I pretty much finished my writing process the beginning of summer 2011 (which for me was around April/May). Adam's writing began as soon as I sent him the chapters as I finished them. His original writing style, while I thought it was great and made it feel like a story, turned out to be problematic for timing reasons so you might see a slight shift in style after chapters 1 and 2 (in that there will be a significant lack of detail compared to those chapters, but I'll explain that another day). By the end of summer 2011 Adam has finished writing and now we're in the process of editing, which is hard because we're all in school again and barely have the time. As it stands, I just finished editing the first copy of chapter 5 and I'm about to send it to the other editors (there's two more after me and Adam, hopefully we'll add more by Volume 2). Adam is reviewing my changes for chapters 1 - 3 and then sending it back to me before I send it to the other editors. Those other guys should currently be editing chapter 4 right now because that one's done. There's 10 chapters in total this volume.
"So, how long is a chapter?"
Adam likes to always tell me how long everything is but I never remember. Right now I'm looking at Chapter 4 and it's 27 pages on a Word document. Keep in mind each chapter will be split into 3 parts, so you won't be reading 27 pages per week. So you can see after 10 chapters, and making sure continuity is fine and no plot holes (since we will be going into the history of the story often), it takes a long time just to write it. I don't know when the editing phase will be done, but I also have to work on the forums. Right, the forums. I should probably talk about that...
So I originally came up with a concept to the other guys about keeping a database of character profiles, events, and such for further reading for others if they want. We could also link to this stuff as well as artwork from others through the blog. I asked them if this sounds good or if they thought it was unnecessary. Of course, they decided to give me an answer that gives me more work to do. So now I gotta make these profiles on the forum without giving out spoilers for future chapters and updating them when a new chapter comes out each week (which I might delegate to someone else). There's also a bunch of talk from the 3 of us about left out stories; things that can be taken from the main story that would be interesting to write about but don't really flow with the rest of the story (for example [SPOILERS!], I mention many times in the story that there is a growing international feud over the Regeneration Pod technology and the United States unwillingness to share it.). So we might be making even more stories depending on the reception this thing gets.
We're planning for Volume 2, though. We're going to be using an online platform to edit new chapters on the fly without waiting for someone to email what they've finished. We're also likely going to get more people involved to help us out. We even discuss future stories after this volume often so we have plenty of ideas. I know it's planned for 3 volumes, but we want it to go farther and we have ideas for that as well but we'll see how it goes first.