Virus Alert: Patience Is Rewarded [Not a story segment]

[WilloWisp]

It probably hasn't escaped everyone's attention that, in most of the parts of the world using the Gregorian calendar, April is nearly over. It also probably hasn't been overlooked that, despite my earlier assurance that Virus Alert would resume before the end of April, this has not yet happened.

Now, I could be coy and pretend that I meant "I will resume writing Virus Alert before the end of April," but that's just not cricket. Although I have been writing steadily over the past week (which would fulfill the "writing before the end of April" portion of the statement), I was also writing steadily the week before that, and the one before that, and pretty much the entire month. Barring a few isolated demands from Real Life which precluded writing, I never really stopped, so it wouldn't be at all honest to say I'm "resuming" right now. I'm just continuing.

I have been writing ahead, and have drafted all of season six, and most of season seven. Unfortunately, I rather misgauged my production schedule, leaving the season six opener unfinished by the time of my personal due date. It's there, I just need to go in and fill in more detail. To give you an idea of the current status of episode 6.00, I present the following analogies for various other industries.

* Comic books: Sketches are done, now we're about halfway through inking and colors.
* Animation: The keyframes have been sent to the animation studio, and we've received about half of the in-betweens.
* Movies: Filming is done, we're just editing together the dailies, and we're nearly done with post-production and ADR.
* Software development: Beta testing is all but complete, we're already working on the Release Candidate.
* Book Publishing (As Stephen King would see it): I'm way behind. I mean look at this, the project started back in October, and I've barely got 600 pages of material here.
* Book Publishing (As Douglas Adams would have seen it): Whoosh.
* Book Publishing (As George R.R. Martin would see it): I'm nearly done with the next six parts. Also, seasons 1-7 form the first of three phases. Should have those out in stores by 2018.
* Console Video Games: Tightening up the graphics on level 3.
* PC Video Games: We shipped two weeks ago. Right now we're working on the patch which fixes that version so that it actually runs.

Sooooo... I can confidently say that the week will not end without another Virus Alert episode posted. And no, that doesn't mean I have any kind of time distortion device capable of stretching out a week for an indefinite period of relative time, nor am I using some exotic definition of any of the words in that claim. 6.00 is coming.