One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is the idea of ‘significant updates’. It’s an argument that Brad Guigar makes when talking about long-form webcomics like mine. The idea being that you want to make sure you’re updating regularly, but also that each update is significant.

I’m not sure that the page-a-week updates are doing the story much justice. The pages individually aren’t self-contained, they really kind of require the reader to flip back a page or two to get the gist of the ongoing conversational thread, and then they cut off again in the middle of a dialog only to pick up again a week later. What I should be doing is completing several pages in a row and then updating the site with full scenes, but finding those arbitrary breaks is never easy either.

So, what I’m considering starting with the Chapter 6, is simply posting the complete chapter all at once when it’s finished. It means a longer gap between finished work here at the site, of course, though I think I would still post finished pages as I complete them over at the Patreon as part of the Process feed. Here, though, updates would diminish, and would likely be more focused on the inspiration for the chapter, and become more of a working diary. Like, I’d post to say that I just finished a new page, but wouldn’t post the actual page until the chapter was finished. I would post character designs and sketches to whet interest, but would keep the actual narrative back until it could be appreciated as a full chapter.

I’m also wanting to redesign the site a bit, to remove the focus on the ‘latest page’, and instead on the overall stories and their chapter breaks. Part of my thinking along these lines has to do with my intention to switch to serialized prose fiction after The Eye of the Vortex is complete, and wanting to experiment with different update schedules, and how that will work when I’m posting prose instead of comics – the formats will be wildly different from what I’m used to.

Anyway, lots of thoughts. What do you think? Tell me in the comments, or over at the Patreon!