Draft sent off, and random thoughts

So, I finally finished my draft and sent it off to edity-peoples. I've thought of one or two changes since then, but overall, I'm satisfied that the story is now better than before.

It took way longer than I thought it would, mainly because of two reasons: one is competitive LoL with some e-friends, and the other is two months of sickness with something we still haven't quite figured out. I should know soon, though.

*runs off to do summer assignments*

-

Random thought, but it's somewhat annoying to me when someone reads or writes a slash story and feels the need to defend himself by claiming, "I'm not gay!"

Maybe this is important to some people, but I don't really care so much about anyone's sexuality. I don't preface my slash stories by saying "I am gay and think this pairing is hot; only gay people can really appreciate it.". (Nor do I preface my het Foxtal dabbling by saying that I don't like the pairing--and that would be true.)

I mean, it's always flattering to hear that a reader who normally dislikes slash likes my stories. But when a reader or writer seems annoyed or overly-defensive about it, it's a bit annoying.

More revisions

I've been silent lately, but I've been whittling away at my stories, both original and fanfictiony.

The editing on "Six" is starting to come together. Revisions on the first three chapters are now mostly completed, and they were the chapters that were giving me the most issues. I've still got quite a bit to do, but I belive the most intensive chunk of editing has passed.

(Also, I graduated high school. Cool. More on this may follow.)

News, plus stories?

Over the past few days I've been trying to warm myself back up into writing/editing "Six," so I can finally start tackling the task of editing or writing it again. I anticipate that I will probably have made some progress by the end of next week, so maybe all the "Six" fans out there won't have to steal my soul.

There's another thing on my mind, too. Writing original stories has become such a part of my routine that I can probably say that I spend more time with originals than fan fiction now, with exception of maybe a few periods a couple months ago when I was doing serious revisions for "Six" almost daily. I still have lots of old, unfinished, unedited stories out there that I started and left open for me to finish later in the world of fan fiction. This includes expected novel-length works like "The Ambassador," which I eventually put aside because I couldn't think of any advantages of working my butt off for fan fiction when I could write original stuff instead.

So, my question to you guys is: would you like to see these stories released? A while, I was thinking about posting a story on FFN that was nothing but a collection of story fragments, things that I'd never completely developed enough to be stand-alone stories.

Lemme know what you think.

Hey look, a post!

It's been a while since we've seen signs of life in this place, but I assure you that I am still alive, though school is making it difficult to focus on much of anything.

In the upcoming week or so, I might have time to write and edit, so we'll see how that goes. I doubt I'll be able to accomplish enough to release new material, but it is possible that I could post more writing advice and whatnot on the blog, if there's anything interest. We'll see.

More revisions

As of today, I've finished drafting revisions for chapter two of "Six to Bereavement." It's added around 1000 words, so the total that I've added so far comes to at least 3000.

It looks like the number is slacking off the farther I go. Let's hope I don't end up changing the later chapters too much!

"Six" revisions (and music)!

So, a little bit of news for "Six:"

Over the past few days, I've been going back and revising "Six," starting with the beginning. Basically, I'm tired of having to deal with a beginning that doesn't sufficiently set up for the rest of the story (at the time of posting the beginning I was thinking that the fic might reach a max of 15,000 words and three days).

It's been fun doing this, as I get to see the kinds of choices I made in the beginning again, and how they fit the original intention, but not my current one. I'm sure most of my revisions will be made on only the first few chapters, so I don't think the later parts of the story will be affected too much.

In other news, I've composed a small orchestral symphony for "Six to Bereavement." I'll be posting it with the next chapter. (Expect the next chapter to be relatively short, as I have a lot of authors-notey things to say when I release it.)

(These things are my ways of saying, "I meant to release the next chapter on Christmas, but I got distracted and decided to do other things instead.")

ETA: I posted part of a draft of the first chapter's revisions up on jaslazulstories.blogspot.com.

Six to Bereavement FAQ

Q. What's with the wonky update schedule?

A. At school, I usually have classes until six, with a few small breaks crammed in for homework and practice. Afterwards, I have individual practice time (I play in about four ensembles and I have private lessons), a few chamber music rehearsals per week, club meetings (also I'm crazy and am trying to start another club), homework, etc. It's a rarity that I go to bed before midnight.

Oh. And I have a roommate and there are crazy vocalists who like to stalk me. I can't write with people watching me, plus I don't like explaining why I'm writing gay furry fan fiction (still trying to figure that out myself).

Q. Will there ever be sex?

Maybe. Will it be explicit? No.

I think explicit sex can play an important role in a story, depending on how realistic you're trying to be, or what kind of message you're trying to convey. But any good I'd gain from it would be negated for these reasons:

1. Explicit sex is illegal on FFN, and I don't like having my stories taken down. If I tried to Break The Law by putting it up anyway, I'd have to at least put the fic as M, and then it's off the front page and nobody sees it.

2. Most of my readers are underage, and some of them probably aren't old enough to be reading even a T-rated fic. My view is that sex does not equal porn and rating systems result in a lot of unnecessary censorship, but my view is neither the law nor the common belief here on FFN. Plus, the last thing I want is having someone whose profile says they're thirteen telling me my story is hot.

3. On FFN sex is too big of a deal, probably because the majority of people who write it write porn. Instead of a story with sexual content being a story, it's called a lemon. I write stories, not lemons. (Consequently, if I were to write sex, it would not be porn, which I think is what a lot of people would want anyway.)

Q. I found a plot hole! Will you give me a nickel?

No. Chances are that I've already found it myself, or that you're overlooking something that makes a plot hole less holey. Chances are more likely that the plot hole isn't really a hole, but it's contingent upon something that's implied and not directly stated. If I wrote a story where everything was completely explained and justified, it would be a history textbook.

If it really is a plot hole, tell me about it. But note that my job isn't to completely fill all of the gaps; it's to fill enough of them so that the readers can fill in the rest. That sounds a bit crude, and people will probably accuse me of being lazy, but it's true. If I have to add a paragraph that will confuse 200 readers and clarify a hole to one, I will choose to omit the paragraph and have that information be implied instead.

Q. I found a typo! Will you give me a nickel?

No. But tell me where it is so I can fix it. I edit my stories extensively, but I have no editor or beta-reader, and trying to catch all of my own typos is impossible. It's not that I don't try to find them; it's that when I do, I just read straight through them and never notice.

Six update

So, for those of you who haven't noticed yet, I posted the next chapter to Six. Hopefully the next one won't take too long, but I'm buying myself GPO for Christmas so I'll probably be stuck behind the synths for at least a week or two. We'll see.

And since this might be the last update until then, happy holidays to everyone!

Busybusybusy

Sorry for the delays, but the last few weeks have been pretty crazy for me, and I don't see it letting up any time soon. I'm often struggling to find time to write, and struggling to find time in that time to focus on "Six." I have some other fanfics in progress, but they're not developed enough that I feel an announcement is necessary.

The keen-eyed might note that I've killed my forums. It's something I've wanted to do for a while, and it took seeing that I've only received one hit in the past two months (from a beta-seeker) to spur me to doing it. If there's anything that you really feel you want to read, such as my tutorials, send me a message... but bear in mind that I did delete the forums for a reason.

(Don't take this as a sign that I'm abandoning the Star Fox community. Apocrypha has always had my full support, but it ultimately failed to serve its purpose. It was a far too ambitious community, with far too little marketing, to run smoothly in the Star Fox section.)

ETA: Note that there's a very good forum on FFN, "Writers Anonymous," that you can find on the common forums listing. Lots of brilliant writers go there, and it's definitely worth investigating.

I'm on tour!

I understand there are lots of people that I owe reviews, stories, replies, etc. But for the next two days, I will be on tour throughout the state with my school, playing concerts.

Be back later!

"Six" chapter up

So, the latest chapter of "Six" is up. You should all go read it now.

I'm now making my blog the official "afterthoughts of posting a chapter" place, since placing notes in the story itself is slack.

So, afterthoughts. Basically I said "Screw it" and posted it after my last set of revisions, so there are probably some errors, but after working with editing the same chapter for weeks, I think it's time to for it to go on out.

Also it ventures dangerously close to M-rating, but eh, the story will go where it goes. The few times I've tried to resist the natural flow of a story, it's always ended up bad.

Anyway. I am tired, so I will now go to sleep before I start typing jibberish.

Quick update

In light of an upcoming performance and a lot of hefty schoolwork, I've been slacking for the past week or so on "Six." I would've posted the next chapter by now, but I added some content and I don't feel confident enough with the new content to post it.

I might spend a good bit of time editing this next chapter. There are some parts of it that I am very tempted to delete. Right now, it's mainly a struggle of exactly how much information to give.

Progress update

So, the new chapter of "Six" has been done for a while. Right now I'm working on writing up the chapter after that.

I anticipate the next chapter will be lot of people's favorite chapter. I'm a bit unsure about some of the stuff I'm doing, and there's a lot of stuff near the end of it that seem a little wonky and I might eventually be taking out. But eh, it should be a fun chapter, if I do it right.

New chapter

So, there's a new chapter of "Six" up. Go check it out; it's not as "OMGWTFBBQSOMEONESETUSUPTHEBOMB" as the last chapter, but it's still okayish. (If every chapter was "OMGWTFSOMEONESETUSUPTHEBOMB," then it would be boring, anyway).

I've got most of the next chapter written and I'm starting on the one after that. Hopefully it won't take too long to get the next one up. I anticipate that a lot of people will really like it. Some won't, but the ones who won't probably shouldn't be reading my fics to start with.

Overall, I can say that so far I've had plenty of time to write here, maybe more than I did at my old school because I'm getting distracted by video games a lot less here.

But as I usually say, We Shall See. "Six" keeps getting longer and longer in my head, but maybe it won't be too long before we start to get near the end.

Plot devices

You know how when you read a story and it seems like it's going in one direction, then something convenient happens and it's starts going somewhere else? For example, the characters spend forever searching for X, then they... arbitrarily find X by chance. Or, in romance, you have two love-stricken characters who are paralyzed by shyness, but something convenient happens that confines 'em together.

In both cases it's a shift of direction, but I'll start with the latter example of romance because it's simpler. Before I explain anymore, let's address something: what is a story?

Character A wants something and something is preventing him from getting it.

How is a novel structured?

inciting incident -> rising action - > CLIMAX <- falling action <- conclusion

Basically, in the beginning, you introduce a conflict. In the romance story, that conflict is shyness. A good, logical story would have the character CONFRONT and SOLVE that issue on his own--when that happens, that's the climax. Such a progression would be the natural path of the story.

(Does that path sound boring to you? It does to me. That's because the conflict is extremely weak; it could never create a strong novel on its own. But that's an issue for another day.)

Often, what happens instead of the natural path of the story--because that story is very weak--is a plot device that sends the story spiraling into another direction. Something shoves the characters together, and shyness is no longer that much of an issue. Sure, it's still there, but the characters no longer have to approach each other. In furry fiction, this is usually the point at which they get together, make perfect first-time sex, and the story ends:

weak inciting incident -> weak conflict -> plot device -> climax (pun'd)

Now, it is possible for a plot device there to instead carry the story to a really strong position:

weak inciting incident -> weak conflict -> strong plot device -> strong rising action -> ...

This is what I call discontinuity syndrome--the story starts weak with a weak conflict, then a plot device sends it spiraling into a strong, tense work of fiction. Sometimes, you can do that on purpose and use it to your advantage, and you'll know when that opportunity comes. Generally, though, that's not what we want to do.

In my opinion, if you have a story that looks like the above diagram, you're starting in the wrong place. Start with the REALLY BIG CONFLICT that everyone wants to read about. You don't have to smack everyone in the face with it on the first page, but you really should open a book at a strong point, not a weak one. Work the weak conflict into the strong one.

For example, instead of having the characters meet each other, go gaga over each other, then get forced together, open the book where they get forced together. Their feelings could now be distracting them from the plot--that's a conflict, stronger than shyness, that produces tension and helps drive the story forward. Heck, maybe when the plot's at the climax and there's about to be a BIG EPIC BATTLE, that can motivate them to get together--or as I would do, have them break off.

Basically, what we DO NOT WANT is a Plot Device that shifts the focus of the story--meaning that it solves a conflict that the characters otherwise would've had to solve on their own. Honestly, why do it for them? You're killing your own story by nuking the tension.

There's a special type of plot device called a deus ex machina that's pretty similar to what I'm talking about, and I'm sure it's familiar to just about about all readers of fan fiction.

Deus ex Machina: a writer writes himself into a corner, and the characters can't resolve the conflicts on their own, so the writer pulls a god out of his ass and it solves the conflict for them.

More technical definition:

A deus ex machina is something that resolves the plot in place of the characters; the characters never solve X problem, because some outside force does it for them.

The classic example of a deus ex machina is "It was just a dream" syndrome, where something terrible happens, except it didn't. Or maybe something terrible is about to happen the protagonist, and someone arbitrarily saves them (I'm looking at you, Tom Bombadil).

Contrary to popular belief, deux ex machinae are not *all* bad, but most of them are. One that's really good is the one at the end of Basil's "Finding Time." There's one at the end of Hamlet, too. Just stick with my definition and never let a deus ex machina solve the major conflict.

For the record, though, you are given one plot device that you are automatically allowed to use to get the story going. It's my belief that the inciting incident should come from a plot device that sets the story on a certain direction--and it should stay on that same path the whole time. Of course, the characters might not always know exactly what path they're supposed to be taken, and that's fine.


And that leads me to the good plot devices. Yes, they exist! And if you don't use them, you are silly.

Let's take the imaginary novel in which the goal is for particle physicists to discover the Higgs boson (force-carrying particle that determines objects' mass). Let's look at the natural path:

inciting incident (someone predicts the Higgs's existence) -> rising action (physicists construct the LHC, a huuuuuuuge particle accelerator, and run into all kinds of problems along the way) -> CLIMAX (They find the particle!) <- falling action (Celebrations, awards...) <- Conclusion (The results are published.)

Since we know what a bad plot device is, let's examine a few:

1.) someone else finds it first;
2.) someone else proves that it doesn't exist;
3.) the LHC appears to lack the strength to detect the particle

Now let's look back at the natural path of the story. It's not bad, but I as a writer have a problem with it: it's too linear. I ask myself, "Who'd want to read that story?" and I don't get any answer besides "physics nerds!" From the very beginning, you can pretty much tell that they're going to find the particle. End of story.

Here's a trick to writing. People do not want predictable stories. They want stories that are predictably unpredictable. You can have them find the Higgs if you want, but I might choose to take a different path.

What if the particle collisions have enough energy to force open some of space's extra six dimensions? What if it creates a "bubble" of 9D space that researchers can enter? What if inside the bubble, they find not only the Higgs, but other particles that allow them to act in unheard of ways in the existing three dimensions? What if it allows them to write the equation of the universe?

I know it's physics-nerd science fiction, but it's the basis for good physics-nerd science fiction, if you do it well enough. The researchers could all agree to keep the unlocking of the universe secret, but maybe one of them could betray the pact and try to use new-found science to make himself into God. So the researchers not only have to stop the mad scientist, but also answer reports and provide fake test results for those who funded their research.

Those are the kinds of plot devices you want to use. As cliché as the last example sounds, it's much more interesting than a boring linear story.

But aside from those kinds of things, I just really dislike plot devices. iDunno.

Status and CAD!

So, I'm all moved in and so far everything's all fine and dandy. I've had a lot more free time than I was expecting, but the arts classes (and performances) really haven't started up yet. Weird thing is, I've had time to write, but I haven't been doing it. Huh.

Anyway. According to FA, tomorrow is Comment Appreciation Day, which means it's the day where all the artists are supposed to show how much they appreciate their readers.

I'm one of the weird artists that always responds to people who comment on my stuff (unless the comment is something I can't really respond to; I'd give examples but I'd prefer not to). Recently, I've been getting a few new readers, for which I am very thankful. It's always good to get back from a busy day of school (and disorienting orientation) and find that people have written me. Honestly, it is because I have an audience that I still write fan fiction; the serious writer in me has moved on to original works, but it's still immensely fun and relaxing to write fan fiction, and I find that the community is willing to tolerate me enough for me to post my stuff here.

So, long story short: as vain as it sounds, commentses are why I'm here. I appreciate everyone who reviews or otherwise acknowledges my existence, though I don't always express it.

FFIX story, and I'm off!

Oh, hey, I uploaded a FFIX story that I wrote like eight years ago. And with that, I must announce my departure! Tomorrow I'll be packing up my stuff, including my computer, and preparing to ship off to the dorms. On the way, I hope to pick up enough books to last me for a while, and that's always a good thing.

I don't know how the schedule's going to work or if I'll have much time to write, but if I don't, it won't be a big deal. Who knows--some time away might be good for my long-run productivity.

Wish me well!

Neat stuff

So, apparently Google Documents will let you edit a document with peers (as editors or observers) that you invite, and you can open a chat room that contains yourself and all the peers.

In other words, Google Docs works as a LifeStream for writers, with chat. Basically, you can watch a writer write as he writes, and if you want to ask a question or say something, you can. Writers can collaborate on a single piece at one time if the host gives the other person permission to edit the document. Or, two people can examine a document together and critique it. All that's necessary is that the writer either make his documents public, or that he distributes the URL of his Docs session to those that he wants to sit in.

Of course, with the LiveStream application, it's bad because it could be distracting to the writer, but a bit of discretion on the part of both writer and viewers can prevent it from getting too bad. And if all else fails, you can just disable the chat.

So far, it's helped me, at least. I always think I am ridiculously slow at writing, but I recently viewed a session of an author whose works I don't care for too much, but whom I respect a good bit. He's met with some success, and he writes at about the same pace that I do, so that makes me feel a bit better.

Interesting ideas. Maybe I'll try it out one day. I doubt anyone's too interested in seeing me write, but if there's ever much of a demand for it, I wouldn't mind. I'd be extremely self-conscious, though.

"Six" chapter up

So, the latest chapter of "Six" is up. The bad is that I must now place the story on suspension, but I'm hoping that won't last too long.

The good is that I like this most recent chapter quite a bit. There were one or two things I was unsure about, like the appropriateness of the pseudo-pun in the middle (if you read it, you know what I'm referring to), but overall I'd say it's the best chapter I've posted on FFN. (Of course, that's not saying too much, but hey.)

I've had a lot of ranty posts about writing I've been meaning to do, but I'll save those for another time. For now, I have to go provide slave labor for band camp.

Difficulties

So, I've been stuck in the same place for the past few days with "Six." The trouble isn't that I don't know what to write; it's that I don't know how to sequence things for the best possible read.

I've written and deleted a few scenes, but that's fine. Right now I'm trying to figure out where things need to go, and though this isn't the funnest part of writing, it's definitely worth it.