Page Forty-Five Who is That?
The Dreamspeaker Webnovel Updated!
Updated: August 26th, 2009
“We got a new chapter! It’s Chapter Six! The Dreamspeaker is a webnovel about when we first discovered the Ajan Treasures! We’re gonna have new games and another preview for the next exciting battle! Be sure to come visit me and Teko on Twitter!”
“Over on our news site there’s also a new exclusive preview of the Battle of Vuran’s Wharf, which is the next chapter in our webcomic.”
Double Update! How do you like the story so far?
Greetings, LadyStar readers! Cat here. I’m the writer for the LadyStar webcomics and webnovels, just one of the seven people who work on this webcomic. (Everything in LadyStar is in quantities of seven.) I’m the person who figures out what happens in the next chapter. I normally try to stay out of the way so our readers can enjoy the story, but every so often I think it’s a good idea to step out from behind the curtain for a few minutes and at least say ‘hello.’
I decided to surprise everyone with a double update today, because we’ve been a little slow with our pages lately.
LadyStar has grown a lot in the last 18 months. In June, we had over 15,000 unique visits between the two webcomics, which is an all-time record for any LadyStar web site going all the way back to the original subdirectory on the Heavy Cat Web. Our direct visits, mostly people who have bookmarked the site, are now twenty times higher than they were when Fury of the Venom Legion launched in February of 2008. The support you folks have shown for this webcomic has been really important to us.
As webcomics go, LadyStar is kind of unique. Technically, the project has been in development for almost nine years. It’s been everything: game, manga, novel, Visual novel, merchandising program, television script, OAV script. We have readers and players who have stuck with us since the original zStory Adventures. I can tell you that LadyStar has never been stronger from an audience standpoint.
Our goal is 100,000 unique visits a month, and we’re on track to get there much sooner than we originally expected. A lot of credit belongs to all of the amazing comics at Palace in the Sky. About half of our overall traffic comes from them, and if you found LadyStar from a link on one of those comic sites, we’re really happy to have you as a new reader.
But mostly, the credit goes to our artists. I’ve honestly never worked with a more professional group of people than our studio team. They knocked out 28 color pages for Venom Legion in 28 weeks, which allowed us to go seven months without missing a single update. Their work on Jessica Hoshi and the Ajan Warriors has been outstanding. All these color illustrations you see here and on the other sites would be literally impossible without our artists, because I can’t draw.
We’ve reached kind of a natural stopping point here on page 45 story-wise. The next scene is the encounter between Kenesh Drun, the Scaled One, an aspirant to join the Blade, and her Excellency, Reina, Vicereine of Kulnas, whose command of destructive magic is unmatched among all but a very few beings. We’re putting a fair amount of extra effort into this battle because we’ve put in a lot of work to get here. We’d sure like the “Battle of Vuran’s Wharf” to be as cool as we’ve planned it.
We also really need to re-build our page buffer, which has disappeared in the last couple of months. This will help us maintain our update schedule through the battle and into the conclusion of Part One of this comic. Then we’ll take another break to decide what to work on next.
In the meantime, we’ve got some plans for the site. We’re going to be adding new archives for both comics, and doing a total overhaul of the Venom Legion site. A new comments system is going to be implemented on both sites to make things simpler for people who want to talk about LadyStar, and we’re going to install a few new features here and there to make the site easier to use.
I’ve also started a complete rewrite of The Dreamspeaker, and Descent into the Ivyreef Deeps will continue updating on the Ajan Champions webnovel site. And of course, as Ranko would say, the “Goofball Express” will still be updating in the Band Room.
Join in with your Comments!
But we’d really like to hear from YOU! Just below this article you’ll find a link to add your comments. I’m going to try to check back to this page as often as possible and I’ll reply to comments and questions as best I can. I won’t give away any spoilers, but if you’ve got questions about the characters or series, I’ll do my best to answer them. We’d like to take an informal survey of opinions too.
What do you think of the story in Jessica Hoshi and the Ajan Warriors? How about Descent into the Ivyreef Deeps? Anything you’ve particularly liked so far? Anything you’d like to see improved? Any long-time readers think the story has improved from the Visual Novel, manga or games? Anyone wanna buy a Hikousen frisbee? Tell us what you think! We know there’s about 500 readers visiting the site every day, and with the number of comments we get, I’m guessing there’s more than a few readers who have something to say.
We’ll be taking a break for a little while here to get caught up on our pages before the big battle. Watch the Band Room for announcements on when updates will resume. We’re glad to have you all here to enjoy our webcomic project. Thanks for your support.
Cat on July 20th 2009 in Jessica Hoshi, Jessica Hoshi and the Ajan Warriors, LadyStar, Teko
