A few days ago, the last of my “Adam: The Beekeeper Chronicles” chapters went live. That means 100 chapters, each exactly 100 words long, can now be found in its own section of the site. They tell the story of three of the characters from Secret Government Robots as they figure out what the next part of their lives will be.
With those Chronicles now concluded, those characters don’t have an ongoing home for the first time since SecGov began back in 2010. That doesn’t mean their stories are over. I fully intend to touch in on them again, hopefully even before the year is over, but there is no ongoing outlet for their tales currently planned. We, like those characters, will just have to wait and see what’s next.
A few years back I did a post full of sentences that, according to search engine searching, did not exist on the Internet until I bravely created them. I’m doing it again! More sentences!
Go!:
- “We need more rocketship movies.”
- “Tomorrow is just later today if you don’t sleep.”
- “I could probably make it rain if I wanted.”
- “What’s your favourite type of chain link fence?”
- “The stealth bomber was invented by ninjas.”
- “I burned down my castle for the insurance money.”
- “The light is always greener on the other side of the tunnel.”
- “Most operas don’t end with a car chase.”
- “Grapes can be your best friend, if you let them.”
- “The devil knows how to build a rowboat.”
- “I’m falling in love with this luggage.”
- “The internet has more sentences on it.”
There! I’ve added to the wealth of humanity’s knowledge!
Hey look, a new form of content has begun on the Book of PDR. It’s Adam: The Beekeeper Chronicles. This is going to continue the story of Adam, the Beekeeper who played a minor but pivotal role in Secret Government Robots, as well as some of the other cast members from that comic. But now they’re in prose! Neat!
Specifically, I’m going to do chapters for this as drabbles, the type of story which is exactly one hundred words long. Easy to read, right? Everyone wins. I figure I’ll do a hundred chapters of it, then see where I feel like going from there.
Hey, now that we’ve begun the last chapter of the story, I might as well reveal that I have completely finished Secret Government Robots. And it’s only about five years late and about four years after I lost interest.
The fact is, I enjoyed writing SecGov a heckuva lot more than I ever enjoyed drawing it, so once I had plotted out the end of things, I barely wanted to put the effort into finishing the art. This is especially true because my limited artistic skills I often had to cut things that I would have liked in there, but which I simply didn’t have the skill to draw. Things were simply a lot better in my head and it was disheartening to see the final product.
Not that it went the way I expected while writing either. The very original concept for the strip was just a gag strip through which I’d secretly build up a bit of lore for the fictional universe that is home to other story ideas I have. That quickly morphed into an idea focused around SecGov City, where I originally planned to tell different stories related only in that they were set in the same Robot city. Instead, I came up with an overarching plot and ruined that plan. Typical PDR. I did build up some of that lore I originally aimed for, though more clumsily than intended, because I had to drop big ideas without spoiling the stuff I want for those other stories.
Still, I don’t fully hate it or anything. I’m glad I got the thing concluded. There are characters in there I would absolutely like to revisit. I even have an idea for a spinoff that would be more focused, but there is no way I could draw it, so it will likely never manifest.
Anyway, SecGov is basically over and that’s good. Maybe someday someone will read it.
Since January 2013, I’ve been doing those posts on Sundays where I put up sketches of characters and describe them and such. It’s been fun. It was mostly an attempt to keep me doing something every week, while also expanding on the fictional universes I enjoy creating so much.
Since July 2015, I have also, not in the “public” view that is this website, been creating a tabletop RPG that takes place in my fictional universe(s). It’s a lot of work because, for some reason, I decided to build it from scratch, and I have pretty minimal experience with such RPGs to begin with. But I’ve greatly enjoyed doing it.
But these two projects, pretty time consuming as they are, have had an unintended result. While I have now a lot of raw material about my universes, I haven’t gained all that much new actual story content set in those universes. So now I’m gonna stop doing the Super Sunday sketches regularly (they will still pop up on occasion when I can’t think of anything else or what have you), and will try to use Sundays for actual story content, or perhaps discussion of the PDR RPG. I haven’t decided just yet.
Let’s see how this goes.