Tag: Writing (page 38 of 47)

Burned by Midnight Oil

January 23, 2010 / / 1 Comment

Courtesy Wiki Commons

This post is going to be somewhat short, which I know will raise a question of why I’m posting at all. Well, I like to keep what few readers I have current, and there’s also the fact that I need to vent at people who might possibly understand my frustration.

You see, instead of that albeit lovely picture of an oil lamp, this was supposed to be the day I finally got around to posting my preview of Star Trek Online. I have a video supplement planned out and everything. However, it seems that my love for the Flash programming language, ActionScript, has once again proven to be a hindrance rather than a help.

I had programmed my video supplement as a slideshow of cropped screenshots, with narration and a bit of appropriate music. Very nice and tidy and all contained within a single frame in Flash. Relatively small and clean, should be no problem to convert to a video that can be uploaded to YouTube, right? Well, not exactly.

Turns out I can’t seem to get software to understand that there’s more content to the video than just that one frame of blank background – the photos load through the script, you see. So I went back and started hashing out the manual, timeline-based method of getting the video together. However, I ran out of time, and now am getting ready to head out for yet another busy day.

Why a video supplement? I know I need the practice at planning production times and working with various suites of software if I am to work on them on the future, which I might. I also felt the need to branch out beyond static text into more dynamic forms of media, hence my Netflix ‘podcasts’ and the attempt at a video with “Powerless,” which could have turned out a lot better. Practice makes perfect, as they say, and this is to be more practice for me.

Unfortunately, it will have to wait.

PT: Get Organized

January 21, 2010 / / 3 Comments

I'll be watchin' you!

There’s been a lot of Star Trek in my apartment lately. I’ve been introducing my wife to Deep Space 9, playing the open beta of Star Trek Online and bringing up Day Job Orchestra on YouTube when my recent negative moods have needed a little buoying. One thing that’s said quite often in Star Trek is that the ship needs to plot a course somewhere. Coincidentally, so do I, and you might find you need to as well.

I mentioned Tuesday that I have a to-do list for my largest current writing project. In case you missed it, here it is again:

  • Get plot points vetted.
  • Generate dramatis personae document.
  • Work out rules of languages & magic.
  • Write the damn thing (target word count:125k)
  • Find an agent a publisher.

I was linked an article written by Stephen King which said that finding an agent for your first novel is often an exercise in futility. Agents work on commission, after all, and 10% of nothing is… well, nothing. That’s why the last point changed. But the fact I want to highlight here is that I have points. There’s a plan here.

The general premise of this story is something that’s been kicking around since I wrote it out as a short work some years ago. Some of the concepts are the same, but as I’ve changed as a writer, so has the story. If I’m going to go with it as my primary long-term project as described over at Terrible Minds, I want to make sure I have a plan for taking it from beginning to end. But at the same time, I know all the planning in the world won’t help me unless I know at what point to stop planning and start writing.

You will learn by the numbers! I will teach you!

So, by all means, plan your story. Lay out a course for the plot from the opening scene to the final line. Sketch out your characters and locations. Set the stakes for the characters and know when they’ll be raised. Figure out what your story’s going to be about…

…But at some point you have to stop.

It’s hard to say when the time will be right for you to shift from planning to writing. The more you plan, the more smooth the writing process should be. But plan too much, and you’ll get caught up in the planning, which presents obstacles to writing ranging from always feeling you have more to plan to finding snags or holes in the plot that may appear insurmountable that torpedo the work before you even really get started on it.

Don’t forget that the end goal, here, is to write something for other people to read. Nobody’s going to be interested in reams of notes for a story that never got off the ground, unless you’re J.R.R. Tolkein or Frank Herbert. When you plan to write, be sure to work writing into your plan.

But now we’re getting into planning your plan, and I’m going to quit before my brain starts to hurt.

Roads Ahead

January 19, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Good Luck!

Whoo, boy. Trying to sort out exactly where I am at the moment and what’s coming next is proving to be difficult. The dayjob is ramping up along with everything else so time during the day to get a plan of action together is difficult to come by, since I have settled on a long-term writing project that should be occupying most of my free writing time. I do have a couple other incidental side projects, and I don’t want all of it to get derailed by my interest in Star Trek Online.

Now, the game has been previewed in several places, and the open beta critiqued in a couple others, but I have yet to pass my final judgement upon it. I actually want to put together more than just some text and pics about it, however, which leads me to the big obstacle that I’ve run into today.

You see, YouTube and Google like each other a lot. They encourage you to link your YouTube account to your Google account, which I did. However, I picked up the YouTube account ‘jeloomis’ before I really got into the whole Blue Ink Alchemy branding thing. In addition to having a video supplement to my beta impressions, which will be more like a narrated slideshow than an actual video because of my desire to preserve processor power and a complete lack of knowledge in FRAPS use, I was thinking of reworking the ‘Powerless’ idea to something less artsy and more casual. In order to make sure people associate these things with this space and my other work, I wanted to change my YouTube account name. You can’t do that without deleting the old account, which I did, but in the course of doing so I neglected to unassociate that account with Google. So, when I went to create the YouTube account with my shiny username, guess what happened?

“That account is associate with jeloomis.”

So… it’s associated with an account that no longer exists. And there’s no way to unassociate it outside of that account.

Courtesy Black Eagle Ops/Classholes Anonymous

I contacted YouTube to reactive the old ‘jeloomis’ account so I can yank it away from Google and get this thing set up properly. We’ll see how timely their customer service department is. EDIT: Apparently very, but that doesn’t mean they’re helpful in getting the association severed. My vexation is COLOSSAL.

Meantime, here’s a to-do list for that project I’ve chosen thanks to the Magical Talking Beardman.

  • Get plot points vetted.
  • Generate dramatis personae document.
  • Work out rules of languages & magic.
  • Write the damn thing (target word count:125k)
  • Find an agent.

The first hurdle is, to me, a crucial one. I’ve laid out the plot of the novel in a document and shown it to a couple minds I really respect. My wife has given me some good feedback on it and I’ve tweaked the document accordingly. I’m waiting for a few more opinions before I proceed with the next step. Having a plan like this should keep me from procrastinating too much. I hope.

No word back yet from Polymancer, although there is another assignment I’ve been contacted about. More on that after I fit it into my schedule somewhere. And what’s this? A new Escapist editorial schedule calender? Hot diggity dog, it’s time to flood Jordan’s inbox with more pitches.

I really have no excuse for sitting around bored any time soon. Unless I’m in STO going from one system to the next and waiting for an instance to load. But more on that later.

Things to Come

January 15, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Bard

With work kicked into high gear since the departure of two friends, this week’s IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! has unfortunately been delayed. I do, however, have some good news to share related to my nascent career as a writer.

I responded to an advert from Polymancer Studios which said they were looking for writers and would-be writers for a new publication related to tabletop gaming. I suggested a column about creative DMing, full of tips for the guy or gal behind the screen aimed at keeping things exciting for the players, from villains with deep motivations to the inclusion of politics in the lands through which the players travel. Polymancer liked the idea, and contacted me about coming aboard as a regular columnist.

Now that alone would be enough to excite me, but then Sandra from Polymaner said this:

I looked over your blog “The Blue Ink” and I liked what I read, would you consider writing for one of our fiction publications as well?

Would I? You bet your ass I would.

I looked through my little bits of fiction, teased out possible ongoing plot threads and character growth and finally settled on Captain Pendragon. Sandra showed it to the others at Polymancer, and…

We like your idea and would love to see this serialized as part of Polygraff’s content. How does that sound to you?

Courtesy travelblog.org

So, yeah. Watch this space. Good things are happening, slowly but surely.

In other news, if anybody wants to sketch the characters or settings in the aforementioned story, feel free. I can picture these folks and technology in my head but I can’t draw to save my life.

Everything’s Cooler in Space: Saturn

January 13, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Jupiter & Callisto

This will probably be my last ‘Cooler in Space’ post for a bit. I’m going to do my utmost to focus on a single major project at a time. Certainly, if something comes along for which I’ll be paid, I’ll shift my focus there, but the point is that I should take something from beginning to end without interruption or schizophrenic and sudden gear-changes.

But before I put the RPG project on one of my many back-burners and move something else to stand all alone on the front one, I want to touch on something I happened upon in my addled brain that might give more focus to the RPG.

Saturn

I mentioned in a previous post that Saturn could be a potential source of conflict. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Saturn and, more specifically, its moons are very nearly a campaign setting in and of themselves. People would come from both Terran and Jovian walks of life to stake, protect, jump or outright steal claims to the mineral-rich moons, the vast open land for colonization or developmental space and the hydrogen stocked atmosphere. Like the unclaimed areas in the Forgotten Realms, the various small moons in Serenity and the Outer Rim in Star Wars, there’s plenty of blank canvas upon which a game master can paint a campaign.

The home worlds of the players, then, become origin points, places where stories begin and possibly end. The bulk of those stories, however, would play out in unknown and unmapped places, lending an air of mystery and exploration to the drama, suspense and combat. That’s what I’m thinking, at least.

More on why this is getting back-burnered in the days to come.

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