Okay, here’s the deal: I need readers, you need friends to play with and people want a book version for ease of reading. In investigating how to do that, I’ve come up against a roadblock: The Song Lyrics. If I leave them as they are – possibly even in the art! – and I become even a blip on the radar, the recording industry will eat me. They have eaten authors before. This isn’t fair, but that’s the way it is.
I have looked at my options and I’ve come to a hybrid solution: Write around the lyrics everyplace I can and where I can’t – and in the art – they will be filked. Filking is an established method of parody, I can’t find any filkers who’ve been sued for copyright infringement, and even Weird Al doesn’t have to get permission – he’s just nice. So hide yo kids, hide yo wife, and for God’s sake hide yo lawyers.
I don’t know if Erik can keep his music loophole under these circumstances, but I’m going to try to preserve as much as I can. Version One of Tin Soldier is going away, take one last look. but Version Two will have better art and come in books available here and hopefully at Amazon! The free weekly installments will remain here too, of course.
This is a lot for me to do. I’m going over about 2000 pages of content with random rewrites and redrawing most, perhaps all, of the art for each installment. That’s +/- 180 illustrations! I’m also going to gather at least one volume of installments together for self-publishing, and add a forum and resources for people who want to write stories and produce art set in this universe. I’m opening up the doors! This may also mean making multiple uploads to DeviantArt so I can get some free advertising, and there will be redesigning of the site.
Beginning October 12th, for the rest of 2020, I will not be producing new installments. There will be crazy amounts of new stuff appearing at random, but no new installments. The site itself may go down and come back up and look weird. If you’re supporting me at the Patreon, I understand if you take a break for a couple months. Please do bookmark the Patreon and keep checking it, because when I put up new stuff I’ll mention it there.
I hope to be back on January 3rd. I will update here if that changes. I probably won’t get everything done that I want to do, but Year Three is planned to be a short one with frequent breaks and about 40 installments, so I have time to begin writing and redesigning characters for Year 13. Hopefully that means more time to clean up whatever I didn’t finish (it’ll probably be the art) for Years 1-3.
Thanks for your patience!
I’m sorry you have to rewrite so much, but I’m glad you’re getting ahead of this and not finding out the hard way. Yours isn’t the first serial I’ve read before and after the serial numbers had to be filed off (though yours is a more limited case). In my experience the second pass is ultimately beneficial, just because having another chance to edit is always beneficial. Anyway, hang in there! I look forward to the new, improved Tin Soldier.
Still looking into my options, including an alliance with the Organization for Transformative Works. It’s possible not all the music is going away. Depending on legal advice or lack thereof, we may be evolving into a guerrilla artistic movement, a non-profit or even a religion. The religion angle is a weird one, but it could give me more options for sharing my work while preventing garbage people from abusing it like poor Pepe the Frog. Something like some doctrine establishing that we don’t use these words or images to harm others and if you do I’m gonna go all Hobby Lobby your ass. But I’m still looking into it.
I for one am prepared to build a shrine to the invisibles if it will help establish your religion.
Good luck with everything!! Your work effort never ceases to amaze me (in a good way!).