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