featured in the second episode. I'll update here as we go, so keep an eye here for updates!