This article is the last in the current continuing series designed primarily to help aspiring authors get their word count up in response to those struggling during NaNoWriMo 2006. The articles outline a planning technique for any given novel which once completed aim to make it hard to stop writing the next necessary piece of information for the audience. The technique is based on structuring concepts and information and, as this is a blog, are to be read from the bottom up. They will later be collated into a single volume.

What we’ve spent the last three tips doing is fleshing out our basic story concept into a plan where we’ve covered most details. It should be pointed out at this stage that nothing is set in stone. If you depart from your own plan then that’s okay. It’s your plan to depart from. All I would say is that if you wander too far from your planned structure you are in danger of having to do a fair bit of new preparation work to avoid getting lost.

Even so, some deviation is unavoidable. When you’re in the process of writing a novel you realise the story as told is actually a different thing to the story as planned. Sometimes you will find the plan doesn’t even really make logical sense. So as long as you’re sticking reasonably close to the scaffold you should be okay.

When finishing my most recent novel I started to understand something about beginnings, middles and ends. If you think of the beginning as lasting until some central event in your novel and the end as concluding after you’ve moved away from that central event then the story is like a narrative rope (or, er, washing line) linking the three parts. Writing from beginning to middle is easier than middle to end because stories often revolve around the build up to a central moment and that moment was where you began the idea. By the time you reach the middle all of the beginning already exists. In fact you’re almost exclusively working with known quantities. Getting from the middle to the end is much much much harder because the end doesn’t exist yet. Essentially you’re trying to attach your string to a pole you haven’t even put in the ground yet.

It’s in those circumstances that your plan becomes your best friend. Stick to the plan, grit your teeth, fumble through it. You have no choice. From middle to end is going to be hard work no matter what. You will have to fix it in the edit. Sorry.

You can skirt round the issue a little by making a story that is mostly leading towards a big finish and has no significant story point in the middle, like a quest story. My novel Figure of the Sorcechanic does this very thing as the central conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist is deferred until the very end. The more central your key event is the harder the end will become. Stories which start with a key event and almost exclusively deal with fall out (with no other central point) are hard indeed.

The point of all this is, your plan is your only friend at these times. If you haven’t got a solid plan you haven’t got anything. And you should anticipate long delays as you try to pierce the intangible creative fog of “what happens next” on several occasions.

If you’re writing on no deadline this is okay, especially if you don’t get frustrated, or so bored you’re going to give up and leave half a manuscript mouldering in the bottom of your sock drawer (or digital equivalent). But if you’re trying to plug through because you long for the sense of achievement and you are sick of giving up, or, more tangibly if you have a deadline like NaNoWriMo, then you cannot afford the luxury of a month spent pondering the protagonist’s next move in a number of intense hot bath mind mapping sessions.

Basically. Get a plan. Stick to it.

In our Hero of Harroo project we already came up with a sketched out plan. It is into this that we will add the flesh of the world and specific references to villains. From the creation of this final plan you’re in a position to start writing.

Just to recap, here’s the original hero’s journey plan:

1. Everyday World/The Call to Adventure - Hero(Arturo), Call Character(Grandpa)
2. Refusal of the Call - Hero
3. Meeting with the Elder/Supernatural Aid - The Elder (Grandpa? Grandma? Grandpa’s Friend?)
4. The Crossing of the First Threshold/Defeating the First Guardian - Guardian (One of Stansted’s forces)
5. The Belly of the Whale/The Other World - The World of Harroo
6. The Road of Trials - Trials (Stansted’s forces)
7. The Meeting with the Goddess - A Goddess (An actual Goddess? A love interest? An artifact?)
8. Atonement with the Father/Opponent/Other - The Father/Opponent/Other (Darkling Stansted)
9. Apotheosis - Hero
10. The Ultimate Boon - Hero
11. Master of the Two Worlds - Hero
12. Freedom to Live - Hero

We’re now going to send this plan through a three phase redevelopment. The first phase we’re going to turn each step along the way into its own “section” with a subheading and slightly more fleshed out precis. Then we’re going to add to this fleshed out version of the list how many key story elements are included in each stage. Finally, we’re going to assign one or more of these story elements to a chapter each (I’ll explain how we do this when we get there).

Now I’m not being prescriptive here. This is a quick and dirty way to generate a workload by the chapter where each chapter has just as many points as a single chapter, or section, should, i.e. one. Feel free to do with your information units what you will. All this will do is give you a guide as to what information you need to get across to the reader and when you need to aproach it.

So let’s go Phase One:

1. Everyday World/The Call to Adventure

Arturo Gatwick attends the funeral of his dead Grandpa. Grandpa leaves Arturo a bunch of things in his will and Arturo eventually receives a number of keys for grandpa’s house from the executor of grandpa’s estate. Arturo finds his Grandpa’s cellar, a doorway to Harroo and a letter from grandpa telling Arturo about his magical ancestry.

2. Refusal of the Call

Arturo attempts to forget all about this. He is a modern 21st century guy and has no time to be running around in some half-baked Lord of the Rings world.

3. Meeting with the Elder/Supernatural Aid

The Elder Mellifluous’s old familiar a five foot long, fat lizard called Fenwick, comes to fetch Arturo from his home.

4. The Crossing of the First Threshold/Defeating the First Guardian - Guardian (One of Stansted’s forces)

Arturo returns to the mirror with Fenwick. He emerges from the ruins of Mel’s laboratory and the two are instantly set upon by gigantic spiny spiders made of reflecting mirrors. Arturo is no match for these creatures but Fenwick manages to help them escape.

5. The Belly of the Whale/The Other World - The World of Harroo

Fenwick and Arturo travel on foot from Mel’s laboratory towards a nearby city. During this time Fenwick explains the world of Harroo to Arturo.

6. The Road of Trials - Trials

On their way to the city Arturo and Fenwick have been avoiding Darkling Stansteds armoured troops, each armed with vicious twin magical tonfas. On one occasion Arturo has to be saved by the daughter of the last great magician who wasn’t Mel. She joins the party. They visit the city where Arturo uses some of his natural magical ability to elude the guard captain of Darkling’s forces and the party escape into the wilderness. In the wilderness they encounter a vast swamp of grey mind suckers who try to drain the pary’s will to live. They go through the caves to avoid the chief guard of Darkling’s army and are nearly devoured by albino cave dwellers. When they escape these they are very near to Darkling’s palace. Eluding the guards they proceed inside.

7. The Meeting with the Goddess - A Goddess (An actual Goddess? A love interest? An artifact?)

See daughter above.

8. Atonement with the Father/Opponent/Other - The Father/Opponent/Other (Darkling Stansted)

Darkling attempts to turn Arturo to the darkside. Arturo resists.

9. Apotheosis - Hero

Arturo wins the battle with his powers of illusion tricking Darkling into believing Arturo is a summoner like his grnadpa when all Darkling is focusing on are shadows from his own mind.

10. The Ultimate Boon - Hero

Darkling’s castle is seized. Darkling dead or at least rendered ineffective. Arturo is invited to re-establish the ways of enlightened sorcery in Harroo. He reclaims the gathered intelligence of a countless generations of sorcerors.

11. Master of the Two Worlds - Hero

Arturo, instead, leaves the kingdom in the capable hands of Fenwick and returns to live most of his life in mundane obscurity.

12. Freedom to Live - Hero

Arturo returns occasionally to Harroo to meet with his new friends. And let his new wife catch up with some of her old ones.

Phase Two:

1. Everyday World/The Call to Adventure

Arturo Gatwick attends the funeral of his dead Grandpa. Grandpa leaves Arturo a bunch of things in his will and Arturo eventually receives a number of keys for grandpa’s house from the executor of grandpa’s estate. Arturo finds his Grandpa’s cellar, a doorway to Harroo and a letter from grandpa telling Arturo about his magical ancestry.

Introduce Arturo Gatwick
Introduce Mellifluous Gatwick
Mellifluous Gatwick dies
Arturo inherits all of Mel’s posessions
Arturo receives keys
Arturo goes to Grandpa’s house
Arturo unlocks the cellar
Arturo finds letter
Arturo finds mirror
Arturo visits Harroo for first time alone

2. Refusal of the Call

Arturo attempts to forget all about this. He is a modern 21st century guy and has no time to be running around in some half-baked Lord of the Rings world.

Arturo returns to real world
Arturo covers up mirror
Arturo leaves house
Arturo returns to work
Arturo decides to attempt to put his experiences behind him

3. Meeting with the Elder/Supernatural Aid

The Elder Mellifluous’s old familiar a five foot long, fat lizard called Fenwick, comes to fetch Arturo from his home.

Introduce Fenwick
Arturo goes home
Arturo and Fenwick meet
Fenwick persuades Arturo to come to Harroo

4. The Crossing of the First Threshold/Defeating the First Guardian - Guardian (One of Stansted’s forces)

Arturo returns to the mirror with Fenwick. He emerges from the ruins of Mel’s laboratory and the two are instantly set upon by gigantic spiny spiders made of reflecting mirrors. Arturo is no match for these creatures but Fenwick manages to help them escape.

Arturo and Fenwick return to Mel’s Basement
Arturo and Fenwick cross to Harroo
Arturo explore’s Mel’s lab
Arturo and Fenwick are attacked
Introduce the Spiny Spiders
Fenwick defeats the Spiders
Arturo and Fenwick escape

5. The Belly of the Whale/The Other World - The World of Harroo

Fenwick and Arturo travel on foot from Mel’s laboratory towards a nearby city. During this time Fenwick explains the world of Harroo to Arturo.

Introduce Harroo
Fenwick and Arturo travel

6. The Road of Trials - Trials

On their way to the city Arturo and Fenwick have been avoiding Darkling Stansteds armoured troops, each armed with vicious twin magical tonfas. On one occasion Arturo has to be saved by Seline, the daughter of the last great magician who wasn’t Mel. She joins the party. They visit the city where Arturo uses some of his natural magical ability to elude Marrowfat, the guard captain of Darkling’s forces, and the party escape into the wilderness. In the wilderness they encounter a vast swamp of grey mind suckers who try to drain the pary’s will to live. They go through the caves to avoid Marrowfat and are nearly devoured by albino cave dwellers. When they escape these they are very near to Darkling’s palace. Eluding the guards they proceed inside.

Introduce Darkling Stansted
Introduce Stansted’s troops
Stansted’s troops establish character and danger
Introduce Seline
Introduce the city
Introduce Marrowfat
Introduce the swamp
Introduce the mind suckers
Introduce the caves
Introduce the dwellers
Introduce Darkling’s Palace
Arturo and party sneak into Darkling’s Palace

7. The Meeting with the Goddess - A Goddess (An actual Goddess? A love interest? An artifact?)

See Seline above.

8. Atonement with the Father/Opponent/Other - The Father/Opponent/Other (Darkling Stansted)

Darkling attempts to turn Arturo to the darkside. Arturo resists.

Enter Darkling
Darkling attempts to corrupt Arturo
Arturo resists
Darkling leaves Arturo to Marrowfat
Marrowfat is defeated
Arturo pursues Darkling

9. Apotheosis - Hero

Arturo wins the battle with his powers of illusion tricking Darkling into believing Arturo is a summoner like his grnadpa when all Darkling is focusing on are shadows from his own mind.

Arturo and Darkling Battle
Arturo Wins

10. The Ultimate Boon - Hero

Darkling’s castle is seized. Darkling dead or at least rendered ineffective. Arturo is invited to re-establish the ways of enlightened sorcery in Harroo. He reclaims the gathered intelligence of a countless generations of sorcerors.

Arturo liberates Harroo

11. Master of the Two Worlds - Hero

Arturo, instead, leaves the kingdom in the capable hands of Fenwick and returns to live most of his life in mundane obscurity.

Arturo gives the rule of Harroo to Fenwick

12. Freedom to Live - Hero

Arturo returns occasionally to Harroo to meet with his new friends. And let his new wife catch up with some of her old ones.

Arturo Returns to the real world with Seline

Phase Three:

Okay, before going on to phase three take all your incidents and put them into a single list. This is what we’re now working with. You either want to leave incidents by themselves or group them together into single chapters. If the amount you will have to explain to the reader in the incident you’re looking at is very large then it might be better to give it its own chapter. If you can combine incidents then do. Don’t leave yourself with too much to explain in a single chapter.

Here’s the Harroo phase three:

Chapter One
Introduce Arturo Gatwick

Chapter Two
Introduce Mellifluous Gatwick
Mellifluous Gatwick dies

Chapter Three
Arturo inherits all of Mel’s possessions
Arturo receives keys

Chapter Four
Arturo goes to Grandpa’s house
Arturo unlocks the cellar
Arturo finds letter
Arturo finds mirror

Chapter Five
Arturo visits Harroo for first time alone
Arturo returns to real world
Arturo covers up mirror
Arturo leaves house

Chapter Six
Arturo returns to work
Arturo decides to attempt to put his experiences behind him

Chapter Seven
Introduce Fenwick
Arturo goes home
Arturo and Fenwick meet

Chapter Eight
Fenwick persuades Arturo to come to Harroo

Chapter Nine
Arturo and Fenwick return to Mel’s Basement
Arturo and Fenwick cross to Harroo
Arturo explore’s Mel’s lab
Arturo and Fenwick are attacked

Chapter Ten
Introduce the Spiny Spiders
Fenwick defeats the Spiders
Arturo and Fenwick escape

Chapter Eleven
Introduce Harroo
Fenwick and Arturo travel
Introduce Darkling Stansted
Introduce Stansted’s troops
Stansted’s troops establish character and danger

Chapter Twelve
Introduce Seline
Introduce the city
Introduce Marrowfat

Chapter Thirteen
Introduce the swamp
Introduce the mind suckers

Chapter Fourteen
Introduce the caves
Introduce the dwellers

Chapter Fifteen
Introduce Darkling’s Palace
Arturo and party sneak into Darkling’s Palace

Chapter Sixteen
Enter Darkling
Darkling attempts to corrupt Arturo
Arturo resists
Darkling leaves Arturo to Marrowfat
Marrowfat is defeated

Chapter Seventeen
Arturo pursues Darkling
Arturo and Darkling Battle
Arturo Wins

Chapter Eighteen
Arturo liberates Harroo
Arturo gives the rule of Harroo to Fenwick
Arturo Returns to the real world with Seline

That must be the end of the process.

Why? I hear you ask. Is there no more preparation that can be done?

Well, yes there is, but it involves taking steps backwards, not forward.

If you remember back through the mists of time our encounter with the Annoying Five Year Old then if you feel less than confident about any of the information delivery tasks above you can let A5YO loose on the task.

To help define Seline, Marrowfat and others look at our work on character.

Remember, nothing is set in stone.

This concludes the series of articles in which I set down the actual techniques to aid in the preparation of your novel. Writing tips will continue with a dual approach. Firstly I am to commence writing my second book set in the Greater Dominion soon: Canals of Mercantor. I will use my own techniques to plot this out and will leave the planning documents as tips here on the site.

As Canals of Mercantor is likely to be a piece of generic YA fantasy I have asked my mother whose blog may be found here. To see if any of my techniques prove useful for structuring the novel she is trying to write. This novel is likely to be far less generic, her commentary will help to form further writing tips.

For now though, happy writing!

So it’s a good thing I happened to check in on my mailbox on the Internet before downloading to my real Inbox because I lost power during the transfer and it caused all the headers and contents of all my mails to get mixed up. Thus I happen to have no mails since I opened submissions.

In answer to your queries people whose email addresses (and emails) I no longer have.

Ms Grove: Thank you, I have downloaded and am reading Storyteller and will post a review shortly.

Small Publishing House whose name begins with a ‘w’: Yes I would love to review the SF book about Nanotech and such.

Author of “When An Angel Falls”: I would also be delighted to review your book.

If I missed you out please resend.

Apologies to all.

The Book: Cyberpunk by Bruce Bethke

Review Category: Not on a list

The Blurb: This, in somewhat cleaned-up format, is the original manuscript of the novel I wrote between 1984 and 1989. I’m still not sure whether this is a functional book or merely interesting wreckage, but in an admittedly rather naive experiment in electronic publishing, I’m putting the file on the web under the terms of a shareware license.

Preview Available: No need.

Why buy this? The shareware license means you can try before you buy. I tried. I bought.

The Product: This is an e-book. Some funny typographical stuff has been applied to the pages to attempt to render it paperback size but it doesn’t ape a physical book or a reasonably printable document. In the field of self-publishing this has all the hallmarks of the professional making a token gesture towards standards without wishing to make himself into that most hideous of things a self published author. All the same, this is readable on PC and unavailable on paper unless you print it yourself.

The Nitty Gritty: About a decade ago I borrowed a copy of Bethke’s major published novel Headcrash from the Swiss Cottage Library. I read it in a single sitting. I went out, I bought a copy, I read it again. I named a fictional sport after it in one of my unpublished novels. Basically, Headcrash cannot help but be named as one of my “influences”. Not that you’d really know it from what it is I’m writing but it is always there. I keep wanting to yank it out and read it again. Something about that book speaks to me. Therefore Mr. Bethke would have to go way up there on the list of authors who have influenced my output.

So approaching “Cyberpunk” is, as you can imagine, not just a pleasure, or an obligation but also something of a milestone for me. The fact is in the field of novels Mr. Bethke is not prolific, in fact should I read this, a collaboration with Vox Day called Rebel Moon, the novelisation of Will Smith’s Wild Wild West and a hard to track down Asimov Inspired story called Maverick I’ll have read his entire back catalogue. That’s all folks. So each work has to be regarded as something to savour.

Of course when a book has such a deep and lasting impact on someone as Headcrash did on me it’s going to be virtually impossible to follow. So I’m giving a lot of leeway for my own sense that Cyberpunk lacked that special ingredient that has made Headcrash a permanent fixture of my head furniture.

So what’s Cyberpunk actually about? And couldn’t Bethke come up with a less generic title?

To answer these questions in reverse order. It’s generally acknowledged that Bethke invented the word cyberpunk. He has first dibs on it. Unfortunately I don’t think what cyberpunk became is what Bethke intended it to be but them’s, as it is often remarked, the breaks.

Cyberpunk was intended by Bethke to sum up what the central character of this novel was all about. Originally the story was a short about a kid who rebelled against his parents using a portable computer and won because technology had moved so fast the parents couldn’t even really understand what the kid was up to anyway.

In the novel this translates into the set up. Our Cyberpunk, Michael Harris, gets out of bed, meets up with his friends, gets into an argument with his parents, has a good time trashing his dad’s finances and then walks out of the house smugly triumphant to be…

to be….

Well, there’s the thing. What happens next is that a couple of guys drop a bag over Mikey’s head and he gets thrown into a plane bound for a military academy miles away from the nearest internet connection. Why? Well, it’s the only means his parents have of controlling him. The remainder of the book details Michael’s journey through adolescence and the process of his learning to be an individual without an identity and intellect shaped by electronic aids.

I think I must have been conditioned by a youth spent becoming conversant with man/machine stories. You see I, and I suspect anyone else shy of 35 years of age, will be expecting this story to go a different way. We hear, at the outset, about secret caches of data, there’s a character called Rayno who is seriously in need of comeuppance being all style and no substance. Yeah, Mikey shouldn’t be allowed to get away with doing over his parents, and talking of the parents they have a strained relationship which goes way beyond the influence of their demon child. You think at the outset that Mikey’s dad is just exasperated, his true nature evolves piecemeal throughout the novel.

But none of that matters.

What matters is how Mikey learns to get by without technology. How he learns about thinking without assistance, about tactical thinking, about human relationships, about political manoeveuring, about survival. All the while he clings to his identity, cyberpunk, a term used pejoratively in the military academy. The thought in the back of my mind was ‘wait until Mikey gets back to the world’.

There’s a lot that’s weird about this story and it all revolves around the fact that the majority of the novel deals with a process that most authors would have counted as off-stage backstory. The fact is everyone is out to betray Mikey in one way or another. Some don’t get an opportunity because of his removal from the main story flow, some do it off stage to the main action, some of them are just too weak to help him and so betray him by inaction; this hardly matters because in the end Mikey is quite capable of taking care of himself from about two thirds of the way toward the end of the book.

The novel leaves a lot of things to the reader’s imagination and outlines a lot of stuff that readers are usually left to infer. By the time the cyberpunk is finished with his rite of passage he is more of a cyberninja. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this is that Bethke gives Michael discipline and organised thought and allows him to retain his power as a programmer but he never really bothers to temper these qualities with compassion and wisdom.

He takes a rough, dirty explosion of adolescent anger and emotion and hones it into a cold and calculating machine capable of executing far more cold blooded sneak attacks. It is strange that one of the reported goals of Cyberpunk was to address an adolescent’s amorality in the face of increased technological leverage. The question of morality in Cyberpunk boils down to “might makes right” and then adds “might comes in lots of different forms and is proven in many different ways”.

By the end of Mikey’s journey he has might but he also has very little in the way of a moral compass save for an execution of military style discipline. His mentor at the academy Ernst Von Schlager takes the time to instil in Mikey some idea of Spartan military brilliance but as a moral compass that’s of debatable utility.

So, the novel gives you plenty to think about, perhaps too much. There’s loose plot threads, debatable philosophies and unexplored implications. As such this freight of so many relevancies left unspoken makes the actual substance of the novel seem light and somewhat unsatisfactory. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in here but like Mikey you spend a long time waiting to get back to the story before eventually realising, with dull surprise, that this is the story and has been all along.

The fact is you can’t have some of the things that happen offstage happen and not expect the reader to worry about them. There’s a hell of an interesting story to be told about cyberninja Michael Harris. This is just an origin story.

Bethke’s style is always crisp, concerned with delivering the relevant information and always concerned with presentation and communication. The characters are sometimes underused but always fully rounded. Cyberpunk is an enjoyable read whose only problem is that it leaves you wanting so much more.

Well worth a $5 honorary contribution from anyone’s pocket I’d say.

POD Critic points out that I haven’t been reviewing much lately. There are three reasons for this.

1) I really really want to let the next book I review settle in my head before I review it. Reasons for this will become plain when you read the review. Having said that I guess gestation period is actually over and I just haven’t noticed so I shall start writing my review of Bruce Bethke’s “Cyberpunk” forthwith.
2) I have been busy writing fiction for submission to various markets. The first of these failed to sell to the original market and although I think it could fare well elsewhere I’m going to hang onto it for a bit. The second fruit of my labour will be ready for revision soon. But I can either be writing or reviewing not both. So it’s been the former for a couple of months.
3) After Cyberpunk I really don’t have anything on my slate and save for reproducing none may say’s free book reviews I haven’t got spare money at present. Therefore e-submissions are open.

I have previously shied away from inviting people to submit their work because sending reviewers free copies of books to review doesn’t generate you any income as an author. However, waiting for a voluntary reviewer to be able to afford your book may result in it being unreviewed for quite a while. When I started out on these reviews I figured I didn’t really deserve to be sent free copies of books even in electronic format. However I think I’ve kind of earned my chops in the last five or six months so if you want a review here I am. As you will be aware I’m good on genre, not so good on lit fic. There’s more info accessible from the main menu up above. The other reason of course is that I wish to avoid an overloaded mailbox but there seems to be no way to invite people to submit without risking that. And it’ll make a change from spam anyway.

To submit please send me .txt or .rtf or.pdf files (no docs or odts please) to “submissions at my URL” I would write it out but the spam harvesters still manage to get round my filters so I don’t want to increase the amount of spam I have to moderate.

When submissions are closed I will be sure to let everyone know.

(Waits for mail stampede… observes tumbleweed.)

On a different note Pub-guy tells us about several literary networking sites. This intrigues me as it should you. I can’t stand all these MySpace and FaceParty thingies as your agenda is inevitably drowned out by everyone else’s. Themed spaces are the way of tomorrow, I think. So I’ll be checking them out. You should too.

So until my review appears (post lunch time) I bid you a temporary adieu. I’m going back to tweaking some Cascading StyleSheets… the joy.

As I believe I may have mentioned I recently acquired a budget copy of the original NeverWinter Nights, partially because it was part of a 3 for £10 offer but mostly because the game has the by now notorious Aurora Toolset included with it. Even when NWN was new I considered buying it just to have a crack. There was a time when designing computer games was a dream of mine, as I imagine it is a dream of many young men out there.

I’ve bought or downloaded more game creation tools than I can even remember right now. Every time I found very quickly that my brain ground to a halt like the engine of a car with Golden Syrup in the petrol tank. Always the reason for giving up was related to the same basic source.

The Games Factory: No skill to make my own set ups, no time to program, no inspiration from the provided libraries.

Blender: Arcane 3D modelling tool, made you feel like you were piloting a space ship, would take you many many many centuries to program a game worth programming in it.

Adventure Game Studio: No skill to make my own set ups.

Always there was a required time investment or a required skill investment and always it was easier just to crack open a word processor and do what the hell I liked. In the end, being a film director or a video game designer are no replacement for being a writer.

Why?

Well, even when I write a paper and pen module for an RPG I have no limits to what I can chuck into the mix in terms of locations, characters, items etc. etc. etc. If I want to have a dragon guarding a time machine in a New York sewer then have it I shall!

If I want that in NWN, well, I need a dragon model (this is doable), a time machine model (er… may possibly be able to fudge it from some kind modellers imagination) and a fully rendered 3d recreation of New York City… and its sewers (er… two chances of that slim and fat, well the sewers may be possible but New York? All of it?).

Leave aside the fact that the allowances for setting and characters in the original NWN are only great if you’re a Lord of the Rings -aholic and all of a sudden the weight of the limitations came down on me once more.

Now, luckily there is a D20 modern pack available, and for a low price I even managed to obtain the two upgrades I needed to install these new bits (as well as an exciting thing called the Community Expansion Pack) which come with some expansion packs for just over £5. Already I’m beginning to get this sinking feeling, I’ve been trawling the internet for days just to get in a position where it’s worth opening the Toolset again. Plus I have to go fiddling about in folders to unzip bits and bobs into the correct locations and so on and so forth.

And this is just to have a fiddle.

If I was writing that dragon would have been happily toasting adventurers looking for that time machine days ago…

The fact of the matter is that writing a computer game or any kind of multimedia adventure is tedious in the extreme. If you’re writing with a toolset you have to learn what the tools are before you can even write the script. But at the same time if you’ve got no script you can’t really learn how the toolset works. Enter tutorials. I’ve downloaded the official one from BioWare (makers of NWN) hopefully that will give me a good shove in the right direction.

However, the problems don’t end there.

Even once you’ve identified an adventure to write with the tools you have at your disposal the fun doesn’t start there… oh no.

No. Actually at that point you’ve got to contend with the fact that as a writer you have the power to script:

“In the alleyway DeFalco inserted the sewer key into the manhole cover. With a grunt of effort he pulled it clear, its solid mass landed with a wet thunk in a pile of garbage. There were scurrying noises as frightened rats decided to relocate to somewhere less noisy. DeFalco shone his torch into the dark undercity and was rewarded only with the sight of illuminated raindrops streaking into the abyss.”

There, five minutes, done and dusted. To do this same thing, in an adventure you have to:

Create the character of DeFalco
Create or find a sewer key object
Create the alley
Create the manhole as an access point to the sewer area
Create or find a manhole cover
Write a script to detail what happens when DeFalco uses the sewer key on the manhole cover
If we decide that when DeFalco uses the sewer key on the manhole cover he should tell the player what he sees or feels in addition to a text prompt we have to get a voice actor to record a line of dialogue.
Set it to rain
Switch on rainy noises
Decide whether to have ambient noise
Create or find a placeable pile of garbage for the rats to hide under.
Make some rats
Have them spawn under the garbage and run squeaking when the sewer key is used on the manhole cover
Create or find a torch
Decide what happens when the torch is used on the manhole, if such a thing is even possible.
If we decide that when DeFalco uses the torch on the manhole he should tell the player what he sees in addition to a text prompt we have to get a voice actor to record a line of dialogue.

Total gameplay time: probably round about 5 seconds.

I mean, honestly.

But I love computer adventures as my recent week long excursion to the worlds of Arcadia and Stark in “The Longest Journey” (another one of those 3 for £10 purchases) will testify. So I would consider it a great shame if I don’t at least attempt to write up a computer adventure of some sort. I am choosing NWN because in all fairness it is the most spectacular result for the least amount of effort. But maybe I’m thinking about it all wrong. Maybe I should be using Adventure Game Studio to make up my own point and click adventure (my first love, particularly if beautiful, mystical and epic).

I shall keep you posted. If Iever finish loading tilesets, patches and expansions…

…and other side projects seem to have taken over all the thought I can devote to creative things.

First off is my new project, which is at a stage inbetween being all process and no creativity and being all creativity and process finished. What I am currently doing is the crossword puzzle mentioned in the post heading. That, unfortunately for clue-hunters in the future, is all I am permitting myself to say now.

Second, I was supposed to be attending a gathering of role players the weekend after moving house. But I was moving house so I couldn’t. This wouldn’t have been a major disaster except that I was supposed to provide an LRP (Live Roleplay) scenario for the Saturday night and consequently couldn’t.

The reason I’d committed to do it in the first place was that I’d fancied preparing one, it seemed like a different kind of writing even distinct from writing Role Play campaigns. So now it looks like I never will see one, er, played through, but I have this stellar idea for one. Only problem is that role play campaigns share something in common with bombs. As bombs exist to explode so games exist to be played. A game never played is like a bomb unexploded. If I don’t write it it will definitely never be played and if I wait for a guaranteed crop of players I will never write it… ho hum.

Then there’s the awesome wonder of Ron Hogan’s down to earth translation of the Tao Te Ching. This makes me want to to some work with the Tao. It seems to me that the only way to integrate written teachings into your life is to work with them. That’s why my writing tips are always keen to promote exercises to reinforce them. So I’d like to do something with that.

Also I have been playing some point and click adventures recently. Couple that with the fact that there is a free point and click adventure toolkit and also the fact that I recently picked up a budget copy of Neverwinter Nights complete with it’s Aurora toolset and the spectre of video game design raises its head once more.

Sigh.

None of these things (save for the completed result of the crossword puzzle) is a novel. All of them have aesthetic merit.

If I was pushed to do some quick writing I might start on the sequel to Sorcechanic… but with this full schedule… Priorities are difficult things to manage, creatively speaking.

It’s been over a year since I reformatted this page and as I just became another whole year older I thought it might be a good time to reflect upon things this journal has become particularly over the last five or so months since NaNoWriMo.

Let’s quickly ask the interesting question regarding GOB’s post regarding the imminent publication of the previous lulu title ‘Kill Chase’. The question many people are asking is: “would this have happened had the author, Ron Morgans, not been a known face in tabloid journalism?” This is not the interesting question. Why did it not happen until Mr. Morgans decided to self-publish? That is the interesting question.

I think self-publication does drop some clues to a prospective publisher and agent about the understanding their new client has of what they do. If you’ve made some effort to distribute a product that is hard to tell apart from the “real thing” or even fulfils the technical definition of what the real thing is then you are presumed to have some sympathy for what it is agents and publishers have to do. Well… essentially you have been your own agent and publisher.

If you whack up an old bag of spanners with no attempt to create a brand, or to make the product professional seeming then you probably don’t really care about your work. So why should anyone else?

It has to be pointed out that I have so far spent about three years getting to the point where I can release one book. That book being Starfall. I anticipate sales of Starfall to be the greatest of any book I’ve published so far (7? 8?) and as soon as it’s out there I will be putting all of that experience behind publishing the next one.

Everything that is done is just preparation for the next milestone.

This is a work ethic that cannot exist in traditional publishing. It’s also new even in the new arena of self-publishing. The number of people dedicated to canon is a minority inside a minority.

It will be interesting to see how this unexpected tangent of new era publishing pans out. I think it cannot help but be a good thing for all involved.

So, yes, the Monkey attains the giddy heights of his 32nd summer as of Thursday (although technically the 32nd would have been last summer, this will be *ahem* my 33rd) and also it is the Easter holiday. For these reasons the Monkey and Mrs. Monkey will be gallivanting around South Wales for a few days and enjoying bracing sea air and ice creams and stuff.

So what thoughts should I leave you all with in Monkey Land to ponder over your chocolate eggs?

Well first off POD People have noticed the emerging POD review community. Although I admit I am highly suspicious of things which just start (thus assisting me in my own status as a ‘non-joiner’) I am far more tolerant of things which just appear. When a bunch of dots turns into a picture of a dog in a park I’m happier. So the organic nature of the POD Critic circle (de facto) is far more encouraging to me than if a bunch of random people had spontaneously decided to do this; although what circumstances might have precipitated such an event I really could not say.

Ironic then that this sudden upsurge in places the average joe can visit to get the lowdown on what’s not going to cause eye bleeding and brain dysfunction in the world of POD should follow a few meagre weeks after the demise of POD-dy Mouth. I’ll stay away from hydra metaphors…

From the sublime right down to the ridiculously optimistic. If you have around $30,000USD to plough into a video game project and don’t know that at last count 75% of all computer games sold world wide were sports simulators you might want to urinate your money up the wall on this.

If you want to explore the depths of one man’s possibly (nay, probably) deluded optimism even further take a look at the MS Word preview that accompanies this frankly stunning one time only offer. All I can say is that if irony is anything to go by he’ll get this thing sold within the week. I base this statement on the fact that that the authors of all the links in the right hand column and all the authors of the links on those links would form a queue of people the width of Wales who would happily join me in telling Mr. Shorz not to pin his hopes on making a sale anytime soon… or just any time…

So you watch. It’ll be shifted in milliseconds now.

DISCLAIMER: Don’t hold your (or anyone else’s) breath.