Rob Osterman's Blog, page 7

The End of an Era: COH Closes its Doors

It was after Everquest had more or less run its course and before the launch of Everquest II or World of Warcraft.  It was a summer, which for me translates to more time playing games, and it was after several months of the game having been released so that it had time to get the initial hitches out.

I picked up City of Heroes, and it was my go-to MMO for a long, long time.

I was not playing it when the plug was pulled last week.  I had long moved on to other games, and hung up my cape.  Stormherald, my main hero, and one that had been born again and again in other games, was no longer level capped, and my legions of small characters remained where I had last played them.  Had a friend not posted anything on Facebook I would never have known it had finally shuttered its doors.

I could really go on about all the great things the game had, and all the things it did not, but instead I want to talk about something else.

What's left now that the game is gone, and running the client will leave you unable to ever again connect to a server?


You start to wonder what you ~did~ with all that time, where it all went, and what you have to show for it now.  Maybe you've got a few screen shots you saved from the years.  Maybe some contacts you made that you can keep up with outside of the world of COH are still on your Facebook friends list.  Maybe you even have migrated together to a new game, be it Champions, or Warcraft, or something else.

For those not familiar let me give a small and short review.

First the game believed heavily in diversity of heroes.  You had close combat characters, ranged damage, tanks, and support.  The goal of the designers was that any group of characters from a single player to a full eight man group could engage in the content and be successful   They wanted the game to have the maximum fun and the minimum penalties.

For the most part, it worked.  Sure there were nerfs, times the developers had to roll back a power or two.  The dreaded "Enhancement Diversification" was an effort to thwart the massive work players had done to fine the "Ideal" combination of powers and enhancements and basically "break" the game.  At the end of it all the developers wanted anyone with a sense of cleverness to be able to get in, have fun, and play the game.

My wife and I played it for about a year and a half.  We actually missed the news of the tsunami the day after Christmas because neither of us had to work, and neither of us left the computer room.  We got up, got some food, logged in, and only came out long enough to sign for a pizza.  It was totally indulgent but it was fun.  We eventually petered out on it, picked up WoW and that was that.

I tried to go back, to find good RP groups to hang out with, but that was always the challenge:  The time.  As much as I loved developing my character's back stories, there just wasn't time to sit and type up dialogue with others.  Not once we had our first kid.  Not once games moved to voice chat and more focus on the mission and less on the RP.

We left CoH before the Going Rogue expansion hit.  I tried to get in and get a feel for it.  I always thought it would be fun to use "going rogue" to bring some of my Masterminds over to the Hero side.  I still believe that  my "Little Girl with an Imaginary Army She can Make Real Through Force of Will" would make a pretty cool hero once she got the right mentor.

I still remember back when City of Villains launched and people started asking for a neutral ground to meet and to to RP between the two factions.  Sometime later, it happened, and a pocket dimension where powers were forbidden, entered into the game lore, and there was a common meeting place for heroes and villains alike.

I did some of my best writing playing City of Heroes, many of them survive in my mind as characters I'd like to explore again someday.  I'm going to close this out with a short list of those that will remain in my mind as people who have stories to tell, and make them a promise here, to tell them.

Stormherald

A devout Catholic, Stormherald was raised in a rectory by a priest and his staff.  Little did they know that the baby found on their door step was a fallen angel, a creature of God's vengence who had doubted her place in the heavens and was now finding herself again in a new body with no memory of who she was.

The Kilkelly Kid

Sent to Paragon on a Hero Exchange, The Kid teamed up with other heroes for weekly adventures, dressed smartly in her Irish Dancing costume and mask.

Kid Phoenix

Some heroes are born into greatness.  Others do their hero work as community service for vandalism and destruction of property.  Phoebe Sinclair was the second of them.  Green haired, wearing a leather jacket with torn sleeves, she eventually comes to like helping people.  Eventually.

Professor Twilight

An homage to Dr. Midnight, he joined with other members of the League of Justice to do good around Paragon City.  Despite being her elder by several years, he also developed a deep affection for the Blue Nautilus, an homage to Black Canary.

So long, heroes.  I'll miss you.

5 Things XCom Could Have Done Better

I know I don't post much about gaming here because really this is supposed to be about my writing, my stories, my process and my work.  But once in a while I just get wrapped up in something and I need to talk about it.

XCom has totally decimated my free time for the last few weeks.  It's a tactical strategy game where, mostly, you manage squad based combat against an alien threat.  It's pretty dang slick.  I completed my second campaign this week, this time on Classic Difficulty.

The game starts out with a basic squad of soldiers armed with conventional weapons and grenades.  As the game progresses, these troops are added to with new recruits.  Each mission earns them experience and new abilities.  You also research better weapons, and armor as you go along, allowing you to take out the easier minions quicker and opening up harder enemies.

But what really kept me going was the overall engagement.  Your soldiers earn nicknames (seemingly randomly assigned, but you can edit them), they level up, and they do get killed.  There is an optional Ironman mode which removes the save game features; you can't save and then reload.  If you save then you're done.  If your guy dies on a mission, then he's gone for good.  Needless to say it's nerve wracking to be in a mission that's going well only to have your favorite medic dropped and killed with a lucky shot.

I guess you could call this a review but it's mostly about the things the game falls short on.  I'm going to have some light spoilers in here but I'll try to keep them limited.


1.  Multinational Voices

In the game, you draw troops from all over the world for the XCom project.  You fill out your barracks with people from China, Australia, England, Nigeria and other exotic locales.

And every last one sounds like they come from the Midwest of the US.  You get a choice of 5 voices to assign to your soldier and they are all basically the same except for a few small hitches in the inflection.  I'm sorry but I want to feel like I've got a world united with me here.  When my Sniper brags about how he should be keeping score I should hear that Aussie twang in his voice.  When my medic tells a wounded trooper to "Rub some dirt in it and walk it off", it'd be that much better to hear it as though she was from the West End of London.

2.  Variation on Speech

While I get that this is a military operation, when the soldiers break regulations and provide some kind of chatter, it's all the same.  There is no personality in the speech packs.  If we're going to be locked into just US voices, then at least give us the basic archtypes in those.  So when the "Bubbly" soldier gets wounded, she says something different then the "Hardened" one.  How about if the "Jock" says things like "Score XCom 1, X-rays Nothing" while the "Snarkster" says "That shot was legend-wait for it- dary".

I imagine that they'd get a little stale over time, but out of the box they'd provide that extra level of customization to better let us build into these soldiers that we are both meant to see as dispossable assets and as valuable members of a team.

3.  Final Mission Staging

I've played the final mission twice now.  In both cases it was a matter of having my sniper in a good overwatch position.  Final event triggers and BOOM headshot.  Mission is over.

Really?

4.  More depth of story

I get that Firax's Games is not a huge studio.  But they surely could have sprung for better writing.

As you go along there are three main personalities in your base.  You have your right hand man, who is also the provider of all the main mission descriptions.  Your science wing is headed by very confident scientist who wants to experiment and push the envelope.  She is balanced by a seasoned engineer over in the engineering department   Every time she pushes for another upgrade or another new technology, the engineer is there to caution about going too far too fast.

And that's all you get out of it.  There's no real consequence of their conflict.  They just give you two sides of a coin, back and forth, between missions.  I would have loved to have seen the scientist's need to experiment turn against her and put you in the position to have to decide if you want to save her or not from her own arrogance.  Or maybe the engineer hesitates too much and you're forced to decide if you want to risk lives by not using the latest greatest tech in the field.  It's all there for some real drama and conflict or at least some depth but it's all just left on the table.

5.  The Memorial Wall

Okay this is going sound really really minor.. but.

When you lose a solider their name appears on a list of guys killed in combat.  You can go to part of the base and see the pictures of those soldiers in the background.  There is a list of how many missions, how many kills,and the actual mission they were lost on.  But you can't look past the text to see the actual wall of images.

Now that seems like a silly thing to want to have, but for me, the ability to go look at who I lost, see that face, would really bring back that conflict of "they're just grunts" and "we need every last one of them."

Of course, as a writer, I'm also struggling a little because each time I start a game or recruit a new soldier I start writing their back story.

Is there a market for XCom Fanfiction?

Mind the Thorns Reflections

Here I am, 100 posts on Fictional Omens, and 20 chapters of Mind the Thorns and I'm feeling very contemplative.

It's been a very interesting run so far on both counts but mostly I want to think about Mind the Thorns and how that has played out as time has gone on.  It was an experiment, to be sure, and one that I'm proud to have engaged in.  Quite a few things worked, a few did not, and for the most part I feel like my writing has done nothing but improve in the time I've worked at it.

Which, before I get into the nature of Regan and the dangers of trying to write something as immersive as a reader-directed novel, I want to talk about.

Writing is work.


World building is even more work then I think most people respect.  The real world, the realm in which we live and all "realistic fiction" takes place is pretty easy to write in.  We know what cell phones can and cannot do.  We know what kinds of food we eat, what the political situation is for most nations, and we have an idea of the basics of currency.

But when you're making  your own universe from scratch, you have to make an active choice as to what each of those things are.  You need to have some kind of conflict and it has to be genuine.  You can take inspiration from current or historical events but at the end of the day you still have to start writing, and start building and then letting it take shape.

One of my goals for Fictional Omens was to turn it into a clearing house for back story and additional information on my Scifi Epic "The Queen's Fury", which is still lodged, months after I last worked on it, in chapter 3.  I've just not had it in me to figure out which race is at war with whom and why, nor exactly what the enemy ship that has just appeared is going to do now that they have a crippled ship at their mercy.  Which is even more of a shame as Mercy, the protagonist of that tale, has been labeled one of my most interesting main characters, easily eclipsing Allison in FantastiCon and Regan in Mind the Thorns.

So what is it that makes Mercy so engaging?

As far as I can tell not much; the fact is that Regan is rather bland.

Which begs the question: why is the protagonist of my most ambitious project to date so plain-Jane?

To answer that let me turn to a complaint my wife often lodges with me when she's done reading a piece of not so well written prose.  She will praise the writer for having a good story, and a good world, but laments, regularly, that the characters are interchangeable.  It doesn't matter who the main character is, anyone could follow those bread crumbs and stumble along to the story's completion.

What she craves is someone who doesn't follow the bread crumbs because they are there, but because that is just the kind of person the main character is.

And that's hard to write.  The conflict between character and plot is very real, and not in the sense of "The plot creates conflict" but in finding that sweet spot where the character drives the story, and the story forms new character traits.  Instead what tends to happen is that a more generic character is born to garuntee that the plot can be followed, that there are no conflicts between what a given personality will do, and what is required to move the story forward.

The writer's nightmare is layout this massive intriguite plot, only to have the final climax become impossible because the main character simply won't do what is needed.

I ran into a similar problem with Regan but for a totally different reason.

When I started I did not Regan to have too much personality.  I had some main ideas about her background but I left her personality very open so that I had room to develop her as it went along based on reader direction.  Emma, Harrison, and everyone else had clear characters.  They had depth, complexities and each clearly had their own agendas.  To be honest that was how I wrote up my notes:  "What does this character want?"  That way as the story progressed, I'd know where to take them.

But Regan never got past that initial "Jane Every Girl" character.  Part of it is the nature of a readership who only has 4 days to read a chapter and pick an option.  Often the most passive option seems the most agreeable and so when we look at the choices that Regan has made so far, they do add up to a very casual character.

And another part of it was purposeful.  I wanted Regan to be someone that any reader could both relate to and like.  I wanted her to be a character that readers cheered for, and supported and hoped would come out on top when it was all over.  I did not want her to be someone that people did not feel vested in or were unable to project themselves into.  I found myself working against the challenge of writing a Choose Your Own Adventure while at the same time presenting it as stand alone prose, and I think Regan suffers a little for it.

So what's left for Mind the Thorns?  Quite a bit, be that good or bad.  I've not really given Regan a chance to pursue a lot of romance, and there are still a few plot points left to hit in the other main story so her tale has several months to go.

I'm also changing up the format.  I'm extending polling to a full week and giving myself a week to write the next chapter.  This will slow posts to twice a month which may prove to be too infrequent, but it also gives me more time to work at the next chapter, and as I said when I started, writing is work.

Living the iLife

This fall, for my birthday, my parents sprung to get me an iPhone.  There were a few reasons for this, the first being that it made shopping for me unusually easy.  Another is that my mom and sister already had them and the goal, I think, is to bring the entire family into the iUniverse.  I have to admit that it's a pretty slick walled garden to live in.  There's a lot of nice features that work well for a family if everyone has one.

In addition my parents also got themselves an iPad and of course came to me with questions about what to get to put on it, with an eye to letting Xander (who's about to turn 5) play games on it.  Sadly I don't have a lot recommendations on that front but I thought I'd do a little write up of the various apps that have become indispensable in my iLife.

Most of what I'm going to talk about here was free, though many of them were only free for a limited time.  Always check prices before you buy an app and always be aware of the pricing models.  They've made some good changes to how Apple handles In App Purchases, but I still only marginally trust them with Xander around.

So... what's on my iPhone?


This app is a news aggregator.  You give it the feeds you want to follow and it sorts them out and lays them out in a magazine like format.  On the iPad it is simply gorgeous and it works incredibly well on the iPhone.  It is also available on Android.  You create a FlipBoard ID and it keeps track of your preferences across all devices.

And if you're not the sort who's savvy about RSS feeds and the like you can subscribe to several preset feeds based on your interests.  I strongly recommend the App feed because I get lots of heads up on free apps daily and I get some really fun apps that way.

Words with Friends - Free or Paid

I'm addicted to this game.  It's a perfect Scrabble game where you can play when you have time (assuming your friends understand a day or two between moves), and it's low stakes/ low pressure.  And it gives you a gaurunteed thing to talk about when you do see each other.

As a heads up, the paid versions are different between iPad and iPhone (one is HD one is not).  I ended up buying it twice, once for each device and you really don't need to, I don't think.

Train Conductor - $0.99

This is a fun little game for kids.  Trains go across the screen and it's your job to route them one way or the other to ensure that they get to the right numbered exit.  Xander played this for hours at my parent's anniversary party where he was the only kid.

Cut the Rope - Free or Paid

This is another "kids game" that has some pretty solid complexity to later levels.  Candy hangs from ropes and you need to maneuver it to the little alien who just wants a treat.  You swipe your finger to cut the rope and let it drop, pop bubbles that make it float, and tap balloons to help push it around.  The free version has a pretty good collection of levels though for the dollar (or two I forget) it's worth buying if you've got a kid who plays it a lot.

This is Xander's go-to game when he's got a chance to play on my old iPod.

Kid Pointz - Free

This app allows you to assign and take away points from your kids as they earn their way towards various rewards.  It's all stored on the KP server so it works across multiple devices.  You set the rules your child is going to follow, how many points for following or how many lost points for not, and then how many points they should have to earn before a reward.  In addition you can attach pictures to the rewards so that the kids can see what they're going for.

Now it doesn't work on the older iPods so I haven't played much with the child log in, but supposedly kids can request points for rewards, such as to say "hey, I did my homework can I have points for it?"  It really adds that dimension of letting them see how they are progressing.

Home Budget - $4.99

We use this app to keep track of our finances and it's amazing how easy it is to set up and use.  There's a small learning curve as to how you configure it and it's built with a lot of options we don't take advantage of.  For example you can track all of your money through this one app, including balances on credit cards, your bank balance, etc.  We use it for tracking expenses against our budget.  It comes preconfigured with expense categories and when you spend you just quickly tap in the amount.  You can opt to keep track of your balance by cycle, or by month, and see where you are in various categories.

It also has a bill tracker so you can keep track of when bills are due and set up reminders to mail them out on time.  We tend to pay bills as soon as they come in so that's another feature we really don't use.  About the only wish I would have for it is to include a optical scanner for receipts so I can just scan it and have the numbers pulled into the app.  Short of that you can photograph receipts and attach them to various expenses.

And like other good apps of this kind, it uses the server to sync multiple devices so everyone in the family can contribute.

My Fitness Pal - Free

This app tracks to the free website My Fitness Pal which is a great social platform for tracking diet and exercise.  You just put in what you eat and it does the rest.  The data base is searchable and so far nearly everything I've consumed I can find in there already.  In addition it has a barcode scanner to make entering food even easier.

Cook your own meals?  Just create the recipe and then enter it from there.  Now, as a small heads up, it does not take into account changes to food by cooking it.  So if you cook all of the fat out of a burger (we use a meatloaf pan that drains, for example) it won't take that fat out of the recipe when it calculates total calories etc.  I call that a fair trade for a free program.  It also has a social element in that you can track your friends and provide encouragements and admonishments.  I get reminders when a friend has lost weight, is under their calorie goal for the day, or has not logged in for a certain number of days.

Ring Maker - Free

My last app to show off is a free ring tone maker that I've used with pretty good success.  A small comment of caution:  If the song has DRM this won't work.  A lot of my library was purchased before iTunes went DRM free so I got suprised by not being able to create ringtones with them without first making the file DRM free.  If you're new to the iUniverse, this won't be a problem.  Just pick the song in your library, set the parts you want as a tone, and you're golden.  There is one catch in that you have to go into iTunes and move the file over before you can use it as a ring tone.  That's the nature of the beast, I'm afraid.

That said, once I got over that hump, it's a great little tool.

My parents expressly asked for apps for Xander and really there are only two here.  But, my best advice is to get some kind of reader, and subscribe to a Free App of the Day channel.  Lots of great kids games go free daily and it helps to have help knowing when.

FFV: So Real it's Scary

Happy Halloween!

The Rise of Genre Fiction

Fellow blogger and Author Elizabeth Baxter has a post up over at the Indy Book Blog about the Rise and Fall of Genre Fiction.  I think she offers a good glimpse at it but really there is so much left unsaid.

I shall take this opportunity, dear readers, to say it.

The question of the day:  "What the heck is it with everyone being into Genre Fiction?  How did True Blood become mainstream?  Why do we have everyone and their cousin watching Game of Thrones?  And how can you crack a joke about BDSM at a craft show and everyone laugh it off?"

The answer put forth by Baxter is that it has to do with the global depression.  So summarize- nah that'll take to long, let me sum up: the world sucks, people know the world suck, so they want to get as far away from the world as they can.  Nothing like escaping to Westeros, or to the towers of Grey Enterprises to forget about how far behind on your car payments you've slipped.  Why read about courtroom dramas and political in fighting when you can turn on CNN, MSNBC or FoxNews and get the exact same story, played out as though a cheap hack of a writer were coming up with the predicable and convoluted plots?

Speaking of which, seriously?  If I wrote a political drama I would not have named the guy Wiener.   Just, ya know, sayin'.  A dude needs some cred, amirite?

But I think Baxter only skirts the start of the deeper roots.


Which makes a trip from Wall Street to Bagend make sense.  Let's get away from corporate greed and get into some good old fashioned Dragon Hoards.  Why not, right?

What's missed, I think, is more technological.  Before we go further let me put out this thought:  Most people don't read.  There's a joke I've heard bantered about:

Guy 1:  So whatcha going to do with your retirement?
Guy 2:  I dunno, a little golf, maybe finish my book finally.
Guy 1:  You're writing a book?
Guy 2:  Nope.  Reading.

So yeah, the humor is partly in the truth of it.  There just isn't as much reading going on as there was pre TV. Most people, myself included, consume their literature through movies, through television and in smaller numbers, through interactive storytelling such as video games.  Me?  I'm a huge fan of video games as my literature.  I've talked about that before so I shan't digress.

So what's that got to do with the rise of genre fiction?  Everything.

When I was a kid we went to see a HORRIBLE (and yes all caps is justified in this case) movie called Robot Jocks.  It featured a future where the cold war was now fought in the arena between two giant robots in a To The Death combat.  Gladiators who survived five fights were forced to retire.  It was horrible.  But wow, the effects were amazing.

For the time.

I watch movies now like Transformers and think about that early stop action movie with robots duking it out and my head hurts.

Or let's take a look at the Lord of the Rings epics.  Imagine the challenge of creating the charge of the Rohirrim without computer graphics.  How would you ever get a few thousand horsemen in a single camera shot?  Simple answer:  You Don't.

But with the rise of the technology to create those visuals the way the authors intended, we can finally start to see these movies put on the screen (big and small) so that more people become exposed.  Exposure leads to interest.  Interest leads to book sales.  And book sales lead to "if you liked this book you might also like..." referrals.

Especially when you need spend another $5 to get free shipping.

I really think that the rise of Genre fiction owes it's rebirth to the whiz kids who run the special effects studios as much if not more than it owes it to anything else.  Those houses make things like The Avengers possible popcorn classics, and let child actors stand next to Aslan so they can prepare to lead a charge.  That makes more people interested in the genre, and that leads to more fans.

Author's note:  Eowyn was a princess who picked up a sword to defend her friends, family and loved ones.  What, exactly, did Bella and Ana Steel do again?  Oh yeah... they sat back and whined.

FFV: German Star Wars

According to Google the page says:
It felt very spontaneous: the WDR Symphony Orchestra organized a flash mob at the Wallraf Square. Suddenly passersby and visitors turned out to be Cafe Orchestra - and played unabgesprochen apparently to the surprise of passersby a very familiar tune.

Summer Nights (of Writing)

Some time ago I declared that I was going to spend 3 months as a writer, working full time 5 days a week, pounding out a chapter in the sci fi epic novel, a chapter for the online web serial, and at least one short story.  In addition I was going to edit the web novel, promote FantastiCon, promote the web novel and maintain the blog.

I knew it was ambitious.

I knew it was going to take work, dedication, and perseverance.

Writing is hard and I was ~ready~.

So... how'd it go?


And I need glasses now.

I'm serious.  The eyestrain of staring at a computer screen for 5-9 hours a day, plus time playing in the evening basically totaled my vision.  Apparently I've always been farsighted and until this summer I've been able to compensate by, well, not reading too much.  Or getting up from the computer once in a while.  Or just changing tasks.  But this time, my 'changing tasks' wasn't "take the kids to the park now", it was "stop writing and work on the blog."  The result was that my eye strain was bad enough I started to get serious head aches and a trip to the doctor confirmed it is time for me to wear glasses.

So, accomplishments so far:  Destroy eyes.

Now, on the web novel front I had my most success.  I have managed to put out 16 chapters, keeping to a chapter a week with one exception when grades were due and my wife went out of town for the weekend.  I'm afraid I'm going to have to change up my voting paradigm in the future for family weekends but I do think that my "Write for Mind the Thorns Fridays", worked well to keep me writing and keep me the most on the deadline.

My regret on that front is that the novel is still pretty unknown.  I realize that vampire stories have pretty well played out, but I still see new ones coming in to my wife through her book lending websites so I know people are still reading them.  Sadly my efforts at promotion have more or less been busts.  I tried printing small issues to put on Amazon; no sales and no reviews.  I tried doing a give away with Good Reads only to have people rate it as a 2 star because they did not read the description and realize that, hey, this is not a full novel.  I did say "This is not a full novel; you can read it online for free at the website", but that was not enough for some.

So on that front I still need to get some readers before I consider that an accomplishment.  What's success on something like that?  I'd say 100 views a day would be an accomplishment.  That's pretty humble as far as blogs go, but still within reach.  I came close this summer but it's dwindled since school started and my week off tanked it.  I feel as though I need to completely redo the entire marketing campaign, minus efforts at Goodreads.

The sci fi epic?  Almost totally untouched.  Why?  I blame the fact that it's meant to be a big deal, but also I don't have a good solid plot outline for it yet.  I have a series of events I want my captain to experience, but I'm in a constant state of confusion how to get her to them.  For good or bad my friends say she's one of the most interesting characters I've written; I just don't write her enough.

I wanted to write a short story each week, specifically for the "Weekly Short Story Contest" on Goodreads. I tried but I got distracted by a few that needed editing.  I did write a couple, but they're not the kind of quality that I think will sell.

So why did I not produce more?

First, it's not nearly as easy as it sounds to make yourself create prose every day for 10 weeks.  It's work.  You have to make yourself keep making Stuff.

Second, without an outline for the epic I spent a lot of time staring at the screen trying to think of what would happen next, what characters to introduce, what ideas to get out there.  It was time consuming.  I respect that fan fic is a great way to hone your craft, but make no mistake:  it's a lot easier to work in someone else's world then it is to build your own.

Third, there was no immediacy.  I knew what I hoped to produce but the one place I managed to accomplish my goals was when I had a deadline hanging over my head.  I had to write a chapter every week.  I had to have them up for readers every Sunday night/ Monday morning.  I did not have a choice.

All in all, it was a good and informative experience.  I know it will be a long time before we can afford for me to do it again, so I hope that the lessons I learned are learned well enough I don't need another round of education.  Timelines, outlines and just an appreication for the challenge of generating meaningful words.

And the most dangerous?  Burn out.  By August I was losing it.  I needed to talk to people, and I didn't care who.  My wife would come home and I'd ramble for an hour straight before she even changed out of her scrubs.  I just kept going.  I would look at the same short story I'd been editing for weeks and have nothing left to change but know it needed something more.  I struggled to keep working and I did not have the incentive of someone saying "where's the novel you promised us?"

In some ways I miss the time, the quiet, and an opportunity to create.  In others I'm glad to return to the structure of the school year.

FFV: Some Nights I want to WreckIt

This movie looks like it will be a non stop nostalgia fest.

Writing "Real" Fiction

So a while back I waxed poetic on the merits of writing fan fic as a means to practice your art and to establish some kind of reputation as someone who can tell a story, craft dialogue and engage characters.  I stand by that advice, but I would like to deal with some of the negative stigmas that Fan Fic gets and how some of them are legitimate.

One thing that I see in a lot of fan fic, but rarely in quality published writing, is the use of specifics.  The main character does not get into a hot rod to drive to school, she climbs into a 2012 Pontiac Solstice with turbo charged V8, leather seats and the eight speaker stereo.

This makes me want to ask the author:  So?


Now it makes sense to describe the hot rod car the main character is driving.  It can establish a certain level of decadence, or perhaps a need for the main character to have a powerful car to make up for lack of power in other areas of her life.  Maybe it's a case of conspicuous consumption.    It can be a point later in why the main character is able to out drive her rival on a race to get to the library first and score a chance to be tutored by the incredibly hot, but probably a vampire, science nerd.

If that's not the case, they why not just leave it at "car"?  Even the most verbose of writing (I'm looking at you, Moby Dick) provides a context for the instruction, and there it is not so much unnecessary detail, but it is an included treatise on the biology of whales to further the overall knowledge for the rest of the story.  The fair comparison would be that Melville was going through and fully educating the reader on the inner workings of the car's engine so that when the main character out paces her rival, you, the reader, understand in minute detail how this was done.

The detail is not provided to name drop the latest hot rod's title.  It is provided to better serve the story.

I feel the same way about music mentioned directly in the prose.  As I get older I recognize less and less of these pieces.  My wife will be listening to something on her computer and it will catch my ear.  I'll make a comment about "maybe I still like new music" to which she'll respond "new?  This came out, like, four years ago."

The key is in the relevance, again, to the story.  I skirted this with Mind the Thorns back in Chapter 3.  In the scene Regan is barreling down the highway in the passenger seat of a hot rod car, one I imagine to be, yes, a Pontiac Solistice.  On the radio is blasting "Raise Your Glass" by P!nk.  Why that particular song?  Part of it was that I had been listening to it a lot while I was writing and it was in my head.  For that scene, however, I envisioned it as the perfect song of self acceptance.  That moment in the car was the first that Regan stops and realizes, she is immortal.  She is going to be young and beautiful and powerful forever.  It is meant to be the kind of time where the character not just accepts who they are but revels in it.

But I held back from mentioning the title and settled on just a reference to the lyrics because I did not want the reader to be caught up in having to find the song to appreciate the moment.  Instead I focused my attention on writing the scene so as to capture that feeling without the aid of an outside reference.  The lyric I chose to include could be set to just about any tempo and tune and still have a contributing factor to the moment.

What else is interesting with that chapter is that the names of several class cars are also dropped.  Regan and Daryl take in a tour of The Earl's car collection.  Why did I mention the specifics there?  Because I wanted to establish key points of character that those names played to.  I wanted to suggest without flat out stating (ie showing not telling) that The Earl had a taste for the most beautiful cars made in America in given model years.  Why did I not do that for the modern hot rod?  Because at that point I did not want room for people to become distracted.

FantastiCon is a curious case of having to violate this rule just to have a story.  While Allison is in and out of costumes, and most of them seem irrelevant to the story, a convention like that is nothing but one giant pop culture reference.  People change in and out of costumes, and those costumes are from the movies and TV shows of the day.  Some of the costumes, also, had particular relevance to the character of Allison.  She dressed as a junior officer from a sci fi show as a way of saying "hey, I don't like to be the top dog; please don't notice me."  She was a Ravenclaw when she dressed up for Harry Potter as a nod to her intellectual side, and her desire to be a little different.  The Brotherhood of the Wolf costume was meant to show that she appreciated older period movies, as well as provide a foil in that the long skirts become an issue during the novel's climax.  Likewise, the fact that some people did and did not recognize the costume also become a minor plot point.

All told, the question that should always be asked, when writing, is "Are these details nessecary?  Do they advance plot, setting or character?  Is there a better way to share this?"

My personal pet peeve tied to this practice is that it comes off as a short cut.  Fan Fic writers (yes I'm going back there) often get a bad reputation because they don't world build on their own.  They play in someone else's sandbox.  By going another step and saying "She listened to Raise Your Glass by P!nk" you're taking another short cut.  Tell us why that particular song mattered at that particular moment.  Was it that she knew the song from a happier day?  Was it the song itself that put her in better spirits?  Was it a random song that happened to play?

In Jerry MacQuire, there is a famous scene where he desperately wants to listen to an upbeat song on the radio and he has to scroll through several stations before he finds Tom Petty's Free Falling.  There are many songs that are perfect sing along tunes that could have filled in for that song and your writing is considerably more accessible if you leave it open for a reader to insert their own "The perfect classic rock song to sing along to" unless you have a real need for that particular song to be Free Falling.