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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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!
Someone I know recently commented about a book that was particularly poorly proofread. The book in question had numerous spelling and grammar errors in it. Said person wondered why the author done the proofreading himself and asked how long it’d take a writer to do that, suggesting a time frame of an evening or two to accomplish such a task.
Do non-writers REALLY think the process is so simple? I’ve proofread things I’ve written dozens of times over, over the course of weeks, and still have other people point out errors I’ve made. Proofreading your own work is damn near impossible in the first place, because you know what you were SUPPOSED to have written and, even for someone as anal as myself, who generally spots spelling errors, your mind auto corrects the error. Especially when your word processor doesn’t show a little red line under it (or when it’s a name and it ALWAYS shows the red line under it, but this one time you spelled it Kiada instead of Kaida).
Of course, the true story is that the novel was proofread in under a day, by the person hired to do it by the publisher, and because they only had a single day to do it, tons of errors crept in.
Still, it makes me wonder what other misconceptions people have about the writing process.
The brilliant Wondermark webcomic frequently manages to be hilarious and intelligent at the same time. Today, the comic managed to nail about 50% of the writing process, especially for anyone who wants to actual be published as an author. Check it out here.
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.
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… »
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.
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