Category Archives: Words from Behind the Curtain
So Hey, Remember When I Had a Blog?
Do you? Is your memory that good? Impressive!
Okay, let’s try to start this off semi-properly. Ahem.
Hi everybody, time — after lo these many eons — for another OOC post from Averry. So, heya, how’s everybody been doing? I’ve been having a time myself, let me just tell you. In fact, I think I will, at least in thumbnail-sketch form.
So, the last time you all heard from me, at least through the blog, was about… spirits help us… about three years ago, as I was making a sincere effort to get the blog rolling again after yet another long stretch of silence. I really thought I was going to stick with that one, I swear! Which was right about when life decided to throw me one of those curveballs.
Just as the pandemic was getting into full swing and I was working on getting back into a Garrosh groove, I was diagnosed with lung cancer. This, by the way, after a lifetime of never having smoked a puff of anything, felweed or otherwise, so GO ME for winning the reverse lottery! I’m not going to torment/bore everyone with the details — some of you are already well aware of what’s been going on; I don’t at all mind elaborating for anyone who does want to know more; but most importantly, I don’t really want the medical nitty gritty to take over this update and turn it into some kind of woe-is-me post. Suffice to say, there have been ups and downs since then, but I’m still doing well, very much alive and active and doing a pretty damn good impression of someone who’s fully healthy. An act which I fully intend to keep pulling off for a good long while.
Obviously, though, when the news first hit, I suddenly had a lot going on that checked in much higher on the priority list than blogging and gaming and so forth. If I’m honest, though, most of the silence here has come down to inertia — once I got used to not blogging again, it just became a habit that was far too easy to keep falling into. I’m sure many of you know the deal, whether it’s blogging or exercising or keeping up with some other pursuit: “I should really get to that today… maybe a little later… oh, well, there’s always tomorrow.” Repeat for several hundred days straight.
Well, I finally figured it was time to get off my figurative ass and get back to it. Partly because I know I still have stories I want to tell and silliness I want to give form, partly because I don’t much like the idea of leaving this whole dorky project unfinished if things did suddenly go sidewise for me (which they won’t — do you hear me, universe?), but also in large part because I miss interacting with this weird, goofy community that somehow collected around my ridiculous ramblings here. So, on the off chance that some of you are still out there, I figured I would dust off the ol’ Command Board and try getting back to it.
For those of you who are still out there, thank you — I appreciate you still having an antenna up after all this time and being willing to peek back in again. For those of you who have long since checked out and stopped caring about the goings-on here, well, I can’t say I blame you. But you’re also not here to see this, so the hell with you. I mean, I still can’t blame you, I get it, but the hell with you just the same. Hey, everybody still here, let’s mock and jeer at the people who bailed! But I do get it.
Anyhow! I’m mostly writing this to digitally clear my throat and let people know I’m back (or trying to be!). And, since we are just starting into the month of April, we all know what that means — time for me to get back into form by recognizing National Poetry Month with a brand new edition of Garrosh’s Poetry Challenge! Because the world can never have too much EPIC VERSE.
So here’s where I have to come up with a gimmick for this round. In this case, I’m going to be a little lazy by going with something that some of you already built into a few mailbag letters, way back when: you start it, Garrosh finishes it! That is… in a comment on this post, or an email or Tweet to Garrosh, you come up with an opening line, and then I (erm, Garrosh) will try to come up with the rest of the poem that follows! Anything goes, so long as it’s something that could plausibly be a line from a poem (as opposed to the first paragraph of a novel or something).
I’m not going to lock in a set-in-stone schedule, but I’ll be sure to put up at least one post each week. I may very well post more if I get ambitious or see a particular line that’s just too tempting to pass up. So start pelting me with those ideas!
In the weeks ahead, I’ll likely also give a few more updates on blog goings-on. I might like to plan an occasional scheduled hangout in Discord (we created one for a DPS friends-of-blog guild in Classic, which I’ll try to link here soon) — I’m thinking it might give me added incentive to stay on task if a few folks wanted to come hang out while I’m assembling blog stuff. While I’m at it I could share WIP tidbits, whether that’s snippets of dialogue or comic drawings — maybe if I get really ambitious, and people would actually want to peek over my shoulder this much, I could stream myself drawing parts of the comics, so you can witness the hideous train wreck in progress.
Anyway, now I’m just musing and babbling (“AS OPPOSED TO WHEN ELSE, AVERRY?”), so let me wrap up here. Once again, thank you to everyone who’s still here, or who maybe finds their way here later on. Hopefully I’ll get to hear from many of you again soon.
Averry
The Return of (the) Garrosh (Poetry Challenge)
So yes, Averry is still alive! (At least for now.)
I had originally planned to add an OOC note in parentheses after the previous post (If you haven’t read that one yet, what are you doing here reading my prattling? Priorities, people!), but somehow it seemed like the closing bit would have lost something if it wasn’t really, y’know, the closing bit. So here I am to give you a second appearance in one night!
Which… I suppose still doesn’t make up for literal years since the last time I wrote something here. The force of inertia will do that to you. While I’ve worked on material for the blog in fits and starts since things went quiet around here, the reality is that once I got out of the habit of posting, it became all too easy to let things stay that way. So for those of you who are still out there even noticing a new blip on the radar, thank you.
But, as Garrosh himself said moments ago, under the new circumstances we’re all living under, it seems like we could all do with a little extra diversion and distraction, and what could be more entertaining (for me especially) than to slip back into the boisterous voice of everyone’s favorite long-deposed Warchief? (Although now we’ve gotten to the point where I need to make sure I’m being clear about which deposed Warchief I’m talking about. Yeesh.) Especially since April is National Poetry Month, which gives me an excuse to dust off Garrosh’s Poetry Challenge as a warmup.
So, here’s the plan: from now until the end of April, the Warchief will be posting a new installment of EPIC VERSE every Tuesday and Friday. As always with these poetry challenges, he’s going to need help from all of you, so fill up that comment section with suggestions – anything from specific topics to opening lines to kickstart the poem. Anything goes, and I’ll try to make use of as many of the suggestions as I can, but do try to keep it fun – remember, the spirit of the exercise is less “a somber meditation on existential despair” and more “There once was a gnome from Mudsprocket”!
That will take us through April. The first week or so in May is going to be a busy one for me, so I know that I won’t have time to give the blog a lot of attention, but after that, the plan is to post every Wednesday going forward – Warchief Wednesday, as it were! (And for anyone worried that it’ll feel weird to have mailbags not be on Monday, don’t worry; Monday Mailbag will stay in place, and those weeks you’ll just get a second post for the week!)
So, yes, that means you’ll soon get to resume the ongoing and ridiculous adventures of our very particular version of the big ol’ Mag’har lug. Spirits help us all.
One last note in closing: I have a small favor to ask. Since the last time I posted on the blog, there have been a lot of changes in WordPress that forced me to spend a fair bit of time reassembling the site. (Among other things, some of the WordPress changes broke the theme I was using, which I had heavily modified in the first place, and… well, let’s just say it was time-consuming and not fun.) I’m pretty sure I’ve fixed all the major issues, but I’m also sure I’ve probably missed a few odds and ends, so if you could just click around a little and just see if you notice anything that looks off, I’d appreciate it. Nothing major, just maybe link your way through a few pages, pull up a handful of old posts, that kind of thing, to help with shakedown. Also, I’ve added a new plugin to manage comments on posts, so feedback on any bugs that need working out there would be welcome, too.
As always, thank you for sticking around… or rather, for coming back again. More soon!
I mean it this time.
Averry
Rumblings in the Nexus…
Um…hello again! Yes, yes, I know it’s been a while. An unconscionably long while. But last week (ish), as I’m sure you’re all aware, the Nexus stirred and unleashed a brand new incarnation of Garrosh on us all, via Heroes of the Storm. And that got me thinking about the woefully silent state that my own version of Garrosh has fallen into over these past months.
So, about that.
The short version — which, knowing myself, I’m sure to turn into a long version — is that I was hit by a pretty severe case of blogging burnout. If you’re content with the TL;DR version, that should pretty much cover you; feel free to skip ahead a few paragraphs. For those interested enough to listen to me elaborate, by all means continue on.
As many of you already know, the Warchief’s Command Board has been around for a long while — coming up on six years now. Some of that time, I’ve been fairly prolific; other times, posts have been fewer and farther between. The thing is, though, there was never a point when I was really “off duty.” Even when I would schedule a “break,” it wasn’t really a break as much as a concession to the fact that I wouldn’t be able to post consistently. But during those times, I would still squeeze as many hours out of my schedule as I could to work on the blog — or be annoyed with myself for failing to find any (or enough). It isn’t an exaggeration at all for me to say that since I started the WCB, any time more than two or three days went by without a new post going up, I was angry at myself — and the longer that gap went on, the angrier with myself I would become. For slacking. For keeping people waiting. For taking so long to do what I should have been able to finish last week. For not extracting 36 hours out of the day, by sheer force of will.
I’m pretty sure I don’t need to tell anyone that that frame of mind isn’t good for anybody. It certainly wasn’t good for me; after five-going-on-six years of nonstop content grinding, the blog that I’d started as a labor of love had turned into a joyless chore that I was only doing out of a sense of obligation. The last couple installments of the Kypari Zar comic ended up being a wake-up call for me. This was a turn in Garrosh’s story that I’d planned out literally years ahead of time. It was the arc I couldn’t help but foreshadow and tease because I was so much looking forward to it. And when the time finally came…it was just another annoying chore I found myself resenting having to grind through.
At which point, the idea finally sunk into my thick skull that I needed to step away from this for a while.
TL;DR people? Still there? It’s safe to come back now.
Anyhow, I hadn’t really planned for my sanity break to be quite as long as it’s been, but it was very necessary. In retrospect, I probably should have posted an update long before now to let everyone know what’s up, and that I’m… you know… still alive and stuff. I can’t say I blame anyone who might have bailed / unlinked / unfollowed in light of the long silence; conversely, I’m grateful to any of you still out there who’ve stuck around and are reading this now.
So, now the good news: the blog is in a lull, yes, but far from done. There will absolutely be more zaniness coming. It’s just a matter of me managing things in such a way that I don’t bring another burnout down on myself. So, going forward, I’m going to try to approach the blog like seasons of a TV show — create a substantial body of content, post it in relatively short succession, then go on a break while I get the next “season” prepped — with said break including some actual break time, and lasting however long I need to have that next stretch of content ready to go. Hopefully, this kind of structure will make things more tolerable for everyone involved… and, hey, that also means a few built-in opportunities for CLIFFHANGERS! (BWAHA!)
So, that’s the plan. I don’t have a date to give you for the Warchief’s glorious return — I don’t want to come right out of the gate with a deadline that will just set me up for another breakdown — but rest assured that that return is coming. Once I get to a point where I can safely project a start date, I’ll make another announcement here. Beyond that, it’ll be ready when it’s ready… but I promise, it is on the way.
Look! See, doodles in progress!
(Yes, I blurred out the word balloons that are on there, because, you know, SPOILERS.)
Thank you to everyone who’s stayed with me, and checked in on me, and otherwise been there for encouragement and support. I know I’ve said this many times, but it’s no less true or sincere: all your comments, feedback, tweets, e-mails, and more are always appreciated, probably more than you realize. (Hell, why do you think I’m milking this Garrosh thing so long? Dude’s been dead for years!) (Don’t tell him that.) (Fucking time travel.)
Be seeing you (I promise!),
Averry
(By the by, if anyone feels like peeking over my shoulder via streaming while I doodle, I’d welcome some occasional company on vent! I’ll make sure I don’t work on anything too spoilery while people are peeking…)
The Great Noblegarden Easter Egg Hunt!
Hi everyone — Averry here for a special announcement that simply wouldn’t make any sense coming from Garrosh. Specifically, I’m here to announce a special IN-BLOG CONTEST in honor of Noblegarden!
As long-time (and probably even short-time) readers know, my writing in the blog is punctuated by fairly frequent references — to movies, to music, to books, to other games, you name it. Some of these references are pretty blatant, while others are fairly subtle. But they’re all over the place, as evidenced by the fact that the “oblique references” tag, which I try to include on posts that include one of my obscure-or-not references, is one of the most common ones in the blog.
And so, this Noblegarden, you’re all invited to go Easter egg hunting, in the figurative sense! The contest is this: look through WCB posts that have been tagged for “oblique references,” and see how many of them you can correctly identify. Prizes to those who are able to ID the greatest number of them!
The nuts and bolts of how this will work:
- The contest begins as of the moment this post goes live, and will be open for entries until Noblegarden ends in-game at 2:00 PM EDT on Monday, April 4, 2016.
- Go to a post tagged with “oblique references” (look at that! thoughtfully linked for your convenience!) and see if you can spot the reference(s). Think you know where that familiar-sounding line came from? Great! Now click over to the blog’s Forum section, where I’ve added a new topic in the Blog Discussions forum (see how considerate I am, linking you over yet again!). Reply to this topic (or start your own, but please stay within the Blog Discussions section) and ID your reference(s). If you’re right, I’ll reply to your post to confirm it within 24 hours at the most; if you’re wrong, well, you’ll just hear crickets. THE FIRST PERSON to correctly identify the source of a given reference will get a point for finding an “Easter egg.” In the event of any dispute, the more specific identification wins the tiebreaker (i.e., “the scene in Star Wars when Luke first meets Princess Leia” trumps “Star Wars“).
- Winners will be determined, obviously, by whoever can accumulate the most points in the time the contest is running. Since a given reference will only award a point to one person, it’s to your advantage to jump on the ones you know as quickly as possible. You don’t, however, have to submit all your answers at the same time; it’s perfectly okay to add entries on the forum a few at a time, or even one at a time, if you feel that that will help you beat others to the punch on some references. If you submit multiple entries, please do so using the same screen name, so I can be sure to award you all the points you deserve.
- In case anyone’s wondering, I’m asking people to use the forum for their entries simply to prevent my email and Twitter from getting flooded with entries that I’ll need to keep organized and possibly track for timestamps. This way, everything is one place, and what’s more, you can all see which references have been correctly ID’ed. This is good for the contest, since you’ll know if a particular Easter egg is already off the table, but I think it could also be fun for everyone as readers, since the forum will basically become a running index of blog references that you might not have picked up on otherwise!
- All posts tagged with “oblique references” are fair game. I’m absolutely sure that there are also some posts on the blog without this tag that include references, but out of fairness to those who might not want to pore over every last post in the blog, anything without an “oblique reference” tag won’t count toward the contest.
- Also worth noting: Some posts tagged for references may include more than one. In fact, I can tell you in no uncertain terms, some of them do. Remember, points are awarded per Easter egg, not per post. Just because someone else already nabbed one of a post’s references doesn’t prevent you from scoring a point for the second or third.
So, what’s in it for you? You mean besides the fun of reliving some of your favorite moments from WCB past? Okay, fine, here’s the part about winners and prizes!
- One first-place winner will receive his or her choice of any mount available at the Blizzard Store, plus your very own plush Mortimer, which includes an in-game wyvern cub pet.
- Three second-place winners will receive their choice of any companion pet available from the Blizzard Store.
- If you already have all the mounts and pets you want, we can talk about substitutions of other items from the Blizzard Store. I’m sure we can find you something you’ll like!
I think that covers it, so what are you doing still sitting here reading? Get hunting!
(One other quick note — while you’re taking a stroll down blog-memory lane, why not toss a few star ratings on your favorite posts? (Or any/all of them!) This really isn’t just me fishing for praise. (I mean, I am fishing, but that’s not all I’m after!) I recently added a widget to the left sidebar that lists links for the blog’s top-rated posts; the only trouble is that when I moved WCB to its new domain, the ratings and likes that people had given on the old site didn’t carry over, so the current “Top Rated” listings are skewed toward recent material and overlook old favorites like “Anger management” or “Of wyverns and pine cones” or “Locks in Socks.” So, while you’re reliving some of the silliness of the past, why not balance out the voting a little?)
Be seeing you,
Averry
Four Years of Musings and a New Place to Muse
Hello and welcome to the new home of the Warchief’s Command Board! I’m excited to kick things off again with a new, improved (I hope!) look for the blog, along with a few new bells and whistles!
While redesigning, I’ve tried to incorporate a few more easy-to-find links and blurbs to help people catch up and get (re-)oriented to what I know can be some fairly daunting continuity — see the first handful of inquisitive links under the blog header. (Also, coming soon to the “When Is This?” page: a running timeline of blog events with links to key posts!)
The new site also includes a number of forums, open to everyone to use for discussions of all sorts. One of the things I’ve most enjoyed about the blog is the way it’s built up its own community, evidenced perhaps most clearly when we were holding our semi-regular meta raids in Siege of Orgrimmar last year. I’d like to encourage that sense of community and interaction, and I hope these forums can help be part of that. Everyone is welcome to read; posting requires registration with the site, but once you’re registered, you can also choose to use that login as your username for blog comments as well.
I’m still in the process of tinkering with the new site, so there will probably be more tweaks here and there over the next few weeks as we go through a bit of a shakedown period. While that’s going on, please do poke around, test things out, and let me know if you run into any problems or if anything just plain doesn’t look right. (And, you know, if anyone out there happens to be a CSS coding guru, I might have a favor or two to ask!)
While you’re looking around, I’ll also encourage you to spread a little rating / “like” love around some of your favorite posts; likes and ratings from the old WordPress site didn’t carry over to this new one, so there’s a fresh slate here in terms of reader feedback. This isn’t completely an ego-driven request, either (Okay, okay, it’s partially ego-driven! But not completely!) — one of the extra gizmos that I haven’t yet activated will let me add a small menu to one of the sidebars that links to top-rated posts, so this could be a way for everyone to draw attention to some of their favorites! (Please make sure you’re rating posts on this domain, though; one of the things I’m still working on is updating in-text links to link only to these pages, not to the old blog.)
Oh, and speaking of liking things… you can now give thumbs-ups (and thumbs-downs, but those aren’t as fun to think of) to readers’ comments!
The old blog on the WordPress site will remain intact indefinitely, but all new content will be happening here. Anyone who was subscribed to the old site will be migrated over automatically shortly after this page goes live, but just to be safe, I’d encourage you to check back periodically just to be sure. If it looks like you’re not getting notifications as you had in the past, please let me know.
With all that said, let me shut up and let everyone have some fun looking around and taking the new digs for a test drive (but leave the metaphor mixing to me)! As always, thanks to everyone for visiting, reading, commenting, and making the WCB such a fun ride.
Four years down… who knows how many to go?
Be seeing you,
Averry
Summer Sabbatical
Hi, everyone. Averry here hitting the pause button on Garrosh for one of my programming updates.
I’m going to be taking a few weeks off from blogging while I juggle a fairly packed summer schedule.
Originally, I’d convinced myself that I could forge on ahead with the blog through the middle of the summer, but over the last couple of weeks it’s become pretty clear that that wasn’t a very realistic plan. As many of you know — and many more of you can probably infer — I’m a teacher by trade, and I’m in the midst of teaching a fairly intensive summer program. Surprisingly, I’ve discovered that spending 6-7 hours, six days a week, teaching a room full of 13-year-olds, with an hour commute on either side, actually doesn’t leave me bursting with energy for my creative pursuits at the end of the day! Go figure, huh? (Or, as Garrosh the Earth Online teacher might say, “HOLD ON, HOLD ON, WHAT DID THOSE LITTLE SNOTNOSES DO TO MY ENERGY BAR? GODDAMMIT, WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?!”) I could keep pushing through, but that would ultimately turn the blog into more of a chore than the pleasure it normally is, which I’m sure would also cause the quality of posts to suffer. So, rather than make everyone sit around wondering when Averry’s going to get off his ass and post something, then getting a mediocre product when I do, I figure it makes more sense simply to take a few weeks off to tend to real life.
So, here begins a short vacation for the WCB. Garrosh’s next mailbag, originally scheduled for August 3, will be September 7 instead (feel free to flood my mailbox with letters during the break!). I’ll be back with more silliness (and occasional torment) in late August… at which point I may have a surprise or two in the works. SSSHHH, IT’S A SURPRISE. YOU’LL SEE. MAYBE.
Thanks as always for reading, commenting, tweeting, emailing, and otherwise making this fit of tomfoolery into the fun time that it’s been so far. Enjoy the summer, and the Warchief and I will be back soon!
Be seeing you,
Averry
Garrosh’s Poetry Challenge returns
Hello, all! Averry interjecting with a quick announcement that…well…I suppose Garrosh could have covered it himself, but he seems to have his hands full right now. It’s just easier this way.
Anyway! As those of you who’ve taken a cursory look at your calendar may have noticed, today is the first day of April. And as a smaller (but soon to increase!) subset of you are aware, April is National Poetry Month. Now granted, last year I dropped the ball when it came to commemorating the event in the person of one of everyone’s favorite Azerothian poets. (Yes, yes, mea culpa…or, you know, Garrosh culpa. He has a lot of culpa to go around, after all.) This year, though, I’m making sure there will be no such oversights. Besides, the blog has been sorely lacking in EPIC VERSE of late!
For this year’s poetry challenge, I’m dusting off a variety of EPIC VERSE that I slapped together (thanks to your feedback!) the last time Garrosh commemorated National Poetry Month — EPIC VERSE battles! As some of you might recall, ages ago when devilsaurs ruled the Earth, Garrosh unleashed an EPIC VERSE live blog upon an unsuspecting world, which ended up devolving into a rhyming battle between the Warchief and Varian Wrynn. (Because, you see, I actually have no original ideas.) I ended up revisiting the concept again shortly thereafter, and I’ve been wanting to revisit it since then. Well, folks, you’ve dodged that bullet long enough!
So, I’ll be posting a new EPIC VERSE battle EVERY FRIDAY in April — plus one bonus battle on Friday, May 1, because DON’T THINK FOR ONE MINUTE YOU’RE GOING TO GET OUT OF THAT WEEK SO EASILY. The pressure’s not just on me, though, because I’m going to need your help to make this idea work: just like the real Epic Rap Battles, the EPIC VERSE battles will rely on your ideas for matchups! I have a couple of ideas in the works based on suggestions from way back when, but in order to get through the month, I’ll be counting on all of you to offer up suggestions for matchups in your comments. Feel free to play fast and loose with your selections — while blog characters are, of course, welcome candidates, don’t be reluctant to offer up other lore figures who haven’t turned up in the blog in any significant way. Living, dead, retconned beyond recognition… anything goes!
So…start thinking of those ideas, comment away, and as always, thanks for reading and responding and making this whole exercise in lunacy far more fun than it ever should have been. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find a word that rhymes with orange.
Be seeing you,
Averry
Reminder: "Ask Garrosh Anything" LIVE BLOG incoming!
Just a reminder, for anyone who might not have seen Wednesday’s post — clear your schedules for this Sunday, February 15, because at 8:30 PM EST, everyone’s favorite Warchief… um, widely beloved Warchief… hmm… uh… one of the individuals to have held the office of Warchief… Yeah, that works. One of the individuals to have held the office of Warchief, Garrosh Hellscream, will be answering your questions on the fly during a LIVE BLOG event!
The live blog setup post will go up a little while before 8:30, at which point you’re all invited to send your questions in for Garrosh to answer. You can submit your inquiries a variety of ways: through comments on the live blog post, via Twitter (@GarroshHllscrm), by e-mail (garrosh1337@gmail.com), through Google+ or Facebook (yes, he has one!) or on Garrosh’s page on Ask.fm. Be as inquisitive and inventive as you’d like in your questions, but please follow a few simple ground rules:
- No spoilers! Remember, blog!Garrosh is still living in the Patch 5.2 timeframe. If you want to obliquely refer to later events and throw some clever foreshadowing into your question, by all means go for it! But please avoid point-blank references to things that Garrosh hasn’t experienced yet.
- Anonymous questions will not be answered. You can submit your questions with a roleplay name, your in-game character’s name, your Twitter handle, whatever, but there has to be some source to whom the question can be attributed. (This is largely to prevent someone from anonymously engaging in…well…unproductive jackassery for its own sake. Anyone who’s received anonymous questions on Ask.fm is painfully aware of what I’m talking about.)
- Please hold your questions until the initial live blog post goes up, or until after the actual blogging is under way. Part of the fun of the exercise will be for me to see what I can come up with on the spot with no chance to prepare. You, on the other hand, can prepare all you want, so by all means come armed with an assortment of questions and follow-ups!
I’m looking forward to seeing what you all come up with, and to having a fun evening collaborating on some zaniness. While I have your attention, by the way, don’t forget to vote for the next “30 Days of Character Development” profile, or to be thinking of potential letters to send the Warchief for his next mailbag! Cue the handy-dandy mail submission form:
Contrary to what you surely believe…
…I live! Well, I live, as in me, Averry. Garrosh…kinda lives? Only he doesn’t? Except…he still does, here? Until he doesn’t. It’s…it’s complicated. You get the idea.
POINT BEING. I’m still here! While I hadn’t intended to go quiet for so long, it was partly by design that the blog went on an unofficial break during the holidays. My plan was to take a little time off from posting and to use some of that down time to get material prepared for when I was ready to start up again. My hope was that doing so would benefit everyone involved: for readers, fewer long gaps between posts, since updates would be at least partially prepared in advance; and for me, a bit of relief from the constant self-imposed pressure to keep the production line going as quickly as (or maybe even more quickly that) I can. As much as I enjoy writing and drawing the blog, it felt at times last year like I was putting down railroad tracks while the train is coming up behind me — as soon as I would finish a post, as soon as it would go up on the site, my thoughts would immediately go to “Okay, hurry up, get the next one done, get the next one done.” After a while, that can make an otherwise fun experience into something draining. That’s not good for me, but it’s also not good for all of you, who deserve to get the best quality of work I can manage when you come here.
So, I decided to give myself a sabbatical over the holidays, which ended up carrying on for longer than I’d intended. I’ve been keeping busy during that time, though, and have managed to get quite a bit in the pipeline to go live. I don’t want to name specific dates here and now, only because I have a couple more very specific benchmarks that I want to clear before I resume the blog’s storyline, just to make sure I don’t stumble into a new delay. But NEW STUFF is imminent (and we’re talking about a matter of days, not weeks)! So, in the interest of stirring you all up and whetting your appetites, you will soon get to look forward to…
- Mokvar’s saga concludes! We’ll be seeing the rest of what befell everyone’s favorite shaman-turned-warlock scribe at the hands of Kanrethad and Jubeka, then how the whole expedition to Blackrock Spire ends.
(Not without a surprise or two…)
- Garrosh’s Earth Online guild, <Warchief>, has its first raid night! Listen in on the happenings in guild chat when the 10-man team marches into the notorious Earth Online raid, Black Friday!
- Remember years ago during Children’s Week, when you escorted that blood elf orphan
around the world, and eventually learned she was being adopted by Lady Liadrin? Well, Salandria is a teenager now, and is about to join the ever-expanding supporting cast. (Shayari needs a peer to hang out with, right?)
- Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but after dropping the ball during last April’s National Poetry Month, the Warchief has plans for this year. EPIC VERSE on the way…and, throughout the month of April, no shortage of it!
- Naturally, interspersed through all of this will be more “30 Days” character profiles — and for our next one, you even get a say in who gets spotlighted. Take your pick of supporting characters, and make your voices heard:
- It’s been far too long since the Warchief dipped into his reader mail, so expect a new mailbag soon — in fact, you should make a point of contributing! E-mail Garrosh at garrosh1337@gmail.com with your thoughts, questions, or general goofiness! And, to make sure the ever-popular mailbags don’t have any more long gaps, I’m committing to a schedule for them going forward: the first Monday of each month, you can look forward to a “Monday mailbag” post. But remember, the quality of Garrosh’s responses hinges on the quality of his mail — so get thinking!
- Speaking of responding to reader inquiries… mark your calendar! To kick off the “restart” of the blog, Garrosh will be fielding your questions on many and sundry topics, live (sort of) and in person (kind of) this Sunday night (February 15) — in an “ASK GARROSH” LIVE BLOG! Starting at 8:30 PM EST, the Warchief will respond to questions submitted by you, his LOYAL READERS AND MINIONS, on the spot as they come in. You can send your inquiries through e-mail, on Twitter (@GarroshHllscrm), via Garrosh’s page at Ask.fm, or through comments on the live blog page itself. What you shouldn’t do, though, is send them in advance — once the live blog begins, I’ll be (um, I mean, Garrosh will be) responding to questions completely on the fly, sans preparation. Let’s see what I can come up with on the spot, and/or how badly I fall on my face!
I know 2014 was a rather rough and uneven year for WCB. I appreciate all of you hanging in there, and the continued support and friendship I’ve received from many of you. Granted, 2015 is off to something of a belated start, but hopefully I’m in a position to stay on top of things better than I had been. (Very likely, I’ll continue to build occasional posting breaks into the blog to let me get a jump on things again, but I’ll try to be better about letting you all know when those will be.) Garrosh’s adventures continue…and, frankly, I can’t say I’m all that disappointed that drawn-out posting is keeping him alive in the blogosphere well past his in-game expiration date. He’s a character I would never want to live with, but he’s way too fun to live in.
Be seeing you,
Averry
Back to Business
Averry stepping in for Garrosh.
So…yeah. That way-too-long July that I warned about last time? You know, way, way back when I made my last post, back when devilsaurs ruled the earth? Well, the crazy-busy July started kicking my ass in June, which has led to the current (most recent) lull in blog production.
So…sorry. I feel bad that I keep having these dead periods in the blog, and I appreciate all of you who’ve hung in there through my disappearances. I won’t promise that where won’t be any more of them (I know it would be a promise I couldn’t keep, despite best intentions), but I will promise, for what it’s worth, that I’m not going anywhere until I’ve seen the Warchief’s story through to the end. I have a LOT of story still planned, and there’s exactly ZERO chance of me bailing on the blog before I finish telling it. Keep hanging in there with me, and I’ll do my best to make it worthwhile.
Now then, with that said, we have a little business to get to. First and foremost, with my schedule finally becoming a little more human in August, we’ll be’ll be able to pick up our Meta raiding ways soon. I’m planning to resume our regular monthly Flex raid beginning Saturday, August 9. As always, catch me on RealID (Averry#1116) around 8:00 PM EDT to join the party. For anyone new to the raids, we try to hold them each month, on the Saturday that marks the final day of that month’s Darkmoon Faire.
Second of all, a return to a semi-sorta-normal schedule also means that I’m going to be able to resume blogging more regularly. While I haven’t been posting these past few weeks, by the way, don’t think that I haven’t been working on getting blog material lined up for production. In fact, here, witness the heap of posts that are currently written and ready to go! (Yes, I write by hand first, then transcribe and/or draw from there. At least most of the time. For whatever reason — don’t ask me why — I write more easily when I’m doing it on paper rather than at the keyboard.)
(Right now, by the way, the main limiting factor in posting all this material is the time involved in preparing comics for much of it. The writing is something I can do in small bursts whenever I have a spare ten minutes; the drawing requires much longer blocks of interrupted time. Still, take some comfort in knowing there’s a full pipeline on its way…)
Anyway, the point is, I have a lot of stuff prepared for you, and will have it going into production very shortly — very likely to kick off Meta raid day this Saturday. For anyone who’d like the tiniest of peeks at what’s on the way, I’ve edited the Major Storylines index page for Mokvar’s ongoing story to include the titles of the next several posts…
Also! I’m sure many of you already listen to the Lorewalkers Roundtable podcast (and if you don’t, you should!), which streams every Saturday afternoon at 2:00 PM eastern. I’ve recently started contributing to the show, in the form of letters from Garrosh as he bounces through time with Kairoz. I believe the Lorewalkers have been running the feature under the unofficial title of “Letters from a Fallen Warchief,” though I kind of prefer to think of it as “When in the World is Garrosh Hellscream?” Either way, they’ve been fun to write and even more fun to listen to Lorewalker Sol read in an orc voice. Definitely hop over for a listen! I’m writing them very much in the voice of blog!Garrosh, even if they detail events that the blog hasn’t gotten to. Yet. (If you don’t think I’m planting little details in these letters that I can pick up in future blog posts…well, it’s nice to meet you.)
And also…yes, I’ve seen it. If you know what I’m talking about…well, you know. If you don’t know, I’m not inclined to spoil it for you. But…yeah, stay tuned. I’ve got some work to do.
Be seeing you,
Averry
