Kickstarter

Hi everyone!

Again, a reminder: if you have moved or are moving, NO WORRIES. We're going to send out the backer's survey when everything's ready, so we'll be able to get the address you want your stuff shipped to then!

So it's been two weeks since the book has been at the printer. We've gotten proofs of certain pages (they look so pretty, they were approved because they were so pretty) and things are moving nicely. Not quite as quickly as I would like, but not too slowly either. As soon as we have a delivery date I will share it here (and then book a flight to the States so I can start signing those bad boys!) The hardcover's being printed at the same place, so I can give you some HARDCOVER NEWS:

Here is some HARDCOVER NEWS:

• reversible dustjacket will look amazing


• BENEATH that dustjacket will be a faux-leather cover with gold foil printing: remove the dustjacket, and this book will look NOT UNLIKE a straight-up classy volume of Shakespeare you might've gotten if you hadn't spent your money on this crazy adventure instead!


• here is the dustjacket design that faces outward by default: what you're seeing is rear flap, back cover, spine, front cover, and front flap

• here is the other side of that dustjacket, a riff on the softcover cover:

Here is some AUDIOBOOK NEWS:

• final recording session is DONE. It's being edited together AS WE SPEAK.


• part of this editing is adding an original theme song (BECAUSE WHY NOT) and a few other cool audio cues (BECAUSE WHY NOT)

Beyond that, there's not much to report! I realized the other week that I still have one Kickstarter pledge unfulfilled (besides writing a sequel, for which RESEARCH AND PREPARATION WORK HAS BEGUN and I dare promise IT WILL BE TOTALLY NUTS) - I promised I'd make a pizza that looks like Hamlet!

This is exciting. I get to eat pizza in the future, you guys.

I'll post pictures.

Hi everyone!

A reminder: if you have moved or are moving, NO WORRIES. We're going to send out the backer's survey when everything's ready, so we'll be able to get your most current address then!

Yesterday we submitted the final version of To Be or Not To Be to the printer. The paper had already been ordered and the books are being printed in the States, so printing will be as fast as possible, but we're looking more at June than May for delivery. I'm sorry it could not be sooner! The delay was in laying the book out: we wanted it to be perfect and that took some time.

But this is going to be a gorgeous book.

Since the Kickstarter did so well, we could afford to make this book a little decadent. Every node gets its own page, and each ending gets a two-page spread:

(That image is by Alex Culang and Ray Castro (the artists behind Buttersafe and Katamari! It's an ending that appears if you play as King Hamlet and decide not to become a ghost. SPOILER ALERT??)

This will be a solid little book: the final page count is 764 pages, and 113 of those contain illustrations. Not bad. Not bad at all. It's such a pretty book, you guys.

The manuscript itself has been copyedited twice and gone over in great detail when we did the audiobook, but when it was laid out there was the chance of errors being introduced. The only option was to go over the manuscript AGAIN in even greater detail, and to double-check that every single page linked to the correct pages every single time. We didn't want "turn to page 45" and have 45 be the wrong place!

So I wrote a program that took the book text, transformed it into a graph, and checked that this graph was the same as the graph it also generated from the original manuscript. Or, to put it another more futuristic way, I brought a computer intelligence into the world, designed specifically to play my book and run through every possible game. The book was now COMPUTER-APPROVED. That took few hours.

But then I realized that while I thought the program worked, I only had the one test case, and I didn't want to risk an undetected bug in my whipped-together program making the book turn out less then amazing. So I went through the entire book manually, marking down node and link numbers, and making sure they were all consistent. That took an entire day. At the end, I'd produced this, which looks a lot like my notes on unraveling the conspiracy about how dogs are mind-controlling the world's leaders but actually represents a lot of hard work:

All this to say that yesterday was really exciting and this bad boy is going to be a REAL THING. We're now at the printers! We've still got to lay out Poor Yorick and get that printed, but it's a much smaller job that we're starting on first thing next week, and shouldn't take more than a few days.

Other news is that we're doing a final day of re-recording on Monday - this is clean-up work on the audiobook, redoing any line that sounded a bit off!

IN CONCLUSION, WHEELS ARE IN MOTION AND SOON BOOKS WILL BE COMING OUT OF THE WHEELS

Today is William Shakespeare's birthday, so you know that that means!!

STATUS UPDATE TIME

• again, if you have moved or are moving, NO WORRIES. We're going to send out a survey when everything's ready, so we'll be able to get your most current address then!
• first draft of the audiobook is IN MY HANDS, and I've been going through it the past few days (it's 8.5 hours long! Whoaaaah) to find anything that needs fixing. We'll have one more recording session to fix any problem and then we are DONE! In the meantime, the audio team is cleaning up the audio. It turns out there's clicks that the bones in our jaws make that can be picked up when you have a sensitive microphone right near someone's mouth? Those are being removed. I can barely hear them but I am assured that they EXIST and are being EXPUNGED.
• the Yorick skull has had a final prototype and is APPROVED. These are now being manufactured! Awesome!
• ebooks are being tested and are just about done! Now it's just bugfixes to get everything perfect in the widest array of ereaders possible.
• the physical book has had a first layout done, and we're making changes to produce the second one.

So here's what's left to do:

• finalize the physical book layout
• print the books
• sign all those books, hah hah hah, what could possibly go wrong
• send everything out

Everything else (the bookmarks, tattoos, stickers, posters) are sitting in a warehouse AT AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, ready to go! We're still hoping to hit our May deadline for all this, but it may slide past that a bit. It depends on how fast the print layout can be finalized and turned around! I will, of course, keep you posted.

Updates!

• if you have moved or are moving, NO WORRIES. We're going to send out a survey when everything's ready, so we'll be able to get your most current address then!
• the play was insane and fun, you can view the log here!
• audiobook recording is DONE! Pretty much. The files are being cleaned up and stitched together now, and we'll probably have a few more hours of recording to fix anything we don't like, but it's SO CLOSE
• physical book is still being laid out
• and most of the ebooks are done!

For the ebooks, it turns out most authoring software is designed for baby books that only have one story and that you only ever read forward. So instead I've been writing code to generate the ebooks myself, because WHY NOT THIS'LL BE AWESOME and because I WANT THE BOOKS TO BE SUPER RAD.

I've been using the prequel book, Poor Yorick, as a test case, since it's smaller and therefore quicker to generate than the full text of To Be or Not To Be. And I've been sending out versions to friends with ereaders to test it out. It's looking really good! Here's a sneak peek at the book on a Kindle Keyboard (black and white unfortunately, but the file is in colour and will look so pretty on colour displays!) The art for this book is by Tyson Hesse and the words which you can comprehend if you read really fast or know how to pause a video are by ME.

For those interested, the books have an introductory page teaching you how to read them, and after that every node is set up as a chapter in the ebook file. Choices are also their own chapter, so they always show up on their own page all nicely grouped together.

You navigate by tapping on links, which brings you through the story!   At an ending you can follow the restart link, or use the "back" button on your device to go back to the most recent choice you made before you died. Basically it's designed to be as intuitive as possible. Basically IT MAKES READING FUN.

FINALLY

Just a reminder that the live and internet-streaming play performance of the book is today at 9 pm EDT. Full details are at Shakespeare in Busan.com and you can RSVP on Facebook!  If you're not in EDT, here's what time it will be in your time zone.

And yes, if you miss it, it'll be recorded and made available online after the fact. But you won't be able to join in on the voting to decide where the story goes next if you're not there tonight! :o

I can't wait to see this - all I've seen are the same images you have, so I'll be as surprised as you are!

9pm EDT tonight.  Shakespeareinbusan.com.  EXCITING!