Clockwork Storyteller

I have finished two play throughs of BioWare’s latest RPG blockbuster, Dragon Age: Origins. As expected from a BioWare game, the storyline of Dragon Age is one of its many highly touted strengths. On the whole, I feel like the game delivered on its promises of a strong story. But it also had areas that I felt fell rather flat as well. I’ve personally got into more than one argument about its strengths in relation to BioWare’s previous RPG, Mass Effect.
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A new story about a colony that never had a chance and one of the few who still remains.
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Ok, so those of you who have read the fiction I had in EON may remember a story called “Little Fish” about an athlete who gets caught up with organized crime and gambling. For those who haven’t, GO BUY ALL EONS AND READ THEM. The fiction they contain is worth the price alone. Anyway, the game he plays is called Gravball. I’m pretty sure I’ve written about it outside the EON story and at least had references to it in places as well. It has a weird history of how it came to be created (in my head) through RP with various people in the game and then my own crazy descriptions and worked out rules for it. So, I’ve decided that it’d be worth it to write everything down and put it out there. Here you go: the history, rules, and regulations of Gravball (warning: probably really long).
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A little bit of a departure from standard prose here. We delve into the oral history of a people no one remembers and find out, maybe, why no one remembers them.
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Ok, yeah, so the title sorta sucks on this one. But I think I’ve come up with an eerie little story here. It’s definitely the longest piece I’ve posted in forever, coming in at twelve typed pages. Luckily, it only comes out to 4800 words (or thereabout). I think I was inspired by Abraxas’s pieces with this one, since I feel like it has sort of the same feel to it. I’m not as good at Abraxas with truly disturbing pieces, but it was neat to write one. Enjoy and I hope you’re totally creeped out by it.

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Well, that’s it for my long story. There are some successes and some failures with it. First off, some stats. It’s 73 typed pages at 31000 words. A full bore novella, really. I’m not sure how many total posts I made for it or how long it took. Except to say it took probably about twice the time I expected it to.

And that, really, is what the major failure was. Around the middle of the story, I got bored with it. I think that can be seen fairly readily by anyone who has read the entire thing. The middle parts of the story became shorter, as I wrote maybe only 4-5 typed pages per week, and the story moved much slower than I had originally planned. When I first started, I was excited about it and near the end, I got excited again (especially after the spaceport exploded).

I hadn’t anticipated that happening, since I’ve written novel-length prose before. But as I worked, I realized that with the novels, if I didn’t really feel up to working on it for a month, I was under no personal pressure to do so. So I was able to leave it, go write some other stuff, then come back when I felt I could pour the proper amount of creative juices into it. In this story, I did not, and really it wasn’t until I wrote some other, non-EVE related stuff that I began to get back into the flow of things here. But I think I ended it nicely. I think the last four or five parts really were among the best I’ve written.

I may come back and write some more about these characters (at least the ones who survived) some other time. But for now, I think they’ve had enough excitement in their lives. Next week will not see a new story, but the week after that I will be returning for more one-off stories. Around the middle of November, I’ll have hit the year mark and finished up my personal project of a “story a week (though there were two or three weeks I missed)”.

Thanks for reading!

Here’s the end. Final thoughts after the actual story.
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This is what you could call the climax. The events have come to an end here, though the individual stories have not been completed. There are still some loose ends to tie up next week. With that, I’ll give my thoughts on the entire crazy ride. But for now, enjoy (or despise) the true conclusion.
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Here’s some more Cacame fiction! This was originally written and published on the Dwarf Fortress forums in 3 parts, but I’ve decided to post it all together here. It comes from a suggestion someone made on the thread about Cacame and his eventual revenge against the person who killed his wife. I also spun a demon named Egngun into the tale. Egngun is from someone else’s game and was a demon who had somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 elf kills once they finished world generation. It inspired fan art of he and Cacame battling. The Dwarf Fortress community is awesome.

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After this, two more.
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