05.31.07

Quick Notes

Posted in Rants, Site News at 5:13 am

Not much to say. Spent some of last night working on Metal Rogue, but not enough to warrant a full update post for that. Also, for those of you still reading it, 10K updated on Tuesday. This is quite frankly the biggest cliffhanger that I think could possibly have been done for the series thus far, and it works out perfectly.

I have a lot of thoughts about Metal Rogue and the writing style I’m adopting for it (or at the very least attempting to adopt) but can’t comment yet, or rather don’t want to comment until I’ve actually got the first two chapters finally written in that style (my current count is just shy of halfway through the first chapter).

Also, first on my list of stuff to get once I’m experiencing a positive cash flow is a really long audiobook. It’s Thursday already and I’m out of podcasts for the week.

05.30.07

The Path Of Least Incontinence

Posted in Rants at 5:21 pm

There are approximately seventeen hojillion different ways for me to get lost on my way to and/or from work. I came across a rather nice one today which I’ll call “the forest path” simply because it does go right through a nice part of woods. Of course, to GET to those woods I have to go through a sequence of turns and hills that would kill lesser cars.

I love Pittsburgh driving. Except, of course, for the times when I hate it.

05.29.07

Endeavor

Posted in Rants, Site News at 4:53 am

And with this post, my friends, I’m back in business.

Which is to say I didn’t get any additional writing done yesterday due to scrambling to finish up all the other stuff I needed to do to get ready for this morning, where I’ll be heading off to work. I did add a few bits to the MR outline/world guide, though nothing substantial enough to warrant an update. I’m going to try to finish up the OTHER big project I’ve been slacking on this week or next either in the evenings or on the weekends. Y’know, since, it was supposed to be finished BEFORE I got hired.

Anyway, time’s almost up for me. I’ll catch you folks tomorrow. As always, busy busy busy. Of course, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

05.28.07

Solo Mode

Posted in Metal Rogue, Writing at 7:12 am

I was talking with Pez last night a little about the Metal Rogue project, and he asked why I was going to do this one as a self-published effort. I gave him my ready-built answer: “I have no intention of sending this to a real publisher because it’s going to be bad. On purpose. If I’m lucky I’m going for ’so bad it’s good’ status.” That, of course, is half of the reason. There’s another root cause.

First, though, the matter of my crippling lack of self-esteem. To be perfectly honest I don’t think it’s going to be terrible. There is going to be some amount of technical skill involved; it’s not going to read like really bad fan fiction. However, the outline I drew up yesterday (and I got a little more of it fleshed out last night, too) is in no way reminiscent of Tom Clancy or Robert Jordan. This story isn’t exactly treading any original waters, though the situation, characters, and scenario are all more or less from whole cloth (in the end, I only wound up cribbing two names from Inconsequential, one in a way I didn’t even anticipate). By self-publishing, I can have a finished book or two out there and “public” while I concentrate on other, more polished projects. Metal Rogue is more or less my ‘hobby’ book, and by removing the pressure of “will people like this?” I can actually enjoy the writing a bit more. Not to say I don’t enjoy writing to begin with– if I didn’t, do you think I’d do it more or less every day?– but it reduces the stress level significantly, which means I’m less likely to put it off, thinking “that’s too stressful for me to do right now, I’m going to go eat Ding Dongs and play Uno”.

The other reason is sort of a selfish one, and really sort of a shot in the dark. See, I have nothing published yet. Everything I do have published is on Netjak and bears little to no resemblance to my fiction. (I removed all of my fan fiction from the RPGamer archives, I think; that was something I needed to do, so that I didn’t go back and rely too much on that.) By self-publishing this ‘off-Broadway’ series, assuming, y’know, it sells at all, I can get a little bit of acclaim and build up a little momentum in getting Incon or another full novel published. The money certainly wouldn’t hurt, either, but mostly it’s just getting something out there. I have no idea whether or not even hinting that I’m going to self-publish Metal Rogue will hurt Incon in the long run (though I don’t believe it will).

In any event, what you’ve all been waiting for; in what I hope to be a very, very short series, I give you the first:
Metal Rogue Progress Update: Outlines for the first two books have been completed and underwent some slight metamorphosis already. The third book outline is sketched out in a brief synopsis; I’ll probably flesh that out closer to the end of the first book. Book One’s prologue has 1100 words to it so far and I hope to have that finished at some point today between all the other things I need to do. So, without further delay, I’ll get right back to that.

05.27.07

Addendum Malleus

Posted in Site News, Writing at 12:26 pm

Just a quick note to give folks some hope that I haven’t just spouted out an idea without doing something for it. I’ve completed the outlines for the first two books (setting up about 44K to 60K words for each of the two, depending on how long-winded I run) and also sketched out the last book in a too-brief synopsis, wrote up the first part of the prologue, and set up the appropriate systems to ensure that I do actually finish this in some semblance of “on time”. Also, I’ve updated the Books subsite to reflect the new statuses of Incon and MR.

I’ll talk about why I want MR to be self-published tomorrow morning.

The Hammer Of Inspiration

Posted in Anime, Metal Rogue, Writing at 8:46 am

The biggest thing that bothered me about writing Inconsequential was that I had to make references to a whole mess of ‘fictional’ series. I only really created three out of whole cloth: “Nebulords”, which was only a title and a character name, but was intended to be a cheesy syndicated science-fiction yarn along the lines of “Andromeda”, “Lexx”, or a far-less-classy “Star Trek”; “By Love Alone”, a title I cribbed from a Brian Setzer song and was going to be a sweet romantic comedy with elements of schizophrenia (don’t ask me how it was going to work– that literally is all the development it ever got); and “Final Century Metal Rogue”, which wound up being the most developed of the metafictions simply because I had to fill space with a dream sequence. It was the most-referenced of the ‘original’ scenarios; the other ’series’ was “A Game Of Lords” (my first abandoned novel, which I am going to go back to someday, I swear), and the MMO referenced in the book (“Empire of the Sun”) was basically a name slapped onto what I envisioned as ‘World of Romance of the Three Kingdoms’.

Of all of those, the one that I hated most of all– “Metal Rogue”– wound up occupying most of my attention. As most of you know, I don’t really follow giant-robot anime all that much. It was a struggle to get me interested in Gundam SeeD, though that paid off (and as soon as Bandai smartens up and releases boxed sets of SeeD and Destiny, I am so all over those); I could not get into RahXephon, no matter how much people tried, and Eva’s only saving grace was that it wasn’t really a giant-robot show so much as it was “let’s screw with the idea of the ’self’ so much that even WE don’t know what the hell is going on”. In the end, I found myself thinking about the Metal Rogue and its battles far too much for my liking. Like I said, it inadvertantly became the most-developed of the metafictional series.

Why waste all that effort?

So, I suppose now is the best time to announce it. I am starting a side-project that will be a “semi-professional” effort: the Metal Rogue Trilogy. I’m not going to expand it into a full novel all at once; rather, it’s going to be a short set of “light novels” (to steal the Japanese euphemism; the best analogy in the English-speaking world would be “longer chap-books”, as in “what Stephen King’s The Green Mile would have been if he had written it in three volumes instead of six”) that are going to be self-published through Lulu. The first one… well, we’ll see how long it takes to write the first one. I fully expect it to take a while but I suppose if I commit myself to it (as I did in the final week of writing Incon) I could get it done soon enough. I certainly won’t be writing it all at once, either– this first one is just going to be a stopgap until November and my next NaNo idea comes to me. Besides, my real roots are in crappy science-fiction; I figure that if my stuff could at least earn me a few extra bucks, it’s all good, right?

First things first, though– an outline. So, I’ll catch you folks later.

(Incidentally, and for those of you thinking about it– yes, finishing Crest of the Stars did give me the idea, though indirectly. I have to be careful not to actually rip off Crest, though, which is not going to be hard because most of MR’s development happened before I had seen or read much of Crest. Also: Pez, next time I see you, I’m going to pester you to read Crest. It’s that good.)

05.26.07

Twenty-First Century Vox

Posted in Rants, Site News at 7:33 am

I know many of you have been clamoring for the return of the TFOnet VoiceCast. …all right, six of you. Three of whom are my family. BUT! I am pleased to announce that, through FeedBurner, the VoiceCast system is once again up and running!

Those of you still pointing to the old LJ feed will have to update your links. The new feed is at:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/tfonet_vc

I hope to bring you the same manner of baloney that I provide here, only spoken. Hooray! You get to know when I have a cold!

AAAAANYway. There’s little else I’m up to right now; I have to do dishes at some point this weekend, then get a few query letters together with regards to Inconsequential, read more of Brad Warner’s new book (Sit Down And Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen’s “Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye”– I’ll probably be spouting about this one later, though it’s a slower read than Hardcore Zen was), and if I get some time, fire up Guild Wars (since that doesn’t have a monthly fee, that’s likely what I’ll be messing around with until the first paycheck).

So, yeah. Catch you cats tomorrow.

05.25.07

Down The Rabbit Hole

Posted in Rants at 1:09 pm

Whilst taking care of the other myriad things that accompany a car accident, I had occasion this morning to actually take a VW Rabbit for a test spin (primarily because the dealership was literally hundreds of yards away from where I had to turn in my plates). I spent just about ten minutes behind the wheel; what follows are more or less my unvarnished thoughts.

I want.
Read the rest of this entry »

05.24.07

TL;DR

Posted in Gaming, Rants at 6:30 am

I realize that I have been somewhat succinct in my posts of late. This was merely a matter of necessity, as I have not really had too much time to be able to spend writing. That, of course, changed this morning, but while this post still is not going to be as long as I want it to, it will have some substance to it. Which means I’d wager 80% of the casual readers have just clicked off to another page.

The whole impetus for this post came after seeing a ‘bitter breakup’ note regarding Super Paper Mario. The individual quitting the game cited excessive text as his reason for ending his run. Of course, the legion of Diggers who saw his post leaped to his defense, as many agreed, disagreed, posted encryption keys, and called each other rude names. That’s all irrelevant, mostly. My issue is, of course, the fact that lengthy amounts of text could be considered a ‘downside’ to an RPG-style game.

Let’s face it, anyone who has any knowledge of the Paper Mario line knows they’re RPGs. And naturally an RPG is known for having a significant portion of non-action. Now, one can be forgiven for assuming after the ad blitz and videos posted that SPM was a standard Mario platformer, and I do agree that maybe the game could have been better served by being a pure platformer. The action phases were pretty good, and the decision to use a hub area rather than a world map served as a relatively large deterrent to my happiness with the title.

That said, the storyline was worth the reading. At least, I felt it was. Looking at it from the perspective of the target age group, it might have been a little bit more than the average player would expect, but at least it was well-written. I don’t think it was unexpected or detrimental from the enjoyment of the game; as a matter of fact, faced with that or another collection of barely-cohesive minigames, I’d much rather read the story and play what platforming is available.

That’s not to say I’m completely enthralled with the game. I did agree with the point that there needed to be more to the game. 32 stages are just not nearly enough, even with two potentially 100-stage marathon sessions added on. It needed to be twice as long, at the very least. Moreover, the hub area concept was good in theory, lousily executed in practice. I think that we, as gamers, are officially over the idea of a hub area in non-RPG games unless it’s really, REALLY well-thought-out and really well executed (or, as a compromise, optional after a certain point). Finally, yeah, some voice acting beyond the standard Mario-style utterances would have helped greatly; but as a counterpoint, it would have almost certainly broken the ‘Mario style’. Mario games have traditionally done just fine without voice, so there’s no reason to assume that’s going to change– plus, well, while I think Charles Martinet is a good choice for those brief exclamations, I doubt his ability to speak for extended periods in Luigi’s voice without making people throw their Wiimotes at the screen on purpose. (If they get Jen Taylor to voice the Princess again, though, she’d almost certainly get a pass, but there had better be a Cortana-out-take.)

Anyway. No game is perfect, and given what’s available on the Wii right now, Super Paper Mario is pretty close. (No comment on Twilight Princess, as it is a 3-D Zelda and I’d be too biased to make a judgment.) Doesn’t mean I haven’t moved on to other titles on other systems, of course, but the money was well spent.

Oh, and I am a little upset that there’s going to be a Raving Rabbids 2. ‘Cause, y’know, Raving Rabbids was literally impossible to complete on the Wii. I don’t mean it was a little tricky, I mean it was actually not possible to achieve the final goal and have a 100% unlocked game save. Ubisoft is on my garbage list.

05.23.07

Auto Motive

Posted in Site News at 6:20 pm

The short short version: I has a car, as a temporary measure.

The short version: I’m borrowing my sister’s car until the money I get from the totaled old car can be added to some savings for my new car.

The ADD, spoiled-kid-focused-only-on-his-goal version: RABBIT! In a few months. But! RABBIT!