I'm already at the point where I'm getting impatient with this story, and it's not even halfway through April.

I did a little counting ... the story has twenty-five scenes and I started on the renders for scene fourteen a little earlier this evening. So I'm actually doing pretty well, by the calendar. But some of the upcoming scenes are going to take a long time to do. They're part of one of the throughlines in this issue where every scene takes a long time to do because they're horrible sets with horrible setup and horrible lighting issues and also those are the scenes I am pickiest about because I want them to look a certain way.

(I am deliberately being a little vague because there are spoilers, like telling you exactly what it is about these sets that makes them so horrible. But I'll tell you this: They're dimly lit scenes which also have a lot of fire. That is a combination that makes the renderer crazy -- and me, too.)

Remember, remember, always remember: At this point the story, for me, is done. It was done when I plotted it. The rest of this is just waiting around for the renderer so we can all see what the damned thing looks like.

Frank Zappa said in several different interviews, fairly late in life when you could actually get a straight answer out of him now and then, that (I paraphrase) he never really set out to perform music. He wanted, first and foremost, to compose music. It's just that he had to perform the music -- or go through the production and the effort of getting other people to perform the stuff -- in order to hear what it sounded like. All of the performance nonsense, all the fuss-and-bother parts, were just so he could hear the sounds he'd created.

I think about that a lot.