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Djeser posted:Here is the thing you were directly looking for: https://curiosityquills.com/limyaael/ Edit: lol 
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Dec 31, 2019 06:42
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One day I want to write an epic fantasy series that's basically a bunch of creation myth stuff. Primordial Titans forging the first universe out of the chaos of creation, taking the shape of a great turtle. Tiamat's slain remains as the bones of the 'Earth', spawning monsters of chaos from her bones to challenge the Titans. Angels and Demons of concepts and ideas made manifest serving greater beings. The lesser races that are created in the wake of creation- Lots of fun stuff to be had. Just pure high concept, mythic stuff, drawing from Eastern philosophy and Babylonian myth. Humans as a golem race created from the mud and stone of the Earth by the Gods to do their bidding and serve their purpose, given freewill by the Titans. The greatest of them as a Sun WuKong/Gilgamesh type, a leader to humanity who seeks their glory over all else, as a DemiGod herself. An Angel, inherently positive entities, manifested from the concept of Darkness itself, attempting to stop a usurping of the Gods. The first Giant, as old as this universe itself, who hates injustice and the tyranny of the Gods, fighting for the good of all living things with a smile on his face. Shanak, Afiaga, Ceronus You have to have characters you want to tell stories about. Characters you care about, that you want to make other people care about. I love big over the top nonsense like the above, leaning in on how absurd and grand old myths and religions can be and are. But it's something I'm going to wait a while before tackling because I just don't think it'd do well beyond Me. Maybe if I get some clout as a writer, published or otherwise, I can tackle this story- but for now, the important thing is focusing on what you want to tell that you think others will want to hear. Also, yeah, not every story lends itself to an RPG style setting. Somethings just do not translate.
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Dec 31, 2019 07:48
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It's not necessarily a bad instinct, after all RPGs do make their bread and butter on repackaging various cultures and peoples as fantasy nations. But imo if you want to write a creation myth that should be the thing your RPG is based on, and the creation myth wouldn't be very interesting if it was based on an RPG instead. But who knows, I could be wrong. I'd be interested in seeing the results.
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Dec 31, 2019 19:22
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All the truly good and original creation myths I’ve read required drugs.
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Jan 1, 2020 01:26
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Thanks for all your feedback! I believe I have enough to get started, though I will probably turn up with dumb questions again at some point!Doctor Zero posted:I don’t mean this as snarky as it might sound, but is there a reason you can’t do it yourself? Keep a journal or start a private wiki.. No snark taken! I am already drafting a 'skeleton' the players will use to create their stories of creation, like I would when DM'ing any other game. I love the wiki idea, and thanks for reminding me about the rules, I've been meaning to make a set of dogma that govern the rule, particularly around how magic and monsters work. Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Many people start out with a character in mind or a plot in mind, and then write a world around the character or plot, expanding as it needs to be filled in. Others start out with an idea for a world, then fill in characters to fit it. Admittedly not. I suppose I just want more fantasy in my life, and getting input from others is an effective way for me to create. I might just get writing, and see what happens, whatever stories I write or my own or with others don't have to be confined to just one world after all. Djeser posted:Here is the thing you were directly looking for: https://curiosityquills.com/limyaael/ Good stuff! And yeah, ouch, I tried writing an incremental novel about the people in my vampire game. The game and premise was amazing, but it didn't automatically become good litterature, to say the least. Burkion posted:One day I want to write an epic fantasy series that's basically a bunch of creation myth stuff. Oh word, don't forget Shiva cutting the head off a boy, making him a new body of curcumin, and having the curcumin lad follow him everywhere afterwards  Yeah, if this will ever work as fiction, it should have good characters driving the story.
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Jan 1, 2020 15:30
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Is writing multiple different 1st person views, separated by chapter obv, going to be confusing, and is it generally considered a bad idea?
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Jan 14, 2020 00:49
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Not if they have clear distinct voices, trainspotting did it and that's great.
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Jan 14, 2020 01:00
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The plan is to have different tones, depending on the character. I'm not sure if that is being too pretentious, but I think it could give the impression that they experience things differently. Again, may be too pretentious, but 
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Jan 14, 2020 01:25
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The idea of characters having different voices which reflect their character traits is not so much pretentious as it is fundamental to writing, so I think you're fine there.
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Jan 14, 2020 02:02
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DJ Dizzy posted:The plan is to have different tones, depending on the character. I'm not sure if that is being too pretentious, but I think it could give the impression that they experience things differently. Again, may be too pretentious, but Yeah that's just writing.
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Jan 14, 2020 02:06
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Cover update Some details still need to be finessed and we're currently going back and forth on if one, both or neither arms should glow but 
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Jan 14, 2020 19:48
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Nearly ten days later This is just about the final product. Any other criticisms or thoughts?
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Jan 23, 2020 20:26
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I don’t like the fence. The monster doesn’t look scary to me. Something about the scale compared to the man, and how it fills the frame. And its proportions too, the arms vs the rest of it. Go with one font for the author, title, and subtitle. The back blurb doesn’t make me want to read the book. Why’s Paul weary? I don’t get the sense there’s any conflict in this story beyond “this thing wants to kill us” - is there? Phone posting or I’d try my hand at rewriting it.
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Jan 24, 2020 00:56
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Burkion posted:Nearly ten days later Your art person totally nailed the "dude in a suit look" of the Power Rangers monster.
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Jan 24, 2020 02:36
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ketchup vs catsup posted:The monster doesn’t look scary to me. Something about the scale compared to the man, and how it fills the frame. And its proportions too, the arms vs the rest of it.
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Jan 24, 2020 03:06
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Screaming Idiot posted:Your art person totally nailed the "dude in a suit look" of the Power Rangers monster. Thank you! It's more rooted in 1950s suitmation and stop motion animation, but they're very similar families of effect work. We also wanted to capture the classic 'tube limbs' that you used to see on robot designs in the 40s and 50s, but keep it subtle enough that people may not catch on. Kind of like the Venus Robots from Target Earth, 1954. Just ambiguous, due to what the cover dude is. ketchup vs catsup posted:I don’t like the fence. The fence is something we're going back and forth on. It may not make the final draft, we'll see. We're also debating about putting a tree up next to Paul, the human, but we'll see how that works out. And the monster isn't supposed to look scary, so that's working as intended. This is kind of a twist, but one I think readers will put together pretty quickly- the Invader shows up mid way through chapter 3, and is very pointedly not this design here. This is the titular Charred, the monolith discovered in the pit. We've tossed around different fonts for different things. We'll see where it settles. quote:The back blurb doesn’t make me want to read the book. Why’s Paul weary? I don’t get the sense there’s any conflict in this story beyond “this thing wants to kill us” - is there? The blurb is probably going to be reworked and redone over and over and over again and never be right. I'm not good at writing them, and I never know what to include or what to leave out. I was advised by someone who self publishes to leave the blurb vague and evoke the feelings instead of acting like a synopsis. The driving plot, the Invader and dealing with him, is intentionally very reactionary and shallow because the actual story concerns the characters in the town. The rich oil baron who bought out the land, the locals who are having a culture war within their own ranks, a local family that's torn apart by in fighting- Paul himself is a newcomer to the area, a Korean War vet that has early stage lung cancer. So a lot of the story is about dealing with overwhelming odds and such Finding hope even in the darkest times. But working all of that into the blurb, every time I've tried, just goes sideways and ends up becoming more of a synopsis. Sham bam bamina! posted:It's the perspective. The preliminary sketch was imposing because it was drawn from the viewpoint of looking up at the monster, but this picture is eye-level with it or even higher. This, yes. The perspective is shifted so that Paul and Charred appear more on equal footing, rather than one overwhelming the other. It's also why Charred has calming blue and white lights, instead of something harsher. Burkion fucked around with this message at 03:24 on Jan 24, 2020 |
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Jan 24, 2020 03:22
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Agreed re the cover fonts. If you absolutely must use two separate fonts, make the subtitle font a very clean boring sans serif. At the moment your spine/subtitle font has too much going on to not look jarring alongside the main title font. Nix the fence. Agreed re the blurb chat. I do think you nailed the vibe you were going for with the cover imagery (being more familiar with your subject matter than some) but I do worry that your colour and text treatment choices are not conveying the retro sci-fi/comic book type vibe well. Fonts are a big part of genre signifying. You don’t want people to look at your book and say hmm, that monster doesn’t look menacing, you want them to see your text treatments and colour scheme and other graphical elements and go oh, this isn’t trying to be a menacing monster book!
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Jan 24, 2020 10:07
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Is there a standard way to represent digital communications in works of fiction? I want to write a story that involves a twitch chat, and putting the chat in speech marks doesn't feel right. I'm not going to homestuck levels of dumping whole chatlogs. IMO that's boring as heck, but I do want to put two or three consecutive lines of the chat's spam/shitposting in the story. Azza Bamboo fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Jan 28, 2020 |
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Jan 28, 2020 23:35
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Just do it irc style, use a different font if you like but it's not required imo
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Jan 28, 2020 23:42
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Yeah, I'd just go something like 09:27:32 <ObamaBanana> omg rotflol 09:27:48 <BlazeDragon420> That sounds really asinine, like who did they think they were going to fool? You can leave the timestamps off if they're distracting.
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Jan 28, 2020 23:53
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Thanks guys.
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Jan 28, 2020 23:55
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I am an absolute piece of poo poo who cannot write a sentence. Publishing was a mistake
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Jan 29, 2020 19:47
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I want to delete every loving word of these page proofs. Prose like piles of soggy tissue. A heap of hosed up peeled up stained linoleum
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Jan 29, 2020 19:48
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General Battuta posted:I am an absolute piece of poo poo who cannot write a sentence. Publishing was a mistake This is me every time I write. Edit: 650K self published words here, so there’s a lot of self loathing built up that’s only occasionally released through sales.
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Jan 29, 2020 19:51
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General Battuta posted:I am an absolute piece of poo poo who cannot write a sentence. Publishing was a mistake Sorry, man. I hope you can find your way back to the output you need/want to produce. Publication is not the victorious ride into the sunset that we want it to be. Also you tell pretty complex and dense stories and I can't even imagine doing that under pressure. General Battuta posted:I want to delete every loving word of these page proofs. Prose like piles of soggy tissue. A heap of hosed up peeled up stained linoleum the good news is that your words are making you more miserable than they'd make anyone else 
Sitting Here fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 06:08
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General Battuta posted:I want to delete every loving word of these page proofs. Prose like piles of soggy tissue. A heap of hosed up peeled up stained linoleum For what it's worth I'm with you. I'm having to juggle some grant writing with my other work responsibilities. Last weekend I started reading a book by Bell Hooks, and the prose is beautiful. Every sentence and paragraph has a carefully measured cadence, and every word is carefully placed. And it made me feel pretty poo poo about the state of where my prose is at, especially since I have done better in the past. So, um,.  
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Jan 30, 2020 10:02
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So, I have this urban fantasy novel that's all but finished. I'm at the point where I'm starting to look into getting a profressional copy-editor (which I have questions about, but I dunno if this is the thread for that). My main problem is that I've rewritten the introductory scene like 4 times now. I'm pretty happy with most everything else, it's just the beginning that keeps psyching me out. I want to have a fairly mundane intro to the main character, a snippet of her life before all the weird magic and monster poo poo starts happening. But I keep thinking "This is too boring" and starting over. Every urban fantasy novel I've read starts with the character already knowing about the fantastical elements before things kick in, but I like the whole arc of a character being blindsided by that sort of stuff. Am I stressing too much about this?
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Jan 30, 2020 23:57
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Crowetron posted:
Yes Write it to the point where you can't fix it anymore, then find an outside source, or in your case copy editor and see what they have to say. If you're at the point where you feel like you're done and the only thing more you could do is tear it down and redo it, get new eyes on it instead.
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Jan 31, 2020 00:03
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Burkion posted:Yes That sounds much better than my current strategy. I know that friends and family aren't the best choice for objectivity, so maybe I'll put my ego aside and posting something here in CC to get some opinions. Is there a preferred thread for that sort of thing?
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Jan 31, 2020 00:35
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Make a new one, and pimp it in the chat and fiction advice threads.
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Jan 31, 2020 01:31
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Using "it" as the personal pronoun for a functionally non-gendered alien species. Will that get too confusing?
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Feb 1, 2020 09:00
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DJ Dizzy posted:Using "it" as the personal pronoun for a functionally non-gendered alien species. Will that get too confusing? Is there some reason the alien species can't use "they" which is the universally-approved pronoun for non-binary/non-gendered people? Like, do they lack sentience and/or sapience? Are they being referred to as "it" by a species that doesn't understand them or think of them as thinking beings?
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Feb 1, 2020 09:35
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You could also try "one."
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Feb 1, 2020 09:53
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Screaming Idiot posted:Is there some reason the alien species can't use "they" which is the universally-approved pronoun for non-binary/non-gendered people? Like, do they lack sentience and/or sapience? Are they being referred to as "it" by a species that doesn't understand them or think of them as thinking beings? I would rather want to avoid any confusion with regards to single/plural. I thought about using 'they', but as a non-native english speaker, i've always been taught that it was plural.
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Feb 1, 2020 11:12
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SelenicMartian posted:You could also try "one." Please don't.
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Feb 1, 2020 12:15
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DJ Dizzy posted:I would rather want to avoid any confusion with regards to single/plural. I thought about using 'they', but as a non-native english speaker, i've always been taught that it was plural. People pretend using singular they is some kind of shocking change to the language but it's not a new development. It's like 600 years old, it has just been traditionally used when the subject was indefinite. Eg: "Some rear end in a top hat backed their car into mine in the parking lot. They didn't leave a note."
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Feb 1, 2020 14:30
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The awesome thing about page proofs is that you can't make any large changes, just tiny edits. So I'm unable to follow through on my all-consuming desire to entirely tear down this book's prose and rewrite it. That's good for hitting my delivery date!! Too bad I loving hate the book  I think there's a good story in here but the micro-level prose decisions and the limp structure just utterly kill it for me.
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Feb 1, 2020 21:46
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DJ Dizzy posted:I would rather want to avoid any confusion with regards to single/plural. I thought about using 'they', but as a non-native english speaker, i've always been taught that it was plural. Speaking as a native English speaker, this is not a big deal, and if anyone tries to make it into being a big deal, you probably don't want to work with them anyway. (also note use of singular "them" in that sentence) Meanwhile, "it" carries strong connotations of de-personalizing whatever you're talking about. If you use it you're saying "these aliens are not people."
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Feb 1, 2020 22:58
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Hmm. You all make good points. What would be the plural of it?
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Feb 2, 2020 05:23
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DJ Dizzy posted:Hmm. You all make good points. What would be the plural of it? “it’s”
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Feb 2, 2020 23:23
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