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