Frangles - Beta Bricks

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12/30/09

If we were to print out all written Frangles material and have you thumb through it, you'd get a much better idea of the concept and structure, and your opinion of our writing competence would lucky be flupupled. That was the idea of simply posting everything semi-written instead of holding back over half of it. (Right now about 300 out of 750 PLP are posted over about 100 fages). If that idea seems premature to you (obviously most writers write whole books before publishing), keep in mind acouple things.
Frangles ultimately is not a single book or series of books. It's a huuuge giant bunch of many many pages organized into frillions of different stories depending which pages you read and in which order. Therefore, there's no guide as to what to post when. We could take decades and write dozens of books worth of material then post it all at once, or we could post a paragraph at a time! Remember that Frangles is--and most likely always will be--a *draft*. That's because fractals are infinite an unending, and we might always find a spec or two or design here or there than reflects back into the entire whole, leaving many other sections already written to be re-written, and so on. As fages are posted, they come together more and more and reflect on the whole concept more and more. Hence the idea of just posting all finished fages (that is, a scene of frangles which in and of itself is a solid polished thing, like a scene in a movie sans the rest of the movie)--including ones of which we have little idea of where they'll eventually go if they'll eventually fit in at all--would be like giving you a sneak peak like a film screening or a beta release of a video game. Or like an artist who releases single songs before a full album, or a photographer who puts out their photos before having a full book or calendar of them.
That said, it's still a nifty idea. Posting all material might give you an extra journey like watching a cartoon or video game character be sketched before their concept and artwork is finalized. In fact we're vaguely leaning toward the idea, but our hurdles are as follows.

1/ The "750 paperback lengthed pages" we've been talking about includes prose that isn't polished into finalized "bricks" (or fages, that is, one scene which in combination with others forms longer stories). That's the point where it would be pointless to post or publish at all, just like no writer posts every single brainstorming sheet or half-paragraph of writing. However, a finished "brick" (fage, or scene) can be considered a very short work of art in and of itself, or at least, a finish piece, like selling a pipe that will/could be used in endless different construction projects. And since some of these pipes/fages/bricks are half done or 2/3 done or 99% done, a lot of the ones we'd choose to post still need to be worked into solid bricks/fages.

2/ A lot of the raw prose is in different formats (notebooks, stray graph paper, text files, rtf files, html files, the backs of napkins..) and need to be unified. In fact, we're still debating what format(s) the posted/finished material should be stored in and how it should be edited (we're having a .txt/.html debate at the moment), so certainly organizing stray bricks/fages is second priority, but will get done, as things have to be typed into files long before they can be posted anyway. (That is, there'll always be a lot of material that's just about ready to post even if it's nowhere near ready to fit in anywhere.)

3/ We're really trying to work on finishing the first nova at the moment ("Skip Square One", Frangles 1311), so currently our priority is working material into solid structures rather than posting material that isn't structured yet. We don't think the nonlinear reading concept of Frangles is demonstrated well enough yet to post a whole bunch of stuff that isn't even *going* to be structured for awhile.

4/ Perhaps most importantly, our team of talentless, dropout compsci majors have unanimously decided to put fractal nonlinear site management software engineering nontrivially below online video games and linear vampire RPGs. Write now the fages of Writer's Bricks are being copied into html manually as each one is completed, so we can't change the format / backgrounds / etc of the pages without doing every single one by hand, never mind beginning the same process with a hundred other "beta bricks" before our nerds have sacrificed one of their precious 15-smit !@#$ snack breaks to write the ten second code to do this stuff. To be fair, they *are* making progress, however, as they've recently tossed aside their Basic and Fortran books in favor of a shared copy of "C# For Lazy Roleplaying Idiots".

5/ We like to create a sense of mystery about some of the seven Ages of Okuaka (Flutonia, Earth, Flurth, Florbb, Kroffonia, Generika, Zeroa), so we're not sure if we want to spoil some of the surprise by just plain posting everything we know about every one of them. We might, though, as the up-to-date story of *developing* what they're about might be one worth following.

And so that's basically our progress on the idea of posting all finished fages ("bricks"). Check back sooner or later (or now, or never, you get the idea) for news & progress.

8/13/09

After the embarassing event of having put up a blank page of promised frangles bricks for an entire week, it's now decided this page shall be officially indefinitely procrastinated, and/or forgotten about completely. Thank you for your tolerance of standard friter incompetence during this 343 year construction period.

8/4/09

After a massive plethora of headaches, brain farts, writer's blocks, writer's bricks, story tarts, debates, lawsuits, interkuic wars, lost manuscripts, fraudulant criminal charges that every missing manuscript was lost on purpose, fraudulant criminal charges that there were never any manuscripts to begin with, counter-fraudulant lawsuits that the former is an intrinsically fraudulant accusation given a universe of infinitely equal frangles of which it is one of, doubly quadruple nondisclosure power fraud jet press conferences explaining why this sentence has become the longest like... ever, and a single coin toss, it's been decided to post all finished frangles bricks for lack of anything better to do with them (such as actually finishing one).

The decision was finalized mainly due to the great fear of Friter Judgement Day via the mortal-sin charge that Frangles never accomplished a damn thing in its entire eternity of nonexistence. On this day (increasing more and more in real world corporeality as the friters' fears of it become more paranoid and delusional), it's foretold that the wrath of the entire body of nonexistent Frangles fans (fracked off they never actually came into existence for lack of any actual frangles material to be a fan of) will sentence the eternal souls of all known friters to burn in, well, Blorkk. ...for all eternity. Or at least just plain hurt a lot.

Now, if we're going to throw up a bunch of random !@#$, it would be wonderful to be able to claim the coherency of a rough draft at least, if you're not going to get to read the whole whole damn thing. But that would require competence. It would even be a nice bronze metal to be able to claim the diligence to have finished at least a whole bunch of random drafted chapters. But again, that would require competence. So, in all situations where creativity fails, we've done what it's always best to do: be as creative as humanly possible in explaining why you're unfinished lump of sh** is a full masterpiece frwoa! ....Of couuurse, actually keeping a copy of the written explanation as opposed to chucking the entire 50-page !@#$ing thing in the office shredder because some idiot nameless krforb thought it was the !@#$ing lunch menu, would yet again, require competence.

This final event, ironically, finally caused a little writing inspiration, if only because a friter just happening to be listening to Alanis Morisette and noticed the lyrics to "Isn't it ironic?" were paralleling the friter screaming at the still-nameless krforb who chucked the entire 50-page !@#$ing explanation of why Frangles isn't a lump of useless !@#$ into the office shredder. It was at this point that the friter remembered the term "irony" was originally a literary term before it was the third word of the chorus of a long forgotten top 49s hit. (Either that, or the friter decided to hallucinate it from a top 49s hit into a fraudulant reality plagiarizing Alanis' invented term).

Then, with the renewed muse of a basic seventh grade literary term the friter in question had been idiotic enough to have forgetten (and had somehow passed entirely by altogether throughout friting college long afterwards), they had the idea that instead of calling the unfinished sum lump of !@#$ a finished masterpiece,they just post it all and call it what it really is. Then, if anyone wants to complain about having the final product being ruined for them, it'll be their own damn fault in reading the section with the warning "THIS IS A LUMP OF USELESS SPOILER !@#$ SO DON'T BOTHER READING ANY OF IT". (Or at least, unless you spend your free time walking to preschools and fumbling through discarded crayon scribbles that didn't quite make the cut to a week long display on a rusty fridge).

HENCE, below is a bunch of random semi-finished fractal prose brick modules that you probably shouldn't bother reading if you ever want to any story they'll ever be a part of. Of course, from one frangle, it's all the same story.