Patreon! Going Live on the 1st!

I am a writer, a dungeon master, and a game designer. Make of that what you will. More to the point, I am Eddie Gomes, better known as Pangoria Fallstar. I have been writing poetry and short stories for over 20 years. I’ve also been creating small games for the past 5 years, and have otherwise been a Dungeon Master for Dungeons and Dragons for 15 years on and off.

I live in Southern California, where the debris meets the sea.

I'm a small creator in a big world of content. I can understand that there are levels of things in this world. There are creators across a wide spectrum of work online, and deciding to spend money on someone because they cater to something you want to see more of can be very special.

I want to thank anyone and everyone who supports my work. It can be strange, straightforward, or over the top. I am definitely ludic and very diverse overall. But, for me to be able to express myself completely I have to find a way to pay the bills.

Create to Pay Bills

The way the ecosystem of creation is, a person can’t just make something and make money off of it, without a lot of luck. A diversity of resources is important. I have long-term projects that I’m working on, but the pay off isn’t here. I would love to be able to just work on these things and not worry about money, but I have a family and a very particular set of skills that unfortunately mean that most places will not hire me. Essentially, I’m unable to get a job in retail anymore. I had an office job for too long, and I’m on a long list of people who are overqualified and in abundance for the work I do have experience with.

So, my goal is to take my skills and try to create things for people who want these things created. I’m a short story writer, and so, by supporting me, you support original short stories across a gamut of sci-fi, space opera, fantasy, urban fantasy, magical realism, and romance.

Supporting me means getting downloads of content that I’m making, as I’m making it. I have a variety of stories I want to write, and I have a list of "topics" (concepts, general ideas, entire outlines) that I work on. Most of it is original content, some of it is fanfiction, and others are chapter stories. I'll release either a chapter a month or a different story each month, depending on how the voting goes.

I'll continue to use Fanfiction.net for my Fanfiction stories, and original short stories will be put on tapas.io.

"That is...a tremendously f-ed up story. I'm damn near non-shockable, but this definitely threw me for a loop." - Tuatara

"Rather funny, in a chick-flick comedy sort of way..." - Mr. Qwerty

"…Sigh." - Anonymous

"This story has gotten really weird yet not completely unbelievable considering what we know of these characters." - Compucles

"Seems to get weirder all the time..." - Shadowstalker666

There's a law called COPPA that is causing a lot of online creators on youtube and beyond to make sure that their content is being directed at the appropriate audiences. There are extra rules designed to protect kids from being advertised to, and since my target audience would be young adults and older, I am saving myself the grief of dealing with someone thinking that any video games, cartoons or images I use are targeting kids, when I am trying to target the inner child of an adult audience.

Update! Patreon Coming soon!

I've spent these past 4 months testing the limits of how much I'm able to write in a month within a reasonable expectation. I then took those numbers and came up with a goal of what I can reasonably reach, word count wise, each month. I took that goal and placed it as a reward on Patreon to give to people who are willing to support my writing.

A few aspects that stand out to this, are things like how I do not have some grand following of people. I also plan to write regardless of Patreon, I just reward those first and spend the month double checking some grammar and spelling errors before submitting online. I'm planning on releasing stories on tapas.io for original content and fanfiction.net for fanfiction stories.

But those will occur after the Patreon rewards. Also, people who support certain tiers will be able to vote for what I write next, or even flat out make requests. I'll post an update once the Patreon goes live, I'm still doing some work on it, trying to make it look nice.

I'm hoping that people who are close to me, family and friends can support a $1 a month, since having numbers can help generate numbers. These will be short stories, averaging about 3,000 words, and they will range from one time tales to chapter stories depending on what gets voted on.

I'll update everything as I go, so keep an eye out here. Thank you very much to anyone who chooses to support me on this.

Adapting My Writing Style For Purposes

I've consistently been a short story writer. Because of this it took years to change how I tackle a story that is longer than 10k words. From watching videos about how Avatar adds comedy to their scenes that can be full of drama, to how short stories cut in late and leave early.

That last bit is what is key about how I tend to write scenes. And the Avatar comedy video was the opposite of that. So, let me establish one then talk about the other. A scene in a story is when something happens. Usually you don't need little details unless they matter. So you don't need to talk about your characters going to school, and getting things out of their locker, and making it to first period, and how the teacher is talking about mitochondria, and how mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Unless it matters to the story later.

So you cut out the bits. The go to school, but something big happens at lunch? Then that's where the story jumps in. Usually in a novel length story, you bring the reader in before things really get started. You get an atmosphere going. In a short story, you just dump them in as the thing starts. I fall right in between.

The video I watched talking about the Avatar video showed examples where they did the opposite. They kept the camera on someone who was waiting. They stayed too long after the scene and events had moved on. That lingering led to watching Zuko being bored. See, the thing is, its funny seeing someone who has been so serious the entire series sitting around being bored.

Other movies doe it too, like in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, they had this moment in an elevator. It was WAY before the scene where things "happen". That moment of how these people comport themselves in an elevator brings a change of pace.

So here I am, a writer who comes in just as the action begins, who skips the fluff and assume that the reader can read between the lines, here I am, trying to write things early. I end up skipping the scene set up and jump into the action. It is a work in progress.

I mean, let's take a story by HP Lovecraft as an example (short story), he starts with a guy riding a bike in the country side, and ends with him in a shack with a cannibal. I would start with him running into the shack from shelter from the rain. Lovecraft went all the way back to the bike ride to begin with. The story is better for it.

That's not to say that short story style is bad. Often times I feel like my writing is a montage of scenes, that make a scene together. Sometimes it is just a hyper focus on a singular event. Thing is, that it doesn't lend itself to longer form.

Reading back my writing I often feel like I'm rushing the reader along. People often get confused. I'm not sure where I lose them to be honest. Some readers act like if a moment is not written down, it doesn't happen. It bothers me, because no one ever writes about going to the toilet until it matters. But obviously characters to and use the toilet.

Now, if your evil overlord were to go to the toilet, then maybe you use that to lighten things up and humanize them. Could be funny. My question though would always be, "why?"

Fanfiction is the Remix of Literature

Sometime some twenty years ago I came to realize that I enjoyed remixes, covers, and genre changes in music. Something about listening to a song suddenly played as Bluegrass or a rap song done in the style of Elvis that really makes my ears perk. It helps if I know the original to some degree.

In comic books this is Elseworld stories, and things like Red Son. They take a familiar concept and mess it up, shake it up or change one simple thing that alters the entire timeline from that change. It then asks what happens from there, and usually they find a story they couldn't tell before. Sometimes its about inevitability, the idea that no matter our choices we trend towards one outcome. Sometimes its a "more things change" situation.

In online comics I would say that the work of David Willis exemplifies this perfectly. He's also one of the few where the creator themselves are remixing the work. In this case he takes his characters and resuses them in different situations, each time slightly different, or hugely different. They end up with different people.

All this is to show that fanfiction is to literature what the remix is to music. Sometimes it scrambles it. Sometimes it is a genre change. They'll replace instruments and slow things down. I really started thinking about this when I came across a review of a newly posted story. The review essentially said, "This is an old trope, and it's a lame trope to boot."

Ouch! Harsh criticism strikes a critical blow! Now, this person, they themselves are writing stories that are a bit trope-ish, but he's doing so from a fresh angle. The person he reviewed seems to be rewriting a concept, and honestly this version is coming out better than others I have seen online (maybe even by the same guy, online can be like that).

But that criticism kinda doesn't affect what this guy is doing. He's writing a story he wants to write, and as Nancy Kepner almost said, "Most fans fanfiction is just a form of mas-"-turbation.

But fanfiction is a remix, its a genre change, and sometimes its a cover. Books are catching up on this concept, even though this is older. And has been done by Disney within our lifetimes. I also tend to view any work carried on by others to no longer be the original. And that's okay!

We can change stories to fit the times, and to fit what we want to tell. Characters and events are mutable. Take Batman. Batman is Zorro. Zorro is the Scarlet Pimpernel. And the Scarlet Pimpernel is only now becoming public domain (since it has now been 70 years since the Baroness's passing). But those stories are very much inspired by. Influenced by. But not, an actual fanfiction of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

Smallville is a fanfic of Superman. The new 52 Batman is fanfiction of Batman. Stranger Things is fanfiction of 80s Sci-fi and horror (this one is a bit of a stretch, I'll admit). Thing is, we remix ideas all the time. But it all just happens to be how closely we follow the source material. For fanfiction, we use the names, and sometimes entire history of the series. We branch off somewhere. Or we reinterpret actions. We make characters fall in love or make different choices.

So, if you find a way to step away, and make that fanfic your own. I encourage you to do so. I know I've been trying.

Where Fanfiction Writing Fails

The way I tend to write stories usually involves me picturing a scene as if it were a movie. Then taking that scene and wording it in a way that I'm not just describing a scene in a movie. Writing is very specifically not film. Which is to say that what matters when you write, and if you want to write a physical thing happening, it can be tedious to try to describe a fight with precision. Especially, when you want to make it feel cinematic.

That's the main rub of the whole thing, and what makes me dislike certain writers and specifically, fanfiction writers. They try to describe sight gags and funny things like they show up in film or animation, but they fail to understand that the humor of it fails in words. Because to get the joke, you literally have to explain it. Describing a visually humorous thing tends to break the rule of not explaining the joke.

Some of the best fanfiction writers are able to change what is usually a visually centered show and write it as if it were literature. Some are even able, through fourth wall breaking third person narrative to express character moods and emotions succinctly and expressively.

Again though, this goes back to just proper writing ability. Even when some of the best advice I've read, leads to "write like a camera point of view" then switch to "internal", the movie camera isn't always easy to describe, or shouldn't be described in extreme detail. Like with everything a balance is necessary, but some descriptions become stupidly convoluted when being read.

One way I practice writing these scenes is to watch a show, and then rewrite the scene as if it were to be in a book. It's amazing how you can focus on a single thing, or how entire scenes can be described in one sentence instead of paragraphs of descriptions. Sometimes more time can be spent describing a scene, because the density of details is so important.

Overall though, I have to be able to picture the scene first. Which is why I think scenes I've tried to write before, are easier to write later when I try again. This is why writing every day is so important. Training to make scenes and layering details becomes easier the more times you do it.

So that's my biggest point to make, when writing, don't try to recreate the exact scene, it won't work. Instead transform the scene from visual to novel. Don't try to describe sight gags, find the humor from a different angle. Sometimes a detail that is so very important to visual comedy can be ignored in writing, or can be written or mentioned differently. Feel free to write the in-between moments that get skipped or shortcut moments that can be described more fluidly in a single sentence.

misUnderstanding Criticism

I've been doing a flurry of writing lately.

From blogs to facebook posts to fanfiction and original fiction and poetry, I've been writing every day. I have this goal in my life, to write a novel, or more specifically to write a book that not only has a beginning, middle and end, but that is sold for money to people who are interested in reading it.

I even found platforms online that allow me to easily sell my stories in chunks that are digestible and released when I want it to. I've though of releasing online myself before, but the upfront costs of having a website, self promotion and design always held me back. That and fear.

With all this writing and thinking of future goals, I went back to work that I've published and reviewed the reviews. Now I had plenty of "good story" and positive reviews, which make me feel all warm inside, but I had reviews that were conflicted in even saying that what I did was good.

Those reviews, by people who, not only read the story, but liked it and disliked it enough to talk about it were even more rewarding in a way. Something about a story that in and of itself was a series of surrealistic fetishism and insane narration, receiving such a conflicted review really rewarded what the goal of the story was in the first place.

One of my recent fanfiction posts was met with a review which confused me though. The person simply wrote, and I quote, "...Sigh".

That was it. "...Sigh"

What does that even mean? What pedestal was my fanfiction on that the only feeling they had was "...Sigh"? I kinda feel like I kicked a puppy with that review. Doesn't help that my friends rated it as one of the best reviews ever.

In the end though, I appreciate it. I got feedback on something. What that feedback means though, is very much up to interpretation. One thing I can say for sure, the story at least had a large enough impact on them that they HAD to let me know it. And sometimes, that's enough. 

Opening Paragraphs - The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

"The assassin crept toward the house through cold blue beams, moonlight dancing across the forest floor in a handful of silver coins." ~ S.A. Hunt, The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (pg.1).

This one sentence immediately soured me to this book. This is, easily one of the worst opening lines I have read. It is painful to read. It mixes up what it is talking about. It has two different color descriptions for what should be one thing. It sounds like a fantasy book, but is written like modern fiction.

I read this, and on a macro scale, I understood that the whole thing was essentially a man walking through beams of moonlight towards a house. I get it.

But when I first was reading it, I thought, "cold blue beams of what?" I pictured silver coins scattered on a forest floor, shining in the moonlight.

I took a step back.

Cold blue beams of moonlight. Maybe they should have done of instead of a comma. But that messes up the rest of it.

"The assassin crept toward the house through cold blue beams of moonlight dancing across the forest floor in a handful of silver coins."

No, that is really bad too. Now it feels like the creeping assassin is dancing. Also, again what is up with the silver coins? That's when I realized, that the silver coins are describing how these little beams of moonlight look like when the land on the forest floor.

So they took the word like from the simile. It makes it harder to parse. But after a few moments I was able to understand the opening paragraph of this story. I immediately gave up on reading it.

Humor for Creativity

I've been playing Magic the Gathering for years now. And last night, I got to play a draft with the latest set to be release, Unstable. Unstable is part of a series of joke sets released for the card game, but unlike previous attempts, they have made a legitimately fun draft environment for this set. It brings to mind one of my favorite ways of getting myself to think creatively, which is to tell jokes. They don't have to be good jokes, but the act of thinking in the way that jokes make us think, gets our brains going into the kind of thought processes required to be creative.

I often like to tell jokes or joke around when I'm trying to brainstorm a new level design. Sometimes I'll even design a level that is ridiculous to try to execute. Because in doing the joke. In allowing for the crazy, you end up creating heuristics that you can use on the sane creative thing you are going after.

Some people fail to understand why I work the way I do. I've learned to game myself. If I start feeling low I work out. If I can't think of solutions, I put it on the back burner and joke around. I ask myself out loud the question. I try to explain things in as simple a way as possible to my desktop figurines.

So whenever you find yourself stuck, just remember to tell a joke. It doesn't even have to be funny. For example, when I started this post the title was "Only to use the word Alabaster". I typed it without thinking. And it reminded me of the magic card: Angel of Flight Alabaster. From there I thought of the game I had last night, and well... the rest you just read.

Is there a purpose for Romance stories?

Romance stories have a place in this world.

Not as fodder to sensitive people. Not as porn for women. But as guides of idealized actions.

That’s what happens a lot of times with fan fiction stories. People write idealizations. Perfect scenarios. This is where fanfiction gains a great deal of stigma compared to published works. There is a lack of true threat. People can only win so much before it becomes boring in a story.

But in real life, we accept winning over and over as amazing. Especially when we can understand that someone has worked towards that goal. But we fail to see the failures. Take, Michael Phelps for example. He wins. I mean, he WINS. But we must understand that before each win he has achieved, he failed. He fails somewhere in his life. We just don’t see it.

Stories require conflict and success. It needs imperfections. Finally, because humans are creatures of patterns, we have to connect dots and causality.

But real life isn’t like that.

Real life isn’t a romance story. We don’t have a meet cute. We have exposure and time. We have conversations and hormones. We have false starts and mixed signals.

So, how do romance novels help?

They give us a roadmap on behavior. Where the negative lies, and where it can transition to positives. It shows people how behavior can change, and what the possible results can be. It asks the question: If you love this person, why do you not behave in this way?

In the end we are our actions. Changing our actions, changes who we are, regardless of the reason.

NaNoWriMo 2013

Wow! I did nothing this month. Quite honestly, between GDCNext, and overtime at my job, and a horrible sick weekend, I didn't have a single moment where I was in a headspace to write, mostly because I was walking around like a zombie.

So there you go, one of my least productive NaNoWriMo. To those of you in the same boat though... there's still 2 days left! Start writing! Have November be start writing month, and just keeping going through December, or however long it takes you!

Fanfiction.net / Sad Face

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NaNoWriMo Failed; other stuff

Quite frankly, I think that I have too much on my plate right now. So this month was a 5k word exercise in failure. Which is quite okay, because one of the reasons I had trouble writing was because I wasn't happy with the story. On the other hand, I've written more on the novel I've been trying to write all year, which is good.

I've been checking with myself, and quite frankly, I don't have the ability to do school work, regular work during the busiest time of year, and be a father while writing. So instead, I'll continue things at my snail pace until I get to January, where regular work will slow down.

Speaking of January, I'm making plans to attend the LA GGJ, so if you're going to be there, introduce yourself! I'll be introducing myself as Pangoria. GGJ or Global Game Jam, is a 48 hour lockdown of game making. I'm really excited for it. One cool thing is that this month's class, Design Project, is a culmination of this year's classes. The goal is to make a board game as a team. We've had three meetings so far at about 2 hours to 3 hours each, and I must say, I'm loving the progress we are making.

I went out tonight and bought some materials, and I'll probably spend tomorrow working on a practical board for the game. Though we have a game mat that we could easily use for the game, I want to experiment with different design patterns. To do this, I got a foam board, and some sticky notes. I use the notes to arrange the "tiles" on the board. In this way, I can easily try different layouts.

This will be the second board game that I'll be making since I started Fullsail, and considering the team I'm working with, it is quite a bit more ambitious than Milk Money, my first board game. We don't exactly have a name for the game yet, since we want to finalize more features and game mechanics before we start in on it.

There is quite a bit of news that came out during November, and I'm sure you have all been reading and keeping up on it. I'll instead focus on any news that comes out lately, and if there is something really interesting to talk about from it, though some subjects that came up would be interesting to explore in more depth, it would be old news by the time I get around to writing about it.

Week 4 - Wrap-up and Result Dissonance

Well, I've managed to complete about 10% of my novel so far. I have to wrap up for my assignment, which means looking at what I've done so far. Some key things about the novel is that I was exploring the idea of paradigm-shifts, cognitive dissonance, and how people express their feelings.

So far in the story, we have seen the sister's actions not match her thoughts, the difference in how she and her brother view the world, their reactions to suddenly finding themselves in each other's bodies, their in ability to let go of the fact that someone else is in their body, and I focus repeatedly on how each interprets the other's expressions, instead of saying what the other person is thinking.

Facial expressions is one of those things that I often tend to misread. Because of this, shows like Lie To Me are really interesting. I've tried to study other people's facial expressions, but I tend to only understand the faces of people I've been around a while with. I took an Empathy Quotient test over at Glenrowe.net and scored an 18 (people with Asperger Syndrome and high functioning Autism score and average of 20). As a counter to that, I actually scored lower on my Systemizing Quotient with a 14. I'm not sure if this says more about me, or about the quizzes. This really confused me since EQ and SQ tend to be opposites. Either way, it means that I think rather equally with both sides of my brain and that in both cases, I just don't do so very well.

Part of what I'm trying to explore with this story is not only how to write expressions and reactions, but also to learn and understand them a bit more myself. Also, the story is about two kinds of people that I've never been myself. In this sense I'm trying to create the lives of an outgoing person and a highly emotional person, and trying to find a way to make the imitation not only into reality but as a way of understanding why people like them behave the way they do.

As for how organized I've been with this project, I must say that I really wish I had less demands on my time. Even the one week I had less work to do at school, I ended up having over-time at work. So even then, I could not have the time I felt I needed. Instead my writing was gorilla style, typing in hundreds of words when I could. In the end I've probably only spent a few hours actually writing, when I had wanted to spend tens of hours.

At the rate I'm writing I would probably need another 27 weeks to finish my novel. Regardless, I'm planning to use this weekend, and next weekend to get as close to the end as I can. If I can beat last year's word count of 30,000 words, I will be very happy.

I'll be posting up my word counts, including my word counts of today and tomorrow, by tomorrow evening, and I'll post a final wrap up at the end of the month.

Week 3 - Time Management and Self-Accountability

Wow, three weeks have passed already. In fact, I am on the home stretch for my school project, but... I am far behind in my writing. I have a graph of all the work I have done. Four days worth. That is one day out of every week, where I have worked on this project. That is a literal definition of 20% (or close enough to it). The thing is, that it is nowhere near enough to be done with the novel by the 20th. Doesn't mean I won't keep writing even after the class is over. I still have until the end of the month. Instead the issue is whether I spent the appropriate amount of time on my project.

My goal to write a novel this month is not something that I could accomplish with 20% effort. In fact, 20% effort would get me to about 10,000 words, which is about what I will write by the end of the month at my current pace. Most of my work for this class is done, and I've spent every night writing. I must say that my very hands are tired from the exertion.

I tackled the weekly, time sensitive material first. Even this blog post, which is part of my project, took priority over the actual act of my 20% effort. Which is why I'm typing this over the novel currently. Lucky for me, all I have left is this week of writing, and a concluding post this weekend, as well as an analysis of the whole concept.

In that case, my focus has been accurate. Thought I may or may not complete NaNoWriMo this month, it will not stop me from continuing to write throughout the year. It also will not prevent me from trying to finish the project after the due date.

One issue I have is Self-Accountability. I seem to be more productive when I'm accountable to other people. When I work by myself, it becomes almost guaranteed that I will goof off instead.

Part of the question is, whether I'm happy with how the story is going or whether I think that it is any good. Quite honestly, though this is based on an idea that I had, the execution is altering the concept repeatedly. Part of it comes from writing for writings sake. At some point the story gets lost in babble.

Quite honestly, this project has helped me focus on things about myself that I thought I understood, but that in the end was only a surface understanding. I still believe that I can write a novel, but I'm not sure that I can do so in such short a time.

Part of it is also how I'm thinking about the novel. Thinking in word count can make it difficult to focus. Instead, I want to be able to focus on 2k blocks of story. Short stories that tie into a overall narrative might make it easier for me to write. I will try to apply that concept to this final week to see if I'm able to observe any difference.

Week 2 - Continued Low Self Efficacy

I started this writing project with a high sense of self efficacy. I believed I could write 50,000 words in one month. After 2 weeks, and only being 1k words into the project, I'm quaking in fear. Though I may have 25 days in NaNoWriMo, I have only 14 days to finish up this project. That is 3,500 words a day. Between work and school work, this feels entirely impossible.

Part of the problem is my own fault. Every time I feel I should write, I play instead. I am sabotaging myself. I'm not exactly sure why. Either way, my current self-efficacy is low for completing NaNoWriMo this month.

I'm currently experiencing cognitive dissonance. I'm trying to justify it somehow, but all I have, is that my own actions were poorly chosen, and that I have placed more work and stress on myself instead. This made it even harder for me to tackle the issue. Instead, what I did to reduce the dissonance, is to accept that I have a larger workload, and plan to schedule harder set times to write.

Week 1 - Terrible Failure

Arrgh! It's like everyone I know is against me actually sitting down to write. So I'm 9000 words behind my goal. This in and of itself isn't too horrible, since the idea of 2000 words a day is supposed to be an attainable goal. One of the reasons I'm so frustrated right now, is because I know I can write 2000 words a day. Not doing so is creating a cognitive dissonance to my self-efficacy of writing a word count each day.

Now there are several things I can do at this point. I can justify that other people took me away from writing, or I can say that I was too busy with other things, and that I'll just have to work harder. But none of these things will allow me to accomplish my goals. Instead I have to explore a way to set up time and talk to my loved ones about my goals. Support and open communication are the keys to setting myself up to succeed after failing.

So while we have established that the story is about a paradigm shift that will occur from a brother knowing more about his sister's life, and experiencing a different life, the actual reasons that he dislikes his sister is because she has strengths that he does not (and vice versa). As a matter of fact, his sister is a representation of his shadow (Jungian Shadow). To explore this, part of the shift is to take part of what his sister does differently that he is weak at, and strengthen it. By the end of the story, he will not hate that aspect of his sister, and will understand it better because of how his paradigm has changed.

How exactly this is to occur is still being worked out and is probably on the level of a Freaky Friday or Parent Trap type scenario.

Writers Repeat Themselves (Game Designers should too)

Quite often as I read through a book, I will notice that each paragraph will describe the exact same thing three different ways. As time has gone by, and I have read more and more books, I have noticed this repeating pattern. I believe the first time I noticed this was while reading Shakespeare.

Iago:

O, sir, content you;
I follow him to serve my turn upon him:
We cannot all be masters, nor all masters
Cannot be truly follow'd. You shall mark
Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave,
That, doting on his own obsequious bondage,
Wears out his time, much like his master's ass,
For nought but provender, and when he's old, cashier'd:
Whip me such honest knaves. Others there are
Who, trimm'd in forms and visages of duty,
Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves,
And, throwing but shows of service on their lords,
Do well thrive by them and when they have lined
their coats
Do themselves homage: these fellows have some soul;
And such a one do I profess myself. For, sir,
It is as sure as you are Roderigo,
Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago:
In following him, I follow but myself;
Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so, for my peculiar end:
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In compliment extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.

Iago here, talks about how not all servants are loyal, and that he is not loyal. How he, like those servants who only pretend, is simply waiting for his chance to no longer be a servant.

Now in concept, we could simply leave this idea as is. We could simply follow the concept and apply three variations of phrasing to everything we write, and hope that imitation is good enough to make our writing seem adequate or, dare we say, even good.

For the most part, that would work out, but we need to capture the why of the action, or we'll be like those girls who never understand why to apply make-up a certain way, and end up looking like clowns instead.

So, is it important to use this tripling repetition all the time in writing? Or only during key moments, or important events? How about in a mystery, where you want the clue to exist, but to be forgotten until mentioned later? How about in instructions and directions?

I'm not sure if writing an entire novel in constantly repeating yet different sentences is a good idea. I've read a story like that, and about half way through I was frustrated and skipping the extra two sentences of information. Which after getting in the habit of doing, caused me to miss some scattered bit of info the author was trying to convey. So perhaps in such events, it might be better to only use the three step sentence when information is important.

What about in a mystery? By putting emphasis on something else, and having a single throwaway sentence for something of import, you may succeed in causing the reader to forget about the important item, and focus on what they thought was important.

How can this be used in games? How about in quest text? Quite often, people skip the quest text, as it is often pointless, and simply read the what the goal of the quest is. How about simply writing the goal where the quest text is. Followed by having the goal in the objectives section. Finally, you have it on the players HUD of active quests. This of course means that you have tell your story in a different way (I've seen videos of Cataclysm, where a few times, Blizzard has succeeded in changing quests to this form). This can make it difficult, as telling a story through gameplay is something that is not yet completely common.

So is there a way to use the repeating text concept in game design, to tell a story, where most people skip the reading? Are there games that have told a story without words or with few words?

Perhaps, you start with a simple quest, and you don't read the quest text and just do things. But, if those quests really do serve a purpose, you start seeing a pattern in what you are doing, even without reading the quest text. Just from the quest objectives you can start figuring out that hey, something is going on here. This means that you would have to have most quests NOT be kill 10 rats. You have to add another element, or even better, two more elements into the quest.

How about this: "Rats have been coming up from the cellar. There used to be an underground passage which was used during the occupation of the tyrannical orcs a while back. Looks like something new has moved into the passage ways. Perhaps, you would help me solve this problem? I'll make sure to reward you... appropriately."

First of all, the quest text itself mentions passage way and cellar and essentially going underground. Second, you would have updating or chain quests that would lead from one to the other. Is there more we can do?

In this case, we need to look at cut-scenes or things "like" a cut-scene to help tell the story. This would be the third step of telling a story three different ways.

So we can the quest to go into the cellar, where the quest updates to killing rats and we kill an arbitrary 10 rats. Once we kill the rats, we see one escape into another passage (the "cut-scene"). We follow, and see the passage ways that the quest giver was talking about. Now, we go deeper and explore. Now even without reading the quest text, we knew to go to the cellar, and because our objectives window is auto-updating, and we are seeing the rats escape down a passage, we follow and proceed with the quest.

Now, would you do this with every mission? Or only with important missions?

I would imagine that a developer would tier the significance of of their quests, so that as you go up in importance you have these additional steps taking place, to show the importance of these events. Perhaps even for the same reason that you would for writing.

Pricing Models

Amazon has a deal for writers who decide to put their books up for sale in their e-books store. The concept is, that you get everything formated and ready to go on your own, and put it up for sale.

To do this, you choose a price point. If you sell between $2.99 to $9.99 you get 60%, but if you go over $9.99 you only get 30% of the sale, which means you need to sell it for over $20 to get an equal amount of money from the $9.99 sale.

To me, the over $20 sales would only go to technical books, that teach some programming language or other useful skills. That means, for fiction writers you would be deciding between a $3 or a $10 book to sell. The usual paperbacks, sell for $5.99+ if its been out for awhile, or $17.99+ if it is more recent. To compete, you'd have to go under that, so practically, you would be selling your books for $2.99-$4.99.

That means per sale, you're netting about $2 average per sale. For me, with both me and my wife working, I'd want to be bringing in, $1000 per month, which means selling 500 books a month.

With that in mind, an independently published book is considered "a hit" if it sells 2000 copies. Extrapolating from that, I would be a successful independent writer if I completed (wrote, revised, put together, and published) a book every 4 months, or 3 books a year (and that's if it was a success each time).

Escalating Plot

I don't know why, but sometimes as I read stories, they seem to escalate to levels beyond what I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for. Sometimes when reading a story, I get to a point where I just can no longer stand to read the story.

An opposing family is super rich and has infinite resources and leads. Another is a mafia style family and is killing collateral supporting cast, and the main characters are mostly clueless about it. Suddenly, the wrong people are too far away, bombs are being set in the house, a ninja breaks in, and the main character is getting set up for a crime he didn't commit, and there are relationship troubles to boot!

Somehow, having all that happen at once is just too much, and a perfectly good story is suddenly a wallbanger. This recently happened as I was reading what before the breaking point was one of the best Ranma 1/2 fanfictions, Careful Destiny.

Reading as far as I did, to the last written chapter, I can see why the author could no longer write for that story. It just reached a point of no return, and short of going back and fixing it, there was nothing he could do.

Alea iacta est. The die was cast. This is the biggest problem with publishing online. People see what you already put up, and unless you can allow yourself to rewrite, if you reach the wallbang moment, you are pretty much SOL. You lose your readers. Now, this can happen in print published materials as well, but there is usually so much refinement going on there, and a completed story, that either a wallbang moment is written out, or the reader muscles through it, since they know they have a definite end approaching.

So how can this be avoided while still increasing tension? I say limit what is causing tension down to one main issue and a small problem. Solve small problems on the way to solving a bigger problem. Maybe not all problems are solved, and are put off for later (allowing for sequels, or for a payoff down the line), but throwing too many problems at once without it being a proper climactic point in a story is too much, and even then it might overwhelm the reader.

I think people should look at their favorite tv shows and write out the plot. Follow the rising action, the falling action, the plot threads, the hints leading to other things. Write it out, as if you were recreating the manuscript from viewing the show. Now read through it and identify what is going on with a critical eye.

I've done this to a few genres and I've found myself improve each time. It is highly recommended.

Unnecessary Ranma

Wrote a fanfic. This was mostly done as a writing exercise. Posted up on fanfiction.net. For those interested in reading it, just know that it is NSFW, and not for the kiddies.