The Ship's Log O' the Festerin' Boil

Miss Piggy: “Why are you telling me this?”
Diana Rigg: “It’s basic plot exposition. It has to go somewhere.”
From “The Great Muppet Caper”

First, thanks for being our readers.

Second – Don’t worry (or don’t get your hopes up,) we’re going to continue the story.

But, as much fun as we have with it, we have always said that we’re doing the story first and foremost as a writing exercise. We’ve learned a lot already during the writing of the first 240,000 words – like the fact that we can write 240,000 words.

Now we’ve got another goal. In a word, we want to see if we can write a story that might actually be publishable. This means that starting Friday we’re going to continue the adventure, pretty much right where we left off Monday, but in a sense we’ll be starting brand new. We’re going to write it as if it were a brand new book to an audience that mostly doesn’t know us or anything about the crew of the Festering Boil. They don’t know the characters or the history, don’t know who Sawbones is or why he’s so cranky, don’t know why Cementhands is unconscious, why they’ve got a British officer on board or even who Cap’n Slappy and Ol’ Chumbucket are.

So it’ll almost be as if we haven’t written any of this yet. We’re going to continue the story pretty much right where we left off Monday, but we’ll be telling it as if we’re approaching a brand new audience, So we’re asking for a little patience. Because YOU already know what happened to George’s ankle and that Mandrake Tharp is a sanctimonious little prig.

We may adjust a few things, tweak a few details to make the transition a little smoother or clean up things we were unhappy with, but we’re still doing essentially the same story with the same crew in the same Caribbean, which may bear little or no relation to the real one but that’s not the point. The point is we’re having fun with the story, and we’re trying to stretch as writers a bit. We’ll be taking Wednesday off to think through where we’re going, then we’ll be back Friday with a new installment – which will be written as the first in this story arc though you already know we’re after the treasure fleet.

If you like it, let us know. If you don't, please let us know what you think we could do better. And if you're a publisher who wants to send us a chest of gold for the rights to the story – well, who are we to disappoint you?