Four things. And a lizard. Sans lizard.

 Okay, so I finished my editing work on all my little novellas that I wrote this summer and if you so feel the urge, you can read them by following This Link. They're at the bottom of the page.

Soooooooo.  Here's a little synopsis of each of them:

1.) The Reality Engine - A scholar runs away from home, searching for an ancient artifact that may hold the secrets behind the creation of the world.  (28k words)

2.) The Fox King - A slave girl uses a war to make money toward buying her own freedom.  (26k words)

3.) A Certain Necessity of Evil - A slave girl murders her masters and is sold to an assassin who begins training her as his apprentice.  (33k words)

4.) The Bastard Princess - A queen's bastard tries to make a life for herself in a world that hates her and blames her for a devastating civil war.  (39k words)

 

Like I said, these novellas are meant to set up the characters and the world for a forthcoming novel that I plan to begin work on later this year.

Red Dead Redemption 2

So, for my birthday, my brother got me Red Dead Redemption 2, a game he's been trying to get me to play for ages now.  This is the same brother who got me all of the Mass Effect games for Christmas, not because I wanted them, but because he wanted me to have them.  Notice a bit of a theme here?  He didn't even get me a new copy of the game.  It was used, and didn't come with a case.  Whatever.  So I figured, I'd give it a try, I did end up enjoying most of the Mass Effect games, excluding 2, after all.

So, up front, I have to say that I have never had any interest in Red Dead Redemption 2 at all.  I saw a bunch of trailers, tv spots, and ads plastered all over the internet, but I also heard some really, really bad things about the working conditions  for the people who worked on it.  They basically got paid slave wages to work 90+ hours a week on it, and didn't even get bonuses when the game did well, while the executives raked it in and kept it all for themselves.  I'm not really huge into westerns.  I'll watch an occasional one here and there if someone else suggests it, but I don't really watch them on my own.  It's not a genre I've ever really cared all that much about.  Except for High Noon.  That movie is pretty badass.

 

So, I really liked the prologue of Red Dead Redemption 2.  I thought it was fun to play.  It had interesting characters.  I liked the combat, which is kind of reminiscent of Mass Effect or Gears of War.  The hide behind thing, shoot at things, move up to hide behind other thing, repeat, etc etc etc.  I thought to myself, well, if the whole game is like this, I'll probably end up loving it.

And then the prologue ended, and the game turned into the EXACT kind of open world game that I hate.  The kind where your main story progression quests are not marked out, if they even exist at all.  There's a whole bunch of side quests marked out all over the map, and some of them are rather entertaining little stories, but there's no main story quest you can go do to progress in the game once you get bored with doing side quests.  Look at the Witcher 3.  You've got about 17 million side quests and points of interest splattering the map like a freaking Jackson Pollock painting.  But where you go for the next leg of the main story is ALWAYS clearly marked out for you, so once you get bored with doing side stuff, you can move on and progress to the next part of the story.  It's the same with Horizon Zero Dawn.  And Final Fantasy 15.  And Xenoblade Chronicles X.  And Nier Automata.  And Mass Effect Andromeda.  All of those games are big open world games full of all kinds of side quests and things to explore.  BUT THEY ALL HAVE A CLEARLY MARKED OUT MAIN STORY TO PROGRESS IN WHEN YOU GET SICK OF THE SIDE STUFF!!!  

 

Red Dead Redemption 2 has no main story that I can find.  It's a big open world with nothing to do in it but side quests.  I did a bunch of side quests.  I got bored of doing side quests.  There was nothing else to do.  So I quit playing, because I have better things to do.  Sidequests do not a good story make.  Frankly, I don't really care if a main story comes into it later, it bungled things so badly here in chapter 1 that I have zero desire to play any further than that.  When there's no clear goal, or next step to progress the main narrative of the game along, what's even the point?  Do they expect you to just sit around and do 300 hours of side quests and then tell you the game's over?  Yeah, no thanks.  Don't care.  Just doing sidequests endlessly, no matter how interesting their own individual stories might be, just isn't fun to me.  I want to be able to progress in the story when I get bored of side crap.

So yeah, did not like, would not recommend.

I did another thing. Well, four things. And a lizard.

 So, there I was, sitting around at home, bored out of my mind.  You know, because of the deadly plague of death, as foretold by prophecy. No dating.  No going out to movies.  No going out at all, really, except for work.  Lucky me, my job is an essential service.  

So, with all that free time, I sat down to work on a few things.  At first I was finishing up the first draft of Memories of a Time Long Forgotten, the sequel to Memories of What Never Was.  But I got to a certain part that was particularly tough for me to write, and I kind of kept putting it off for a while.  SOOOOOO, I kind of stopped doing that.  Then I started looking at my partial draft of Carrying the Weight of the World, the story I started last year for NaNoWriMo.  I did some plotting and outlining work on that and I came to a really annoying realization.  This book that was intended to be a standalone fantasy story, was, in fact, going to end up at about 300k words because there's a lot of world building that needs to be done, and a lot of character development done through flashbacks to set up the world, the several forms of magic, the current political climate, and the characters themselves.  So I sat around and thought about what I could do to shave that down, and condense the story a bit.  Then I thought, well, this character's flashbacks have a whooooole lot of the world building in them.  Why don't I just write a novella about her backstory?

So I did that.  And I had a lot of fun doing it.  It's 28k words long, introduces several of the key characters in the larger story, and gives a very good grounding in the world that it all takes place in.  It also showcases one of the three systems of magic in the world.  In my opinion, it's a pretty good little novella.  As I was patting myself on the back for a job well done, I thought to myself, well, that turned out pretty well, why don't I do another one for this other character.

So I did that too.  And it turned out even better than the first.  This one's 40k words, a bit heftier and on the longer side for a novella, but it gives all of the main protagonist of Carrying the Weight of the World all of her motivation and explains why she's the bitter, jaded runaway that she is in the beginning of the main story.  It also explains the second of the three magic systems, all of the world politics, the current political climate, the state of the common people, and why the world is ripe for the massive rebellion that Carring the Weight of the World is about.  Then I thought to myself, well, that was great, why not go for three?

So I did that too.  And this one turned out okay.  It's 31k words long.  It's not the best of the three, I will admit.  The idea of a child serial killer training to become a super assassin was kind of cooler in my head, than it turned out to be in writing.  But it does go a long way toward setting up one of the major characters in Carrying the Weight of the world, and gives a look at another aspect of the world that leads to the rebellion, and also has some more world building in it.    It explains why this largely Asian and Middle Eastern population follows more of a hybrid Middle Eastern/European set of customs and traditions.  Then I thought to myself, well, there's a couple more characters, but one of them was included in the first novella, another's backstory needs to be woven into Carrying the Weight of the World, but this last one might make a good novella.

So I did that too.  This one's the shortest of the four, at 23k words.  It's the backstory for the villain of Carrying the Weight of the World, and it was probably the funnest one to write.  Mostly because I had to take this evil, mass murdering crime boss, and turn her into the hero of her own story, and that was a fun and interesting project to work on.  Also, I basically got to make a 9 year old supervillain, which was really fun to do.  This one gets the last of the world building out of the way, and showcases the third and final system of magic in this world.  And gives the villain of Carrying the Weight of the World her motivation.

So, with all of the world and character building I got out of the way in those four novellas, totalling a little over 120k words all together, I went back to my outline for Carrying the Weight of the World, and shaved it down by quite a bit.  Now I think that I can probably get the story told in a still hefty 150k words, but that's a heck of a lot better than 300k.  The bad news is that I have to throw out pretty much the entire 50k words that I already had written, as most of it was rewritten in the four novellas.  But the good news is that I had a lot of fun.  Probably more fun than I've had writing in a pretty long time.

So, now, instead of a standalone novel called Carrying the Weight of the World, I now have a series called Riftworld, which includes:

The Realty Engine (completed)

A Certain Necessity of Evil (working on final draft now)

The Fox King (first draft done, needs a lot of editing)

The Bastard Princess (completed)

and the novel

Carrying the Weight of the World (outlined)

 I've got a few more weeks of editing on two of the novellas to do, but once I'm done with that I'll post all four on my website.  And for NaNo this year, I think I'll take another stab at the new version of Carrying the Weight of the World. 

As for the lizard, I was making a reference to the single worst Doctor Who episode since the new series began.

Anthem

So I was flipping through the playstation store to see if there were any good deals and I found Anthem marked down to something like $10.

So, Anthem is that big EA/Bioware game that was supposed to be the next big thing, but hilariously flopped.  On launch it was a buggy mess.  It didn't live up to expectations in story and characters.  And people just did not care to be dumping time into yet another live service looter shooter game when there are already so many out there.

Up to the release of this game I had been watching it with an overwhelming feeling of "meh".  I don't typically care for shooters, and I am wholly uninterested in online multiplayer.  There's nothing like being dressed down by a foul mouthed thirteen year old for not being as good at the game as he is to put you off of that sort of thing.  And though the game looked beautiful, they didn't really show off much of it before release.   I don't know why people were expecting this to be the beginning of a new series like Mass Effect, but apparently they were.  They hyped themselves up for it, and the game just didn't deliver on expectations.  And pretty much about a month after the game's release no one was talking about it anymore, and a fraction of the people who bought it were still playing it.

So, I figured why not see the train wreck for myself.  Now, keep in mind, that I played this game more than a year after release, and it has had some significant bug fix patches.  So, for the most part, the game ran pretty well.  I did run into some bugs, but they weren't anything exiting the game and restarting couldn't fix.  The servers that the game runs on were, unfortunately, not very reliable.  I kept dropping in the middle of missions with "unable to connect" errors, which is kind of aggravating.

Anyway, I played through the story, and a few of the side missions.  And I had fun with it.  For what it is, it's not a terrible game.  The problem with it is that it's trying to be an online live service multiplayer looter shooter.  Every problem the game has stems from that aspect of it.  If this game were a single player story based experience with additional multiplayer for the people who wanted it, I think it would have done a lot better than it did.  The story is okay, not the best thing Bioware has ever put out, but it's not terrible.  The characters are fine.  The gameplay is fun enough.  The biggest problem it has is that it wants to be a live service multiplayer game, and it's kind of clearly not.  I played through every story mission solo.  On normal difficulty I died a few times, but made it through without needing anyone else.  As a single player game, it wasn't bad.  I never bothered with any of the endgame stuff, because, like I said, it's just not my thing.  The thing is though, I just can't see why anyone would want to continue playing this game after the story is over?  What's the point?  Why should we care?  That's where this game fails.  It didn't give anyone a reason to continue playing the endgame looter shooter aspect after completing the story.

So, anyway, I feel that I got my $10 worth out of it  It was a fun distraction for a few weeks.  I have no desire to play further, and probably won't ever play through the story again, but I mostly enjoyed my time spent with it.  I wish it hadn't been an online multiplayer game, but we can't have everything.  I think one of the biggest reasons why this game failed was that people put Bioware on this high pedestal and that places unrealistic expectations on them.  Not every game they make is going to be another Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic, and I think that people are now starting to realize that.  They had their fair share of duds in the past.  Dragon Age 2 anyone?  Mass Effect 3 (even though that one's my favorite, despite everyone else in the world hating it for some reason).  If you accept this game for what it is, and don't pile unreachable expectations upon it, it wasn't a terrible game.  It was, maybe a little mediocre, but, I mean, people are allowed to be mediocre at times.

Memories of a Time Long Forgotten

So, as I finished Memories of What Never Was a bit ago, I found myself all hyped up to continue the story, rather than following my plan to finish up the first draft of the story I started for NaNo last year, called Carrying the Weight of the World.  So, that one is going to wait for a bit while I finish up the rough draft of the second part of this trilogy thingy I started way, WAY too long ago.

So a couple years ago I started the first draft of this story.  And back then I had it titled Shadows of What Might Have Been.  It's a phrase that I used a few times during Memories of What Never Was, and I kind of liked the sound of it.  But it doesn't really have much to do with what happens in the story.  So I figured I'd stick with the memories motif and change the title to Memories of a Past Long Forgotten, which is a lot more indicative to what actually happens in the story.

The main reason I stopped working on it was that there were some pieces missing, and it wasn't coming together the way I wanted it.  I back burnered it and went back to editing the two stories that were nearly complete.  But I've been thinking a lot since that time about what I would do to fix it, and what more it needed to make it all work.  And last week I started reading through what I had written (almost 100k words, about 2/3 of the story) and making a few edits, as though I were working on a second draft.  I added in a lot of new chapters that were needed.  Cut out about an equal number of other chapters that weren't working, and ideas that I didn't like, and now I'm ready to finish up with the finale. 

Anyway, I'm a LOT happier with this story now that I've done some extensive fixing on it.  And to be honest, a lot of what I already had written wasn't all that bad, either.  Most of what I didn't like, some pretty bad character decisions I'd made, took some doing to remove and change, but now I'm pretty excited for how well these edits have turned out, and pumped up to write the rest of it.  So, I'm expecting that in the next couple of months I'm going to have a full first draft to work with.  And hopefully it won't take me 5 years to edit this one like it did the first one.

How NOT to write a buddy/rival character.

So, with all the staying home and not going anywhere or doing anything over the last few months, I've set my eyes upon the ever-growing list of video games I mean to play but never have time to between work, working on my writing, and the ever-continuing search for the future Mrs. Allen.  So, the last couple months I decided to pick up a series of games that are a sequel to another series that I really liked.  Trails of Cold Steel.  The first two games are basically the same story cut into two parts because it was so huge it wouldn't fit in a single game.

So, you have this buddy character Crow who then becomes the rival character for the protagonist Rean.  The first time you meet this utter douchelord, he tricks you and steals from you.  And the game expects you to laugh it off and think, "oh, wow, this guy is really cool."  Uh.  no.  That is not how reality works, game.  Every interaction that you have with this guy for the rest of the first game is meant to make you think he's cool, but literally every single one of them ended with me thinking he was just an even bigger douchebag than before.  He mocks people, he slacks off, he doesn't pay attention when anyone is talking to him, he manipulates and uses people.  He's a complete and total sociopath.  And through the whole first game the entire rest of the cast keeps saying how cool he is.  Every single interaction you have with him makes him out to be an even bigger dick, but this game goes ALL IN on telling you his cool, when, by his actions, he's the furthest thing from it.

So, throughout the first game there's this mysterious masked terrorist that's bombing military bases, setting off bombs in crowded cities full of innocent people, kidnapping people, hijacking the mother of all small dick artillery guns to obliterate an entire city with, and several other unsavory things.  Then he assassinates the guy in charge of the country, and sets off an enormous civil war.  And at the end, this guy takes off his mask, and surprise, surprise, it's Crow.  It's meant to be this huge shocking moment, where you feel all betrayed that this cool friend is actually the guy you've been fighting all along.  But, I mean, the guy is HORRIBLE to you, and everyone else in the game.  I didn't guess that it was him, but I wasn't shocked to find out that this horrible guy that is just the absolute worst, is actually this terrorist who has murdered a bunch of innocent people.

And then Rean, for the entire next game, keeps going on, and on, and on about how he's going to beat Crow, and bring him back to the good side.   He keeps telling all of Crow's friends, don't worry, I'll save him.  It's like his entire focus as a character in the second game is to find a way to beat Crow, and then force him back into the life that they had before the war.  It's the biggest part of his motivation for the second half of the story. 

There's a part where Crow captures Rean, and then tells him why he's doing all of these horrible things.  It's because the guy he assassinated to start the war decided not to rebuild a bridge that was knocked out in a flood.  that's it.  That's his entire motivation for murdering innocent people, bombing civilian targets, and assassination.  The guy didn't rebuild a bridge, and his hometown fell into poverty  because of it.  Oh boo-freaking-hoo!!! 

So, to recap, this guy is a lying manipulative douchebag to everyone he meets.  A total pervert.  OMG the lengths this jerk goes to in order to see naked, underage girls is INSANE.  He tricks and steels from random strangers.  He murders innocent civilians.  He sets off bombs in crowded cities during festivals.  He bombs military bases.  He assassinates world leaders and starts a massive civil war.  And he does all of this because he's sad that his hometown couldn't survive without a bridge.  He is a murderer, a war criminal, and a terrorist, on top of being a sociopath, thief, and all around asshole.  And this game expects me to be, in any way, invested in "saving" him. 

Uh, yeah, no.  DO NOT care.  I'm nearly at the end of the game.  I haven't quite finished it yet.  And, realistically, if Rean manages to beat Crow and bring him back to his side.  He's just going to be executed for treason, murder, and war crimes anyway.  But the game will probably just let him off with a slap on the wrist, because he's the main character's friend.

So, yeah.  This is NOT how you write a buddy/rival character.  You can't spend the entire story TELLING me that he's such a good friend, while SHOWING me that he is anything but.  Any perspective writers out there, please, take this example, and learn from it.  Because I see this sort of thing in all kinds of different media.  Movies.  Books.  TV.  Other Video Games.  If you want me to believe that your buddy/rival is a good guy at heart, and has a true friendship with your main protagonist, he can't also be a murderer, terrorist, assassin, and all around douchelord at the same time.  He actually has to have real motivation that makes sense.  He actually needs to have a real bond with your protagonist that we see develop, and can feel that these two people are great friends.  You can't show him doing all this horrible crap to everyone, and then tell me that, oh yeah, he's a real great friend though.

*does happy dance* IT'S DONE!!!! ERMAGERD, FINALLY!!!

So, I just finished the final draft of Memories of What Never Was, and if you feel the great urge to read it, you can do so for free at the bottom of this page.

So, about 20 years ago, I was writing my first novel length story.  It was crap.  The less said about it the better.  And I was coming up with what would be my second novel length story at the time.  That one was also crap.  But while writing that second story I did a lot of thought on the backstory and how everything came to be in the world of that second novel length story.  So naturally, I wrote a story that takes thousands of years later next, instead of the backstory for my third novel length story.  It was REALLY crap.  And then I came back to the backstory for that second novel length story and thought, yeah, I could do that one.  So I wrote it out, and I called it Beyond the Lost Horizon.  This was about fifteen or sixteen years ago.  At the time, I thought it was pretty good.  It wasn't.  It was crap. 

I had big plans for that book.  It was a massive tome, almost 350k words.  And it was to be the first book of a six book series.  I even wrote a rough draft of what would have been the second book.  Which was craaaaaaaaap.  Anyway, I tried to sell that one.  I tried HARD to sell it.  I probably sent submissions in to about 300 different literary agents and publishers.  I got one bite, but it turned out to be a scam in the end.  Defeated, I set it aside, and went to work on my next project, which was the original version of Spires of Infinity.  Which was actually not that bad, but did have some serious problems with it.

Once I finished Spires of Infinity, I looked back on Beyond the Lost Horizon, and thought to myself, you know what, self?  I can do better.  I really liked the world in which the story took place, but the characters were pretty bland and generic, and the story was cliche, generic, and just plain terrible, and the writing wasn't great either.  I thought to myself, this world, and these characters deserve better than what I'd given them the first time around.  So I set to rewriting the entire thing from scratch.  I developed a TON of new lore, and gave the characters new, and better motivations.  And I started writing it.  And it turned out crap.  So I set it aside again, and went to work on my next novel length story I Am Nobody, which, again, wasn't terrible, but wasn't great either.  And all while working on that one, I was thinking how I could fix Beyond the Lost Horizon to make it work.

And so, about 5 years ago I started work on the current version.  The original story was way, WAY too long at 350k words.  I wanted something that was more in the 130k-170k range.  So I took what was about the first third of the original Beyond the Lost Horizon story and completely reworked it with all the new lore, and basically completely new characters that just happened to have the same names, and I called it Memories of What Never Was, which would be the first book of the Beyond the Lost Horizon trilogy. 

There was a lot of work that needed to be put into it to get it just right.  I rewrote it probably three times before I came up with a first draft of something that I actually felt good about.  And I had to put it on hold for long stretches due to burnout at my job with the Post Office, and needing to work through some story elements that weren't quite working before continuing.  It's taken me about 5 years to get Memories of What Never Was to the point where I actually feel like it's finished, on top of all the other versions and incarnations that this story has been through before it.  I've rewritten this book so many times I should get a medal for keeping my sanity.

I really like this version of the story, and of the characters.  I feel like I've done a pretty good job of it.  I'm actually pretty proud of the FINALLY completed book.  I've been working on this thing, in some form or another, off and on, for half of my entire life now.  And it's finally in a form that I feel ISN'T crap.   ........and it's only 1/3 of the story....... *sigh*  The good news is that I have the characters, the world, and the lore all figured out.  It really took some doing to put it together and get it to this point, but the foundation is already there instead of being built from scratch, so hopefully, I don't take another 40 years to write the next two volumes.

Anyway, if you feel the great urge to check out the product of my blood, sweat, and tears, again, you can read it at the bottom of this page And a reminder that it is in manuscript format, which means 12 point courier font, double spaced, and all italics are underlined instead.  Also, copyright, etc.  I own it.  It's mine.  Don't steal it.  I worked on it for twenty freaking years.