the ramble dump
Friday, July 28, 2006
Rattling On
City of Anarchy Chapter 4.
In which Snails tackles a classic Hollywood sequence.
And that's it for a while. Well, an even longer while than usual. I'm going to put CoA on the backburner now, for several reasons; the main being that I have a lot of figuring out to do with it. There's a bit of a mental block regarding how everything's going to come together. I wanted to get another chapter out this summer, and did, but now I've really pushed as far as I can go without getting completely stuck, and it requires some long and careful thinking.
Anyway, next up: this.
In which Snails tackles a classic Hollywood sequence.
And that's it for a while. Well, an even longer while than usual. I'm going to put CoA on the backburner now, for several reasons; the main being that I have a lot of figuring out to do with it. There's a bit of a mental block regarding how everything's going to come together. I wanted to get another chapter out this summer, and did, but now I've really pushed as far as I can go without getting completely stuck, and it requires some long and careful thinking.
Anyway, next up: this.
Labels: city of anarchy, jesnails
Friday, July 21, 2006
Freakshow
So, dragons.
Dragons like to do everything on a grand scale. Flamboyant, ambitious and perhaps a tad egotistical, they love to be the centre of attention. Or so it is according to the Chinese zodiac.
One day I'm going to create my own zodiac, probably, and those born on the exact date and the exact time as myself, with the same name and characteristics, will be the great ones. But for now, I'll stick with what we have, and with that, I'm probably more in line with my supposed Western sign, Scorpio.
But I noticed an interesting thing about dragons.
And, inevitably, it's to do with writing.
To come from a seemingly total otherdirection: why do I write?
No...that's too big a question for just yet. How do I write? Cinematically. This is something I've realised quite recently, especially during the bigger, more action-orientated events in a story. Even if it doesn't always turn out that way in the end, the approach is cinematic. I get an image in my mind's eye, sometimes a very specific image, literally looked at from a certain angle, and I try to put it into words. In City of Anarchy, there's Hermes being launched into the sky as a building explodes underneath him, for example; Chimaera in SciBoard Fiction forcing the snout of the shotgun into the top of the alien's head and firing; or vehicles being hurled into the air and thrown into buildings as the fat men in tweed pursue the Mini Cooper down the street in The Aberration.
But why do I write like this? To impress? To turn to the audience and go, 'Look what insane and spectacular stuff I can make happen!'
I think I'm guilty of this even more than I realise. I do tend, I'll admit, to get a bit carried away. When I first posted City of Anarchy I had people going 'Is this story going to give me nightmares?', and while I was staging a zombie versus pirate fight in SciBoard Resurrection, the climax of which was a hundred barrels of gunpowder and rum igniting and tearing the pirate ship apart, I was too busy having altogether too much fun with it to realise how over-the-top it was, and ended up having someone commenting, accompanied by a shocked-looking smiley, 'My dear God. Not afraid of spectacle, are you?'
So is that all it is? Spectacle? Am I some sort of literary showman, with trailers and posters and general enthusiasm, trying to gather an audience to witness this showcase, this freakshow, that I have brought before the public?
It's that dragon thing, in a way. Eccentricity and flamboyancy. Showing off. Being the centre of attention, which all writers love to be, even though some might pretend otherwise.
But then, while I'd be lying if I said I didn't take some delight in people responding with pop-eyed smilies when I present the absurd, the dark or the unusual, entertaining other people is actually a very small part of it. It's much more selfish than that. I do it to entertain myself.
Picture, if you will, a dark and eerily-lit laboratory. Its centrepiece is a large slab, upon which lies a dormant creature of freakish qualities; and somewhere to the right is I, the mad but nevertheless genius scientist, cackling maniacally and bringing down a giant lever with all my force. Impressive lightning effects ensue, and the monster becomes alive. I shriek with glee at that which I have created.
Enthusiasm, sometimes demented, is needed to bring ideas to life, whether it's being curious about or taking interest in some line of thought or image, or throwing yourself full-force into a concept or hypothetical world, either way exploring it and seeing what interesting things you can find.
This is why I write. This is what I love about writing. It can be figuring out a way of telling or presenting a story, through the way I use language and the way I construct different scenes and situations, or it can be examining what-if scenarios: what if there was a universe with giant slugs that wore wigs and slippers? What would happen if such an aspect of history was changed in this way? Fat men in tweed as seemingly inhuman, terrifying monsters...weird, eh?
Entertainment. Imagination. Perspective. Causality, history, humanity.
Exploring, experimenting, seeing what happens. Making something good out of it, and making something interesting.
Dragons like to do everything on a grand scale. Flamboyant, ambitious and perhaps a tad egotistical, they love to be the centre of attention. Or so it is according to the Chinese zodiac.
One day I'm going to create my own zodiac, probably, and those born on the exact date and the exact time as myself, with the same name and characteristics, will be the great ones. But for now, I'll stick with what we have, and with that, I'm probably more in line with my supposed Western sign, Scorpio.
But I noticed an interesting thing about dragons.
And, inevitably, it's to do with writing.
To come from a seemingly total otherdirection: why do I write?
No...that's too big a question for just yet. How do I write? Cinematically. This is something I've realised quite recently, especially during the bigger, more action-orientated events in a story. Even if it doesn't always turn out that way in the end, the approach is cinematic. I get an image in my mind's eye, sometimes a very specific image, literally looked at from a certain angle, and I try to put it into words. In City of Anarchy, there's Hermes being launched into the sky as a building explodes underneath him, for example; Chimaera in SciBoard Fiction forcing the snout of the shotgun into the top of the alien's head and firing; or vehicles being hurled into the air and thrown into buildings as the fat men in tweed pursue the Mini Cooper down the street in The Aberration.
But why do I write like this? To impress? To turn to the audience and go, 'Look what insane and spectacular stuff I can make happen!'
'Woah,' said the detective.
I think I'm guilty of this even more than I realise. I do tend, I'll admit, to get a bit carried away. When I first posted City of Anarchy I had people going 'Is this story going to give me nightmares?', and while I was staging a zombie versus pirate fight in SciBoard Resurrection, the climax of which was a hundred barrels of gunpowder and rum igniting and tearing the pirate ship apart, I was too busy having altogether too much fun with it to realise how over-the-top it was, and ended up having someone commenting, accompanied by a shocked-looking smiley, 'My dear God. Not afraid of spectacle, are you?'
So is that all it is? Spectacle? Am I some sort of literary showman, with trailers and posters and general enthusiasm, trying to gather an audience to witness this showcase, this freakshow, that I have brought before the public?
It's that dragon thing, in a way. Eccentricity and flamboyancy. Showing off. Being the centre of attention, which all writers love to be, even though some might pretend otherwise.
But then, while I'd be lying if I said I didn't take some delight in people responding with pop-eyed smilies when I present the absurd, the dark or the unusual, entertaining other people is actually a very small part of it. It's much more selfish than that. I do it to entertain myself.
Picture, if you will, a dark and eerily-lit laboratory. Its centrepiece is a large slab, upon which lies a dormant creature of freakish qualities; and somewhere to the right is I, the mad but nevertheless genius scientist, cackling maniacally and bringing down a giant lever with all my force. Impressive lightning effects ensue, and the monster becomes alive. I shriek with glee at that which I have created.
Enthusiasm, sometimes demented, is needed to bring ideas to life, whether it's being curious about or taking interest in some line of thought or image, or throwing yourself full-force into a concept or hypothetical world, either way exploring it and seeing what interesting things you can find.
This is why I write. This is what I love about writing. It can be figuring out a way of telling or presenting a story, through the way I use language and the way I construct different scenes and situations, or it can be examining what-if scenarios: what if there was a universe with giant slugs that wore wigs and slippers? What would happen if such an aspect of history was changed in this way? Fat men in tweed as seemingly inhuman, terrifying monsters...weird, eh?
Entertainment. Imagination. Perspective. Causality, history, humanity.
Exploring, experimenting, seeing what happens. Making something good out of it, and making something interesting.
Labels: boardfic, city of anarchy, excerpts, fat men in tweed, i am the ramblemaster, starcustard, the aberration
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Irregular As Clockwork
Back in February, Amelia and I went through all the old Starcustard chapters, most thoroughly the first, and picked out and changed lots of bits with awkward syntax or phrasing (admittedly, they were mostly mine), so it was all nice and improved for the FMIT launch.
However, writing Chapter 6 these past few weeks, we've found we've had to go back again and take out or change a few more things, only this time for different reasons.
There are ideas that don't seem to fit so well now that we've defined the Starcustard universe a bit better. For example, we got rid of teleporting, which was briefly mentioned in a quick description of the slavekid card catalogue, because that makes things too easy.
There are also things that, in the context of the chapter, are so minor that they've merely been mentioned in passing, but that could potentially lead to some pretty sloppy plotholes if we don't see to them. The example of this that we found this time round we did actually try to sort out in Chapter 6, only to find out that the idea just didn't work, so we had to cut it out completely.
And then there was a single word we had to get rid of because we'd used it when we had a much vaguer idea of where that aspect of the story was going. While working on the sixth chapter, we had a long, deep conversation about where the story is going way beyond where it's at now and more than we ever have before, ranging from doctors to darkness and wide story arcs. And so we've had to go back and change this one little word, now that we have a clearer picture.
They were all very minor changes in the context of the chapters we've published so far, but all of them could have caused problems or huge differences as the story advanced. That's one of the main features of a system where each chapter is published when it's finished and you don't know where everything goes next. You have to constantly go back and edit what people have already read. If you're lucky, this is just minor things.
But then sometimes it isn't. I think there are few stories that have undergone as many drafts, redrafts and recreations as The Aberration. After their 'final' redraft for the FMIT launch a few months ago, I was supposed to leave those first few chapters alone for good. However, this week, as well as the usual syntax proofreading and some almost invisible minor changes, I've gone back and made more slightly bigger changes.
Minor TA spoilers follow.
The first isn't especially exciting, but here it is just so you don't have to go back and read it all again. The type of metal Beef encounters, which started off as copper-coloured, then went to shiny and silver when I posted it online, and then to green, is now back to copper-coloured. These changes happened for various reasons that I can't really go into as I kept changing my mind about things, but now (I think) I'm finally settled on it.
The second is the addition of the strange clock as the object they find inside the porcelain woman. For the past few months it's been a boring, bleeping sort of object that has mostly just been there as a more credible replacement for the note that they find in the old Kommingle version of the story. I just thought the clock would be more interesting. If you want, you can go and read Chapter 2 to see its new ending.
Hopefully, I can leave those chapters alone now. Poor things. But, you never know.
You can expect an extended Chapter 5, though. That'll be posted along with the new chapter in the not-so-distant future.
Before that, however: City of Anarchy.
(And yes, I've been going through that, too.)
One final note, harking back to the beginning of this post: Starcustard has a new opening track! As grateful as we are to friend Lonkey for coming up with Fleetwood Mac's Albatross at the last minute almost two years ago, we've decided it didn't sit quite right as the opening track (and also I personally now loathe it after all those M&S Food adverts), and replaced it with... Mystery, by Kelley Stoltz (some guy Melia found).
However, writing Chapter 6 these past few weeks, we've found we've had to go back again and take out or change a few more things, only this time for different reasons.
There are ideas that don't seem to fit so well now that we've defined the Starcustard universe a bit better. For example, we got rid of teleporting, which was briefly mentioned in a quick description of the slavekid card catalogue, because that makes things too easy.
There are also things that, in the context of the chapter, are so minor that they've merely been mentioned in passing, but that could potentially lead to some pretty sloppy plotholes if we don't see to them. The example of this that we found this time round we did actually try to sort out in Chapter 6, only to find out that the idea just didn't work, so we had to cut it out completely.
And then there was a single word we had to get rid of because we'd used it when we had a much vaguer idea of where that aspect of the story was going. While working on the sixth chapter, we had a long, deep conversation about where the story is going way beyond where it's at now and more than we ever have before, ranging from doctors to darkness and wide story arcs. And so we've had to go back and change this one little word, now that we have a clearer picture.
They were all very minor changes in the context of the chapters we've published so far, but all of them could have caused problems or huge differences as the story advanced. That's one of the main features of a system where each chapter is published when it's finished and you don't know where everything goes next. You have to constantly go back and edit what people have already read. If you're lucky, this is just minor things.
But then sometimes it isn't. I think there are few stories that have undergone as many drafts, redrafts and recreations as The Aberration. After their 'final' redraft for the FMIT launch a few months ago, I was supposed to leave those first few chapters alone for good. However, this week, as well as the usual syntax proofreading and some almost invisible minor changes, I've gone back and made more slightly bigger changes.
Minor TA spoilers follow.
The first isn't especially exciting, but here it is just so you don't have to go back and read it all again. The type of metal Beef encounters, which started off as copper-coloured, then went to shiny and silver when I posted it online, and then to green, is now back to copper-coloured. These changes happened for various reasons that I can't really go into as I kept changing my mind about things, but now (I think) I'm finally settled on it.
The second is the addition of the strange clock as the object they find inside the porcelain woman. For the past few months it's been a boring, bleeping sort of object that has mostly just been there as a more credible replacement for the note that they find in the old Kommingle version of the story. I just thought the clock would be more interesting. If you want, you can go and read Chapter 2 to see its new ending.
Hopefully, I can leave those chapters alone now. Poor things. But, you never know.
You can expect an extended Chapter 5, though. That'll be posted along with the new chapter in the not-so-distant future.
Before that, however: City of Anarchy.
(And yes, I've been going through that, too.)
One final note, harking back to the beginning of this post: Starcustard has a new opening track! As grateful as we are to friend Lonkey for coming up with Fleetwood Mac's Albatross at the last minute almost two years ago, we've decided it didn't sit quite right as the opening track (and also I personally now loathe it after all those M&S Food adverts), and replaced it with... Mystery, by Kelley Stoltz (some guy Melia found).
Labels: city of anarchy, starcustard, the aberration
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Spaceturns
Lots of things seem to be happening this weekend. It's 4th July weekend on the other side of the Atlantic. Over here, people are waiting for England's World Cup quarter-final match against Portugal. Tonight is the first half of the much-anticipated two-part season finale of Doctor Who. And the new Muse album arrived on my doorstep this morning a lovely two days early.
But let's not forget the most important thing about today. Today marks the second anniversary of Starcustard, this space opera sort of thing I've been doing with this girl called Amelia. And so we decided that maybe today would be a good time to, you know, post the next chapter. Because we're cool like that.
We hope you enjoy. :)
But let's not forget the most important thing about today. Today marks the second anniversary of Starcustard, this space opera sort of thing I've been doing with this girl called Amelia. And so we decided that maybe today would be a good time to, you know, post the next chapter. Because we're cool like that.
plaid says:
six chapters in two years.
plaid says:
holy cow.
Chris says:
heh
plaid says:
we are lazy.
Chris says:
it's like cheese, dood. it takes a while to mature.
plaid says:
ew.
plaid says:
no cheese metaphors
Chris says:
aw
We hope you enjoy. :)
Labels: alien conversations, starcustard
