RE: [OOC][PLOT] Galaxy Building (Where we make Magrathea look like small potatoes)
12-08-2018, 05:11 PM
12-08-2018, 05:11 PM
Heh you guys have a different idea of scope. The Drunkard's Walk is not a bigger project than Undocumented Features, and if that's what BA is shooting for, welp.
I think I should talk a bit about UF Core for a minute. I wasn't there at the time, but it seems to me that UF took off because the Core is a really good worldbuilding document. The plotting itself is questionable in retrospect, but it was fun enough, and established a setting, a tone of writing, a bunch of fun characters, and historical events. People just started writing new UF stories because it was just fun to set a story in the universe.
Each person brought in a different spin. Anne brought more relationship drama (and clothing descriptions). Redneck has a good understanding of politics that, even if I don't always agree with him, he like fundamentally gets how people act with power. Martin Rose filled in a lot of backstory and lower-decks activity. But the bones of the main plot were strong, even in the jokey original style, strong enough to support over 20 years of story. It has three eras that support romantic, realist, and postmodernist stories. It's a real credit to Gryphon as an author.
So I am a bit concerned about Rob's questions, and how we can answer them. There's an old saying in programming, worse is better, which means that sometimes it's just better to have a working implementation to draw adoption. But I... don't really know where we're going yet. I am going to use Cinder on November 5 or so, which will probably mark the debut of our main adversaries, though I don't know where to go after that.
But I can tell you that the writing process has affected me a lot. Akari and Alicia make me want to see all of the tourist things in my hometown that I never saw. I took a hot air balloon ride yesterday -- the inner Akari prevented me from an internal debate about whether I really wanted to wake up at 4:30 AM, and instead made me just plain eager to go. At my company Christmas party, my name was announced as one of our employees hitting the 5 year mark -- and the head of operations called out, "Speech! Speech!" The part of me that is Tomo decided that wasting an opportunity to tell jokes would be mottainai, so I got to make my whole company laugh while I'm in a tuxedo and top hat. The tux was also Tomo's fault, along with Kagura, because I was trying to compete with my boss in the best dressed department by going slightly overboard. Tomoyo was OK with this. I'm not really sure who I was channeling when I tried to inspire my coworkers at a planning meeting using the phrase "the power of our pure hearts", maybe Sakura? It got a laugh, of course, but Sakura is teaching me what faith feels like.
So I guess it's inspiring me enough for now, but I hope that we'll be able to get the rough outline of the main plot in soon. I should help more, but I may be too much of a method writer to hold too many villains in my head.
(My workplace is pretty amazing, if you have technical skills appropriate to an online service, we're hiring remote, PM me.)
I think I should talk a bit about UF Core for a minute. I wasn't there at the time, but it seems to me that UF took off because the Core is a really good worldbuilding document. The plotting itself is questionable in retrospect, but it was fun enough, and established a setting, a tone of writing, a bunch of fun characters, and historical events. People just started writing new UF stories because it was just fun to set a story in the universe.
Each person brought in a different spin. Anne brought more relationship drama (and clothing descriptions). Redneck has a good understanding of politics that, even if I don't always agree with him, he like fundamentally gets how people act with power. Martin Rose filled in a lot of backstory and lower-decks activity. But the bones of the main plot were strong, even in the jokey original style, strong enough to support over 20 years of story. It has three eras that support romantic, realist, and postmodernist stories. It's a real credit to Gryphon as an author.
So I am a bit concerned about Rob's questions, and how we can answer them. There's an old saying in programming, worse is better, which means that sometimes it's just better to have a working implementation to draw adoption. But I... don't really know where we're going yet. I am going to use Cinder on November 5 or so, which will probably mark the debut of our main adversaries, though I don't know where to go after that.
But I can tell you that the writing process has affected me a lot. Akari and Alicia make me want to see all of the tourist things in my hometown that I never saw. I took a hot air balloon ride yesterday -- the inner Akari prevented me from an internal debate about whether I really wanted to wake up at 4:30 AM, and instead made me just plain eager to go. At my company Christmas party, my name was announced as one of our employees hitting the 5 year mark -- and the head of operations called out, "Speech! Speech!" The part of me that is Tomo decided that wasting an opportunity to tell jokes would be mottainai, so I got to make my whole company laugh while I'm in a tuxedo and top hat. The tux was also Tomo's fault, along with Kagura, because I was trying to compete with my boss in the best dressed department by going slightly overboard. Tomoyo was OK with this. I'm not really sure who I was channeling when I tried to inspire my coworkers at a planning meeting using the phrase "the power of our pure hearts", maybe Sakura? It got a laugh, of course, but Sakura is teaching me what faith feels like.
So I guess it's inspiring me enough for now, but I hope that we'll be able to get the rough outline of the main plot in soon. I should help more, but I may be too much of a method writer to hold too many villains in my head.
(My workplace is pretty amazing, if you have technical skills appropriate to an online service, we're hiring remote, PM me.)
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto