(This was supposed to post automatically. It did not. I apologize for that.)
Real life still slaying me. I did manage to put out the new, British English versions of Ch. 1-17, with significant tweaks to the writing in Ch. 6, Ch. 7, and Ch. 9. I know a lot of you will probably decide you liked the originals better. But they were polarising chapters; and I believe, though it’s impossible to know using Fanfiction.net’s current web stats, that they were scaring away some readers. I’m okay with driving off some readers for major reasons, but not for minor ones, and it’s quite understandable to me why someone might have a conditioned pain response to songs in fanfiction.
I have completed the scene-by-scene plot of the next arc, working in Scrivener for the first time. I do still need to review that plot; detail it to the sub-scene level; check tension levels, goals/resolutions, character conflicts, etcetera; but hopefully – this is the hypothesis being tested – once all that is done, the actual writing should go fast. The current layout has the next arc carrying to Ch. 91, though I suspect at least one of those “chapters” will break in half.
There’s some substantial loads of new fan-art but I’m afraid I don’t even have time to list them out in this update.
I hope to have better news for you next time. Just please remember, it took J. K. Rowling, literally, 10 years and 21 days to publish the entire Harry Potter series; and there has been progress on the next arc, it’s just slow progress. This is still going faster than “real” books usually come out.
Much thanks go to all the contributors of the HPMOR Ch. 1-37 Britpick Thread on the r/HPMOR subreddit, with special gratitude to noking for compiling all the suggestions into a single page – this was tremendously helpful in executing the changes.
Next Progress Update on August 1st, 2012 at 10pm Pacific Time.