If anybody is interested, I will be participating in a Fantasy Webcomic Roundtable at WEBReeF (which is an online webcomics meetup being held this weekend).

The roundtable is being held at these times:

fri 3 feb 20:00 (8 PM) Eastern Standard Time (US)
sat 4 feb 01:00 (1 AM) GMT/UCT
sat 4 feb 02:00 (2 AM) European Central Time (that's mine, ugh)

Feel free to drop by on the chat. I'll probably hang around somewhere there some time before and after the roundtable too in the unlikely event somebody wants to chat with me :)

Update: Added the date. Duh.

Update: It is done.

*chuckles*

Okay, so I was looking at what search queries people typed in google to find us in the past year. Obviously, most people find us by searching for "Chasing the Sunset".

The second most common result, however, is variations of "800 word story"

This takes them to this story that I wrote ages ago (which, to be honest, isn't very well written in the first place). It was later used as the background for "Big Sister" in the valley of the faeries storyline in CtS.

Now, I'm sure our readers are intelligent and can guess what people are looking for, very specific, an "800 word story". In total in the past year, over 600 people came looking for that.
I'm pondering being sneaky and adding the following text to the story, but make it only show up if the text was copied:

"If you are a teacher reading this, your student copied this story from my website and didn't reread it after pasting it. What a shame."

What do you guys and gals think? Too evil? :)

Oh, and some teachers are pretty smart. Some of the search results were for text that appears in the story.

P.S.: A lot of people seem to have come to us wondering who the main character of chasing the sunset is. If you're one of those and you meant our comic: It's technically Leaf, but Myhrad, Ayne and Feiht are pretty main too.

If you happen on the site today (18 jan) then you might notice all comments are blacked out. This is our little protest against SOPA, a US legislation that would have dire consequences for the internet if it passes.

Chasing the Sunset is hosted in the US, but since neither Alien or I live there, I think we fall under the provisions for "foreign sites". This would mean that a prosecutor in the US could force search engines and other sites to delist us or even our host to take us down, if a lawsuit is brought to us (obviously we lack the resources to fight any complaints in US court).

Of course it's very unlikely anybody would go after us, but that doesn't change the principle. SOPA is a dangerous law and I urge our US readers to contact their representatives and express their opposition to it.

For more details, check this page on wikipedia (one of the few wikipedia pages working today:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

Comments will be restored tomorrow. Happy censorship day!

Excerpt from "The bestiary of The World That Is" by Wizard Ehm-Al.

When I created my lists of creatures to study, it was with some hesitation that I added Faerie Dragons, and who could blame me: if the stories were true, they were a cross between faeries and dragons (with all the obvious implications) and if they weren't, it would be a wild jabberwock chase. Personally, I believed the whole species a fabrication of somebody who misspelled “fiery dragon” and didn't think I'd ever encounter one.

Read more...

Much could be said on the subject of the Hell's Pixies, although in truth if one removed all the curses the written material would be considerably shorter.

Note, please, that by curses I mean not merely vulgar language: so many malignant spells have been levelled at this group that should all of them have found their mark, the results would be, shall we say, unpleasant? Of course almost none of these curses worked, or at least worked for very long. The clue is in the name, after all: we are dealing with pixies.

Read more...