About halfway through writing Part II of the blog, which as you know covers The Burning Crusade, I made a startling discovery about a key piece of information that I had completely forgotten. It was buried so deep, apparently, that the person it affected had also forgot about it. The event was that Blain had actually stepped down from leading raids at the start of TBC to pursue Arenas, alongside Haribo and Annihilation.
I called Blain on the phone that evening to go back over what we remembered to try to wrack our brains and figure out why we forgot it. Ultimately, we pieced everything back together and I feel like I have a really good feel on how the events unfolded. The problem is that the entire first half of Part II is skewed to hell as a result. I tried to handle this with a two-part flashback set of posts starting with our kill of Rage Winterchill, but it felt awkward and weird. I recall it confusing several readers at the time as well.
Since then, I’ve found my groove of single posts that are split into three sections, each labeled with a sub-header and screenshot, and nailed what feels like the appropriate word count: 1400-1600ish, with perhaps a bit of play on posts that feature dialogue. I’ve also finally decided on a consistent naming convention for the titles and the chapter numbers – all of which may seem boring and inconsequential to the reader, but will more than likely play an important role if/when I ever turn this entire thing into an eBook.
I’ve been slowly going through the early part of the blog and re-writing/revising post-by-post, to adhere to this new system, and have now arrived at the major re-write. As a result, I’ve pulled about 11 posts completely down, and am redoing them from scratch. I plan to push them all back out at once. There’s going to be a lot more detail this time around, so if you felt like I skimmed through TBC a bit too quickly, you’ll be in luck (and if not, well…you’ll probably see it as homework!)
Here’s the current state of my progress – I’ll keep this updated if you care to watch the topic (switch the state at the bottom of the discourse thread to “Watching”) and you’ll be alerted for updates to the post.
NOTE: A few of them I’ve not yet gone over with a fine-toothed comb, which is what I do before I post a new topic here for everyone to review. If you see ‘no topic’, you are free to read it, but please hold your edits and commentary until I start a new topic here on the boards so that you can contribute your edits and thoughts to it.
have their own topic, are already reviewed/being discussed
- 2.1
- 2.2
- 2.3
- 2.4 - Karazhan
- 2.5 - My Second Mistake
- 2.6 - Logging in to Hell
- 2.7 - One Suggestion Too Many
- 2.8 - What Rolleth Downhill
- 2.9 - Razor Sharp
- 2.10 - Carrying the Load
- 2.11 - Divergent Paths
- 2.12 - The Accidental Florist
- 2.13 - A Single Point of Failure
- 2.14 - Pulling the Pin
- 2.15 - The Merger
- 2.16 - The Underwater Cavern
- 2.17 - Digging in Another Man’s Graveyard
- 2.18 - Decay
- 2.19 - Blizzard’s First Mistake
- 2.20 - Replenishment
- 2.21 - The Thin Yellow Line
- 2.22 - Blain Returns
- 2.23 - The Taming of the Askew
- 2.24 - Back on Tracks
- 2.25 - The Zanjina Monologues
- 2.26 - 9:53
- Let’s Talk About Raiding (no pics, suggestions welcome)
- 2.27 - The Tantrum
- 2.28 - Ashes to Ashes
- 2.29 - Raiding With the Enemy
- 2.30 - No Easy Out
- 2.31 - Resurrection via Apology
- 2.32 - Downsizing
- 2.33 - Controlling Power
- 2.34 - The Lemmings Are Marching…
- 2.35 - Time Travel
- 2.36 - World of Lovecraft
- 2.37 - Sacrificial Lambs
- 2.38 - Day of the Dog
- Why Raid Teams Fail
- 2.39 - The Different Guild
- 2.40 - A Noticeable Lack of Party Favors
- 2.41 - The Not-Knowing
- 2.42 - Wise Decisions
- 2.43 - The False Step
- 2.44 - Epilogue: The Dinner
This will take us up to the end of Part II.