Unmountable Boot Volume

Gosh Darn! >:(

Apparently it can be fixed if you have the install disk. Pity the Laptop came with Windows pre-installed. If money was no object, then I'd go for a Mac instead.

Edit: Safe Mode doesn't work. System restore doesn't work. Right now I'm doing a chkdsk, but it's going slow.

Edit 2: Managed to fix it. At least for now. I got hold of a Win 7 install disk and fixed the error. How exactly I'm not sure. 02:20 on Christmas day. I think I'll de-fragment the drive and see what that does. Might not get any sleep tonight.

Skyrim Modding

So I'm taking a mini break from Ash and Dirt, and doing some modding of Skyrim.

One thing I've always been dissatisfied with on the whole regarding Race mods, is the fact that they're always recoloured vanilla presets. I've decided to make new presets in the Tri's which will include hopefully most Bipedal Elven/human Lore race.
First off I decided to go Sea Elf/Maormer. I'm concentrating on the female morph first because they don't have beards to deal with and I want to see how easy/hard it is before I tri (pun intended) to do more races, IF I decide to do more. It's based off of the High Elf morph and will hopefully look different enough when I'm done.

I'm editing the tri. files in Blender.

What I'm doing is adding the preset to the existing ones. Essentially what this means is that if someone makes a new race that is called "SeaElfRace" using this tri. then they choose NONE for morph, then it will grab the correct morph from this modified tri, giving them a new morph, one that is not vanilla.

Now comes in the problem. It isn't as easy as changing ears and face shape, and then giving yourself a pat on the back for making a new race morph. NO! if only it were that simple.
There are Race tri.'s for nearly everything that goes on the face. Scars/Eyebrows/beards. They all go on the face, and all have tri. files that fit to the race. Just the small change seen above took 3 hours. Why? Because I had to make sure that the brow tri. didn't clip when changing sliders that change the brow positions. I also had to check that there wasn't any clipping with facial expressions with the brow sliders at default or their most extreme.
There was and I had to make minute adjustments. They had to be minute, as to make it so the brows also weren't too far away from the face either, making it look cartoony.

The ears are actually on purpose. The Maormer are said to have pale, chameleon-like skin, and by their description they sounded a bit amphibious, so I made their ears kind of "amphibian" like.
I'm not doing textures for them or anything because I'm concentrating on the morphs, and my goal isn't to make race mods from this, but to give others the tools to make the race mods that there always should have been.

My goal is to try and make morphs for:

Mer
Sea Elf - Maormer
Heartland High Elf/Wild Elf - Ayleid
Veloth Elf - Chimer (maybe I'll come up with a better name than Veloth Elf, perhaps Ashland Elf after Morrowinds red mountain)
Deep Elf/Dwarves - Dwemer
Snow Elf - Falmer

Men
Akaviri (Might call them something else. They're supposedly extinct, but who knows.)
Kothringi (Most went extinct, but some escaped Tamriel. We'll see if I bother with this one)

Might make an Ohmes morph as well. I've kind of done one before for Rasha in my ES fanfic, but it wouldn't hold up if you tried to put scars on it.

EDIT: Couldn't get the brows to sit on the face properly, so for now I'm only going to alter the ears, and see where it goes from there.

EDIT 2: Laptop's borked, so this is on hold till I fix it or get a new one. FIXED IT FOR NOW.

EDIT 3: Blender won't open morphs that are over 50KB which has put a halt on this. Might just use existing morphs and change the ears. This means that I'll have to put each race into a unique race morph and have them replace existing morphs, but as they're in a separate morph file, it won't overwrite anything.

Troublesome Chapters.

Fallout AaD: Survivors is a troublesome story. One would think that because it has an almost singular thread, and only a handful of main characters, that it'd be easier than writing a story with lots of different characters.
If only that were so.
The difficulty here is that I just don't have any drive. I've tried finding some by playing FO3. I just find it boring now, even though I'm playing the Alton mod, which takes you to a new world-space. That haunted feeling I used to get when playing it is no longer there.
I'm a mere 1262 words into chapter 19, and I feel as though I'm running out of things to write about, even though the story doesn't feel ready to end yet, or rather can't end yet as all the pieces aren't in place.
It would be easier if I stuck with the original outline, but as with all things I write, I tend to go in the direction of what feels natural, more than what I had set out to write months before.
As with how the story is now, they aren't going to be where I wanted them to be by the end of the story. (location wise)
Heck if I went by the original idea, Oliver got stupider because his brain was tied to the vault computer, not because he was breaking down, and Milly didn't even exist beyond a brief mention about it being her birthday.
Perhaps when Fallout 4 releases in 2016 or whenever, it'll motivate me more. But that's a very long time to wait.

JG

Orc Eyes Alternate

So, I made a mod that adds a new texture for the Orc eyes in Skyrim. I'm now using Natural eyes, but their Orc eyes were just wrong. Completely wrong, so I made some myself.
I have made an eye mod before, which included Orc eyes, but it was just lackluster at best. This new mod aims to make the eyes look as awesome as they can.

There's also a plugin version that adds 4 new eyes, with new colours including bright green/brown/deep red/violet.
In my ES story, I mentioned that Magoza had green eyes, yet there isn't green eyes selection in Orcs, so I made one. :)

Memory Lane 1

I was reading through some of my old posts and realised how far I've come. It's odd to see just how unprepared I am for near everything I do in writing fan fiction. My Elder Scrolls story was originally just going to run straight through with no breaks from beginning to end, until I decided to break up the different 'parts'. It also had a dumb name, the sort you'd give to an anthology.
Fallout as well. Where I had 4 stories going on at the same time. Stories that wouldn't intersect for perhaps 60 chapters. So I split them, and right now I'm continuing AaD Survivors.
My Trek story has flown off into the ether, and I have no clue if I'll continue it after AaD S.

Anyway, it's late and I need sleep.
JG

An Elder Scrolls Saga P2 - Complete

So, part 2 of my Elder Scrolls Fan Fiction is complete. The ending is far more open than the last, but it sets up the jump off point for P3.
P3 is going to take a while till it's ready to be written. I have 19 major and supporting characters to juggle, with up to 5 different story arcs. Perhaps I'm in over my head, but I've started it now, I will have to finish it.
That said, it'll be a while till I start part 3 (Though I said that about part 2 and then started writing it almost as soon as the words had left the keyboard.)
Anyway, as I have some kind of neurosis, I made all 19 characters that I'll be juggling.

In other news I've been editing the chapters of Fallout: Ash and Dirt. the next one was already half written, so Ch10 may be out soon (as of this posting)

JG

Fallout: Ash and Dirt - The Return.

So, the last chapters of An Elder Scrolls Saga: A Dagger in the Wind has been written. All that remains now is to edit them, and to spot errors/typos.

When it is done I will be shifting my focus back to my fallout fanfic, which has been sorely neglected. With that said, I started to continue writing the chapter I had left off on, and immediately started calling LeBethany, Valerie from AESS.

So what I decided to do was to star re-reading AaD, to try and get a feel for it again. What I found was errors and typos and mis-constructed sentences.

So once I have finished editing DitW, I will re-do AaD part 1 (I must really learn to plan stories that aren't serials)

Another thing I decided to do, was to remake the cover. It's just plain too dark, and you can barely see the thing. I also thought it was too 'busy'

OLD

NEW

The old version doesn't exist as a big image anymore, but I could easily remake it if need be. In the end though it was hard to see.

JG

Making Covers, and Building Characters

So I've said a good amount of times, that I like to make covers for my stories. Well, I make them by doing a kind of panorama, and joining the images together, to get a larger image. The console helps heaps in this. Simple "TFC 1" to pause all the action and then use "FOV 10" to reduce the field of view. This reduces the amount of warpage that occurs around the edges of the screen, making it easier to make the panorama. I then take a series of shots. Working on larger images helps, as I like to round out the polygonal edges with a warp tool in Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8. Yes, you read correctly. I use software released in 2003 (Jasc PSP being Coral PSP in 2005 onwards) and it works well with windows 7.
Anyhoo, the panorama goes from top to bottom, creating a rectangular image on the vertical.

This is the image after it has been put together from the series of screenshots, scrolling down. And then after it's all been messed around with in PSP. If I did this today, I would have taken 2 shots of  Mag. One with the Hide armour, and one with the master mages outfit, and then merge them to create something unique looking, as I did with M, on an image I posted earlier.

I also redid the Valerie and Tam images as I wasn't happy with the way they looked. Another thing I did was start making more characters, as I thought it might help me when describing them. (May go back and add more description on characters when I go back to repair part 1 of it's typos and such.)

Anyway, I thought it might be good to show some characters from part 2.

 

Sorry, no Darovin as I didn't make him. Just imagine Brendarr, but with black hair, older and with five-o'clock shadow. (Getting a Dunmer to look young is actually quite hard without him looking like a high-fantasy elf or something) (Might see if I can fix the way he looks later)
EDIT
Changed Brendarr's normal map to make him look closer to his age.

Rasha's appearance is kind of an accident. I wasn't happy with how the Ohmes Raht race, from a mod on the nexus, was simply a re-textured Bosmer. I threw the Race Morph Tri into blender, and made some changes. I was worried that it would cause problems, but in the end it turned out quite well. I kind of gave her a slight muzzle, and made the morphs eyes narrower on the horizontal plane. the eyes themselves use the Khajiit eye texture from cover eyes, just altered so they fit on the non-beast race eye texture.

Faldan on the other hand was easy. I used some hair mod (Apachii Skyhair maybe) and tried to make him look a bit dorky. He's around 35.

That's all for now

JG

I mod also, well not any more I don't

I made a Race mod for Skyrim a while ago, and while I tried hard on it, I can't get the thing to fully work.
The problem is that the Formlists don't exactly function as I think they're supposed to

Example:
If you add a race to HeadsPartsAllracesMinusBeast formlist, then everything works. But if any other mod uses that same formlist, even in reference, then things begin to break.
Also the Vampire and Werewolf change scripts begin to act up with multiple race mods.

I've tried using the "Generic Race Controller" scripts from the mod "Creating Playable Races the Right Way" and I tried following the instructions, but all I get is script failures and issues. I might have start fresh, but that ain't happening. So for now, the half working mod will stay.

I tried something I haven't really tried before. Creating a mod. In the end it's a partial success, partial failure.
The success was creating morphs that are different from vanilla. Learning texturing and how to alter texture-maps. Being able to create custom spells for the races.
The failures are simple. Creating a race in Skyrim is broken. You need other mods to get a race mod to be properly functional with other race mods. Otherwise, you have end up with the possibility of a bald race, and/or a race that bugs out when becoming a vampire/werewolf etc.

Anyone interested in taking a look, it's here.
The Dwemer and the Falmer
I also did an elven eyes mod. Might expand that a little more.

JG

An Elder Scrolls Saga: Part 2 - The Final Stretch

Part 2 of my Elder Scrolls Fan Fiction is almost complete. Already I can tell that some aspect of the story are not going to feel complete as I thought they would feel, and an upcoming battle (this was posted after chapter  15 had been posted/before 16) may feel as though a last minute thought, when it has been planned for a long time. I just didn't allude to it as I wanted it to feel sudden, and out of the blue.

After this is complete, I will begin to take another look at my Fallout FF, and also fix errors and typos in ESSaga P1, that really need to be corrected. I was reading through it the other day, and was amazed at how glaring some errors were. Extra words, using the wrong words etc. It'll be fixed as well as me getting back into the Fallout universe.

That's all for now
JG.

Backup! Backup! Backup! Always remember to backup!

So part of my thing is making covers, and I spend a lot of time setting these up and "photographing" them. Then editing the images to "yellow" them and give them a bit of a painted look.
To do this, I make a non-functional mod that has all the characters. Well around a month ago, Skyrim was starting to run slow. So I decided to essentially remove everything and reinstall it, as I couldn't be bothered to go through the script folders and meshes and textures etc, and do it that way.
Come to a few days ago, when I realised that I had deleted the 'mod' I used to make the covers. Of course by this time it was long gone, and I checked all the storage devices I backup my stories on. Turns out that I hadn't backed it up.
Re-making the characters from scratch wasn't something I was looking forward too. While the first book "Old Wounds" didn't show any faces, the second cover showed Valerie, and the cover for the third book had already been made (And I didn't want to have to remake it)
Anyway, in making new faces, I'm quite satisfied at how close I was able to get. I also "enhanced" the faces using a HD texture from the nexus and a modified custom normal-map, to give them that extra nudge away from that "vanilla" look.
Anyway, here are some pics of a select few characters.

 

Valerie uses elements from the "femaleold" normal map texture and dropped parts in as a new layer, making them almost transparent before merging them into the layer, giving a slight wrinkled look. Val also has elements from the Redguard (Nose and cheeks I think) and Breton (eyes and forehead)

Rontag uses elements from all over the place, including wrinkles from both maleold and femaleold. he has an Altmer nose.

Magoza was the hardest to do. I had to make her young, while having her look both Orcy and Altmery at the same time. her skin colour is custom, and is closer to yellow, than normal Orc skin-tones. Her normal map I found on the nexus (can't remember where now, I think it was from one of those mods that make the women look freakishly young. Took the Normal map and deleted the file :P[sorry to the original maker of the NM]) I then modified that texture adding in an Orc brow and more Altmer-like features around the eyes.

Tam uses dark elf elements for wrinkles as well as the female old map and some Breton.

Meratur uses Altmer, Breton and Redguard normal maps all skillfully crafted together.

Normal maps for anyone reading who doesn't know, is essentially a texture that tells the engine to give fake shadows/lighting/bumps to an object. It enables an object to have more detail and make it look more 3d. The illusion is often shattered though. For example: looking across a stone wall from along it's edge. It's clear that the stones are not "bumpy" but are flat.

What I aimed to do here was to make them look "real" and not like supermodels. (and yes Rontag is supposed to be tanned. He spent five years in Hammerfell. At somepoint I will make a small correction to Old Wounds mentioning his darker skin due to being in the desert for so long.)

I've backed all of this up :)
JG

Tales of the Bold and the Brave to be Renamed.

The title of my Elder Scrolls fan fic series has been bugging me for quite some time. "Tales of the Bold and the Brave" is a long and clumsy title for a series, and I think sounds a little dumb to be honest.

As the idea of this series is a long one, and I have a lot of ideas about it in the future, I've decided to re-brand it as "An Elder Scrolls Saga" (I went through several title ideas, and this one I think this one is simple and to the point.)

"Tales of the Bold and the Brave" to me, always sounded like a title you'd give to a compilation of short stories, with different characters. Perhaps I will use this title again, for a series of short ES stories, that do not have enough material for a proper novel length story. Or perhaps this title will fade into distant memory. Who knows.

Here is what the cover will look like under the new title /\
I feel it's less cluttered than before, and I prefer it . I have no idea if this will help with views, but it will help put that gripe about the title out of my mind.

JG Pliskin (Sorry, I had to)

JG

Been Playing GTA V Along with the Billion Other People

Been Playing GTA V (I've heard people pronounce it GTA Vee, which seems dumb to me. V is 5) Liking it so far. They addressed a lot of complaints people had, reducing the amount the euphoria physics affects the player and the heavy cars and heavy damage. Problem is now people are complaining again that they removed all the realistic driving etc, that was in IV. Truth is you'll never please everyone.

Anyway, so far the experience for me has been solid. The graphics are pretty good, considering it's on old hardware, and it appears R* are pushing boundaries, regarding what you can get away with in a video game.
Textures can get a little muddy (Blame low RAM) and the frame rate seems to hover around 30 (With drops here and there) The resolution is also 720p with very little AA, so it can look a bit bad at times, but never awful.
The amazing thing is the countryside. Leaving the city on a highway/freeway and it 'feels' like you're leaving a city. Everything looks sculpted, and I have to say looks better than Skyrim in terms of the wilderness. (But Skyrim is doing a lot more things in the background that can slow a machine down, so graphics take a hit for performance.)

The game allows you to take pics in game. Not as good as "Print Screen" on PC. (Or other image capture software) The resolution of the images just plain sucks.

Declasse Tornado. Based upon the 57 chevy Bel-Air with some Cadillac Eldorado influences. (Look at the ground. Muddy/blurry textures are everywhere in the wilderness. Still looks amazing though considering the age of the hardware)

The thing I've always liked about GTA is that it's a showcase of the worst parts of American society. Be it Misogyny/Murder/Robbery etc. It takes the piss equally out of Liberal ideals as it does Conservative ideals. (Both tending to go too far one way or another)

It certainly won't keep me as long as Skyrim has due to the fact that GTA even on PC is inherently less moddable.

JG

Fan Fiction and Me

I was thinking recently about the misconceptions and biases towards Fan Fiction. To those who have never read it, or know what it's about, they usually see it as something "Nerds" or "Wierdos" do. They see it as badly written, and also as mostly slash fiction, that is there solely to quench some sexual desire that the writer has.

In the late 90's (I would have been 10-13 at the time) I wrote fan fiction on half A4 sheets, that I bound with glue in a cardboard, and tried to make books. They were Star Trek DS9 stories and were absolute trash with no merit to them whatsoever. They usually involved them flying somewhere in the Defiant, finding some-thing and then flying home again jiggidy-jig. At some point I stopped doing it as I grew up and the very memory of it vanished until recently.

Jump to 2005. I thought that fan fiction was trash. I'd never read any, but I thought it was trash. I thought that Fan Fiction prose was just Kirk/Spock stuff that I had no interest in reading that.

Around this time I saw a Fan Production by the name of Star Trek New Voyages: Come What May. It was truly terrible. I thought it was nothing more than a stupid 'High School Play' level of production. I shook my head and thought that fan-made stuff was simply garbage. (Come What May is still truly awful)

It wasn't until I caught their episode To Serve All My Days, did I start to take notice of what fans were capable of. I waited with a strange excitement when I saw their trailer for World Enough and Time, which at the time I kept calling "World Not Enough and Time" for some reason. In fact my last name appeared in the e-mags they used to release, with my short forum review and my forum name (which was my last name) misspelled in it.

Anyway, this took me onto the Audio-Drama side of things. Things I could listen to when walking. I caught something done by Darker Projects, but they mixed in other Sci-Fi universes and I didn't like that. I also listened to Star Trek: Defiant (Which has since vanished from the face of the internet) and then later Star Trek: Outpost (Which I still listen too)

But before Outpost and after Defiant, I read my first full Fan Fiction. It was a TOS fan fic detailing Scotty's time at the academy. I think this was 2009 or 10. I wish I knew what it was called. All I know was that it wasn't on the Fan Fiction site, and on another with a load of other fan fics. I know the cover image was of a bridge or something. I really enjoyed it and now am quite sad that I cannot find it again.

Then As I'm writing this, I found the story on Ad Astra, an archive for Trek Fan-fic. It's called On the Nature of Wind. This was the story that made me second guess the legitimacy of prose in Fan-fiction.

Jump ahead (or maybe this happened before reading On the Nature of Wind, I can't remember) I wanted to do something with Audio. It never came about, but instead Ideas for writing came about. I think in an earlier post I mentioned it when discussing my Trek story that is sadly on hiatus right now.

Anyway, at this point I still had no real interest in reading it, even if I wanted to start writing it. Though it wasn't for a year or two till I started writing, and strangely enough it was Elder Scrolls and Fallout that I started with. I continued with ES and Fallout kind of fell by the wayside, and for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to add a Trek story to the mix (Don't try and write more than one story at a time. You'll either lose interest in all three, or two of them won't see an update for MONTHS)

At some point I started to take a gander at other fan-fics. I would tell you my first favourite (Which I favourited to know what stories I was reading, but I cannot remember and I'm getting a 408 time-out error when I try and access my profile on FanFiction.net. and has completely ruined the end of this post.

JG

Edit:
Heh, my first favourite is a story I've not actually read.
Second is Solace in the Sand by Banger1897, a Fallout Fan-Fic that I haven't read any of the updates in a few months.
Third is Accident and Destiny by SuperGreG. The first Elder Scrolls Fan-Fic I saw that wasn't "The Ever Repeated Adventures of the Champion of Cyrodiil/the Dragonborn" Four days later I favourited his second.
My foray into the world of written FF is a rather new one, and I'm glad I found it.

JG

Skyrim Modding Peeve.

Why, oh why are mods that make the women of Skyrim look 14 years old so popular?
Yet another mod that changes the appearance of the women (This time the housecarls) has been released. And they look like teenagers.
What's worse is that it's a hotfile on the SkyrimNexus. This really annoys me because there are people out there making interesting mods that get little recognition.
The mods that make certain women look like 14-17 years olds are the worst, and is just plain creepy. But I guess people like 'em young looking. (Too Young FFS)

Maybe I'm overreacting.

JG

Edit: To be precise, it's Jordis that looks 14. I also feel that the others look like they're barely twenty. When I played Skyrim, I got the impression that Lydia and Iona were later twenties at their youngest and early thirties at their oldest. I want them to look and feel like they have experience on the battlefield, not like they're barely out of school.

on Rails, Amazingly Generic Entertainment (RAGE)

I've started playing Rage on the PC. While it looks really nice, and runs in 64bit, I can't help but feel like I'm on a rail. The shooting parts guide me down often narrow hallways, and you know for sure when the area gets large and square that it's a mini arena to fight a load of guys or mutants in.
The driving parts aren't much better. The world exists in long canyons, and it almost feels pointless to have it in at all.
Early on you have to retrieve parts from the dead city. You get glimpses of a giant creature roaming about. But the problem is I knew the exact moment I was going to have to fight it, because literately in the area you fight it in, you get a rocket launcher with an infinite ammo cache nearby. It completely spoilt the whole fight because I knew the creature was going to show up right then and there.
If there's one thing I have to say, is that it's generic. It starts off well, but the first gun the game gives you is a pistol with absolutely no feel to it whatsoever. The first time I shot it, it just let me down a little. This game was made by Id. And from what I understand, they used to make killer games.
I can't help but feel that the RAM of current games consoles are partially to blame for how this game turned out. The PS3 uses 512mb of RAM divided by 256 for the video and 256 for the memory (If I recall correctly) and the 360 has 512 unified (I believe) even in 2005 they must have seen this as becoming a problem well before the system's life cycle were out.
That's not to say I'm not enjoying RAGE. I wasn't expecting much to begin with. Overall it's a modern shooter. That's to say it holds your hand, and carefully guides you to make sure you don't accidentally graze your knee.
One thing regarding FPS games. I've never played a Call of Duty game and I plan on never playing one.

Reviewing Chapters are Tedious Yet Necessary.

Reading through chapter 4 of "Dagger in the Wind" and fixing errors in the text, adding comma's, changing sentences so they read better etc. The annoying thing is that I've read through it perhaps a half dozen times and I'm still finding problems with it, and some of these problems are so Obvious.

For example: one of the characters did say. "It couldn't help." instead of "It couldn't hurt." I'd read through this chapter about five times before I noticed this clear error. Another thing is a lack of comma's. It really helps to read it out loud. Where I stop naturally in a sentence and take a pause is usually where I place a comma, given that it makes sense within the sentence to put it there.

Reviewing chapters and fixing errors is really the stalling point of writing. I can see why authors like to write the whole story from start to finish before the editing phase. But then again if I did that, the editing and checking would be quite daunting.

Anyway, I'm going to finish reading through the chapter, upload it to FanFiction, and then give it another once or twice over to make sure it's ready.

JG

The Last of Us - My Thoughts

Well today I finished the Naughty Dog game The Last of Us. I can't say I enjoyed it, as it's not really a subject matter one can enjoy. Instead, I'll say that it was great at what it was trying to accomplish. The gun play was shaky and imprecise, which is what you want from a game that makes you feel that you are constantly on the verge of  horrible death, and the hand to hand often left you exposed, as did stealth executions.
What the game does kind of well and poorly at the same time however, is play with expectations. As a player who's played many games, I have certain expectation of how the storyline will play out. While being brutal in the first few minutes, it's kind of expected. Later on though, the game will not give you what you expect, the storyline starts taking turns.
The biggest turns of the story however, do exactly what is expected. Sometimes the ambiguity of who lived or died lasted for only minutes, others for an entire "level". I would have preferred certain events to have played out as they seemed to at first, disliking how it eventually turned out.

Spoilers on how I thought things should have gone.
I would have preferred it if Joel died at the point he was impaled, and had Ellie finish the story. I think it would have been far better. I really like Joel, but to have the player think he's dead, hope he's not, then reveal he is in fact still alive is too expected.
Again at the end, I would have liked it if Ellie had been given the chance to except her fate and become a kind of martyr. She had the cure within her, and she should have given her life in order for there to be a cure. It would have been upsetting as I really bonded with the character, but it would have made this game truly a game of a generation to kill off all the protagonists.

Those are my honest thoughts on the game.

JG

Stories, Covers and Stuff

Right now, I am writing a rough draft of part 2 for TotBatB. While I am doing this, I am slowly planning out where I want to take my star trek story. While the trek story is an old idea, I hadn't properly fleshed out what would happen in finer detail other than 'this and this and that happens'. I want to try and give all the characters something to do, give them more depth and as such it will probably be a while before any updates are done.
As for my Fallout story. That's on hold for now. I really didn't have a game plan for the individual stories, only where I wanted them all to end up. This was seriously bad planning on my part, and right now I don't have the necessary drive to continue on right now. (Perhaps I should start playing the games again to get me in the mood. Right now however, I'm playing Morrowind for the first time, so that's got me occupied on the gaming front.)

As for TotBatB I edited the cover image for "Old Wounds" to lessen the obvious triangles and edges created by the polygonal construction of the models. I also added hair sticks as it is described in the story near the beginning that she wears them.

In about ten years people will look back on these graphics and say "Why they so pointy?"

Anyway, I have the cover for both the second and third books done. here's the cover for the second 'Novel'.

Big, big images. Won't show the third books cover as it kind of reveals how book 2 will end regarding some characters. Of course book 2 is very rough at the moment with a basic outline. The first few chapters are written however, as they have been for like five or six months now.

Overall I have got a lot of motivation right to keep on writing this "series" and I'm going to run with it. I feel that if I try and refocus my attention onto, let's say the Star Trek story, that I'll essentially stall and loose the locomotion I have with writing.

That's all for now
JG

Star Trek: Overwatch

One of my passions, is science fiction. And Star Trek (and Forbidden Planet) kind of began science fiction as something more than just daft stories for kids, a way to tell current morality tales, but set them in the future. (Not to say Star trek didn't get daft - Spock's Brain anyone?)

You could say Star Trek started fan fiction in the western world as well.

About 4 years ago now, I started to think about writing a Star Trek FF. It would follow the crew of a starship set in the TOS movie era. This ship would be destroyed in the opening moments, and the crew forced to survive on a planet surface until aid arrives. Then I started to expand the story. What if this ship was on detachment to a Starbase? The starbase could be the source of many stories beyond this one. So I put the starbase near the Romulan neutral zone and called it Starbase 23. I then moved it into the TOS era.

Then I discovered the novel series Star Trek: Vanguard, and I saw similarities between it and what I wanted to do. So I abandoned the idea.

Recently I found those old files. Character sheets, story outlines. There was a lot there. I decided to begin to write it again. If it's similar to Vanguard, then so what? I want tell a story, and I want to tell my story. The story I developed those four years ago.

I decided to embrace the Vanguard series, and even base the starbase off of the Watchtower class. I called it the Guardtower class. I even made a pic in relation to the Watchtower.

And a schematic

And deck listing

Why do all this? I like to build the world i'm going to be writing in. I like to be consistent, and if I have information detailed, it lowers the risk significantly, that it won't change later on.

Yeah, i'm a nerd :)

JG

Fallout Fan Fiction AaD Pictures

So I made some pictures for my fan fiction story that is currently on hiatus. I find that being able to see the characters helps me, when describing them.

Regina
With a rifle

Scott & Oliver

I am splitting the stories, Each character will have a "book". and each book will be part of a volume.
Volume one will have a book for Scott, Mason and Regina each. While Volume two will continue on from there with the Brotherhood, and return to the other characters. I have an idea for how each of their stories in volume one will end, and how it effects volume two.
JG

Fallout: Ash and Dirt - Fan fiction story changes and Elder Scrolls TotBatB Cover

For a while I've been thinking about splitting the four stories in this one "novel" (in quotes as can one call a fan fiction a novel?) into four actual separate "novels". I think it will make it easier on both me the writer and the you reader if I do this. Not only is the cast of each story going to increase, but the Brotherhood of Steel Story Arch will feature a huge cast, and I know it will get too complex to keep track of characters from chapter to chapter, especially when there's a three chapter gap between them.

I also have to keep a close eye on dates. Each chapter, I feel, has to be set at the same time or later than the previous. This limits what I can do and feel that if one were to lag behind in date than the other than it would be weird. To separate them means I can be more concise and it will be more fluid and easier to follow.

I'll try and figure out exactly what it is I'll be doing at a later date, but for now I'm going to put the story on a short hiatus until I can figure out how to properly do it.

TotBatB

For my Elder Scrolls fan fiction, I've finished part one (Probably still a load of errors I have yet to find) and I made a cover for it.

On Fanfiction.net the images are teeny tiny, so here it is in big. Maybe I'll point people who read my stories (all 4 of them D:) to here. Or maybe someone just taking a gander through the blogosphere will find this interesting, who knows.

The full size image of the original is something like 1651 -2476 and photobucket didn't seem to like that, so this image is 600 - 900.

JG

ES: Tales of the Bold and the Brave Update

First up, I think I'm going to use this as a kind of chronology. To look back and see the things I've done regarding my fan stories and how they progressed.

Okay, into the meat of the post. Today (It was so late that it was today) I started to update my Elder Scrolls Story. (Tales of the Bold and The Brave)
Before I had Part 1 and some of Part 2 written. I've decided to split them. Part 1 will be a complete story and part 2 will be something separate. This makes it easier for me and will give me an actually finished story, even if it will carry on at some point. Another thing, is that I have to alter part 2 as the Dragonborn DLC revealed more into how far the Argonians got into Morrowind, so I have to alter some things regarding that.

I am also reading through those early chapters and grinding my teeth over how it reads. I've re-written parts of Chapter 1 to make the sentences easier to read and more natural. There was awful punctuation in parts, far too many commas and no full stops in the correct place. It just goes to show that I have progressed in my writing. Enough to see how bad the early stuff was, and in the future, probably how the current stuff still is.

So my goal now is to continue writing for Fallout: Ash And Dirt and edit all of the Chapters for ES: Tales of the Bold and the Brave (AaD and TotBatB, as I will probably refer to them from now on.)

While I do have ideas for other stories set in franchises, I'll just stick to these for now. Trying to get too many ideas onto "paper" as it were was what burned me out last time and stopped me from writing for months. I just have to keep it up and hone my skill if I ever want to actually be a proper writer someday.

Now to think of a subtitle for TotBatB, if I'm to split P1 and P2.

JG

First Post - or - How I Learned to Stop Blundering and Start a Blog.

Here's where i'm going to post ideas for new stories I have, a place to put them out into the blogosphere as it were. Also to perhaps review fan fiction and non fan fiction books. Things I've read and such. I'm new to blogging, so it might be a bit random and imprecise at first. We'll see how it goes. Perhaps there will be a link to my fanfiction page on the side. I'll see if I can figure that out.

Bit of a rubbish first post, but hey, we all start somewhere.
http://www.fanfiction.net/u/1853960/

JG