Clockwork Storyteller

The third of my weekly piece of fiction. This week, we take a look at Egonics, Inc and the story of one man who, quite literally, can’t get a song out of his head.
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One of the hardest things for me to do as a writer is get comfortable. I can’t write if I’m not totally comfortable with my surroundings. It can make for some difficult times when I’m trying to write or I need to write and I simply can’t because of various circumstances. More… »

Love at first sight is a popular cliche that is used in writing. Most recently, in an incredibly popular poorly written novel that has been turned into a poorly written and poorly acted movie. It’s a terrible cliche, one that helps to rob stories of any effort to make characters experience personal growth and reflection in establishing interpersonal relationships with others. This is especially true when two characters mutually “fall in love at first sight.”

In truth, love at first sight doesn’t really exist. More… »

Here we have the second of my weekly EVE stories. This one is longer than the prior one, clocking in at over 6600 words. In it, we look at Sansha’s Nation and one employee of True Creations, the corporation responsible for research, development, and manufacturing of the Nation’s ships.

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I spent the day querying literary agents. The process of querying deserves an entire post by itself, but I’m not quite up to it today. No, I am going to talk about the way some agents seem stuck in the 1980s with their querying process.

When I look for agents to query, there are two immediate things I look at to see if I am interested. Firstly, does the agent represent the genre of work I am shopping. Second, does the agent accept e-mail queries. More… »

This is the first of my EVE Story a Week project. This story touches on the Emperor’s Family corporation by looking at the widow of Doriam II, the former Emperor of Amarr. Naturally, this is all non-CCP endorsed and isn’t actual PF in any way.

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As I said in last night’s blog, I just recently finished Fallout 3. Let me preface this post by saying that I greatly enjoyed the game. The mechanics were incredibly balanced and fun. The area to explore was vast and had a lot of nice secrets and a smart layout. The engine and game mechanics would be a selling point for other games to me.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about the story of Fallout 3, where it worked, and where it failed. Since I’m going to be talking about the storyline, I will be posting spoilers, so if you don’t want to see them, don’t read after the break.

With that warning out of the way, without further ado… More… »

I just finished playing Fallout 3. Or rather, my first play through of Fallout 3. For Fallout 3 is one of the increasing new breed of video games that has what I call Limited Non-Linear storytelling. It’s not the pinnacle of storytelling that video games can achieve, but it’s pretty much the best you can get right now with much depth.

There are three broad categories of video game storytelling that I see in games. They are what I call Linear, Limited Non-Linear, and True Non-Linear. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses and has varying degrees of usage in video games. More… »

I have a new project. I am planning on writing a story a week for EVE Online. These stories will generally be short, most no longer than a couple of typed pages. Each one will deal with a different subject in the EVE universe, depending on what catches my fancy at the time I’m writing it. I’m planning on eventually covering each “subject” in EVE in some sort of detail.

The thing I’m doing that goes against what most people who write fan-stories for EVE is that I am totally going to play with Prime Fiction material. Prime Fiction, for those who are not familiar with the term, essentially means the canon material for the game setting that is produced by CCP. It comes from the EVE Chronicles, Short Stories, in-game information, and the like. Generally, any time CCP states something about the setting in an official capacity, it is PF.

A lot of people who write EVE fiction try to avoid touching PF, and for a very good reason. If they write something and CCP later writes something that contradicts it, the story is essentially rendered invalid. Claim that a planet is inhabited, then later find out it is a radiation-blasted wasteland, and your story loses credibility.

Additionally, it takes some boldness to really delve into high level PF. After all, it’s CCP’s job to write their own PF, and while players contribute their own stories, writing about someone else’s characters can be a tricky affair. And in this case, it’s CCP that are the someone else.

It’s safe to write about what your own character is doing, or couch a story in terms of small scale events that don’t have a great impact on the setting. I’ve decided to be unsafe. If CCP later writes something to undermine a premise of one of my stories, so be it. It won’t invalidate the story itself.

In general, these stories will try to be somewhat informative as well as entertaining. They won’t really be infodump style stories, because I do not have the access to information that makes such stories entertaining. But at the same time, they won’t be pure atmospheric pieces. I’m trying to strike a balance.

These stories will be released once a week on Friday. The first, Doriam’s Widow, will be available on the 14th.

This year’s EVE Fanfest was quite an experience. I didn’t get to do much sight seeing while I was there. I spent the first two days adjusting from EDT to GMT. Luckily, by the time FanFest started, I was on an Iceland-friendly sleeping schedule. This also was a big change from last year, where I was half asleep the entire time.

I won’t really talk about all the big news that came out of FanFest in regards to game shattering changes. Those are covered in more depth and with more spotlight elsewhere. Instead, I’ll talk about the writing-related issues that were brought up this year. With the release of the EVE novel still fresh in many people’s minds and the explosion of news and story content recently, there was a lot being spoken. More… »