Writefaggotry

>Not feathered dinosaurs for maximum fabulous
Trash

Trying to write a weird fantasy setting because I'm mad at something someone else wrote. Grognard rage is a surprisingly good motivator.

I want to do some writefaggotry, but I'm either too busy, too lazy, or just don't know where to start.

What was it?

Sig: The City Between

I'm not familiar with it, what pissed you off so much?

I was constantly in purgatory of thinking of story stuff but never bothering to write anything. But I'm taking a creative writing class in college so now I'm forced to write it. And now that I'm working it I'm actually having a lot of fun doing it. Just start and you'll love it, don't think of it as a chore.

It just seems like a souless ripoff of Planescape. There's no heart or passion behind it, just pandering. The writers behind it are so creatively bankrupt that they could barely think of a semi-original name for the thing. Sigil. Sig. That's way too convenient to be a coincidence.

When the first word you use to describe your game is "diverse" you may be putting your focus in the wrong places

They're pandering to an audience that doesn't really play rpg's, but either way the more alternatives to that the better

I got far enough in that I had a skeletal plot that got right up to, but not including, the actual big confrontation with the main villain, then got sidetracked trying to reason the premise behind the setting I made up years prior, which was "Everybody undeads at a random point in time after they die, no exceptions" and what that would mean if they got cremated, or eaten by a bear, or whatever. Then life happened.

Six months later and I'm trying to remember why the fuck I wrote all of my story notes in code, and also in a giant nonlinear spiral in my notebook.

Green Post-Apoc Texas is fractured into different nation-states, with pretty sizable swathes of territory that are largely lawless. The main states are the Republic of Texas, which stretches from San Antonio to Austin, and then all the way west to College Station and north to the outskirts of Fort Worth, and view all territory within the original American state of Texas as being rightfully theirs, with a special hatred of Cypress, who shamed them in previous wars; the East Texas Empire, consisting of pretty much all the territory east of 45 down to Huntsville to the Sabine River, is a very religious empire of feudal-states that arose from the ashes of a slave-rebellion from Witch-Queens, and are hard rivals of the Republic; and Cypress, the massive, hyper-fortified city-state that is nigh-impregnable and with major economic clout, ammo production, powered armor, and power projection throughout the lawless Houston area, who is largely concerned with protecting their own asses and controlling Houston, while doing business with both the Empire and Republic.

All of these groups are opposed by three others: The Blacklanders, savage tribals from the Blacklands region who have been restructured and led by the last suriving Witch-Queen and her daughter, directly threatens both the Empire and Cypress with their allies the Sabinites and their fell magics; the Czechs, refugees who have formed their own region outside Republic borders, has not forgiven the Republic for the attempted genocide of their people only ten years before the book is set; and the Nueva Azteca, a massive empire that arose from the ashes of Mexico, led by the God-King Quetzalcoatl, who seeks to conquer Texas and sacrifice its people to the gods to usher in an era of Aztec glory.

Shit is a bit intense, to say the least.

Novels are way too complicated.

Dude if GRRM or any other author I took inspiration from said my book was a mixure of their own work and a movie about dinosaurs I would be thrilled too

Question.

Are the Blacklanders black?

Pretty damn good. I've already thought of the Protagonists name and I've bashed out three sentences of the first chapter. It's further than I got with my last project.

Are they any good?

60,000 words in the bag.

My smut masterpiece has not progressed in the last 6 months. I doubt I will ever finish it

I suck at characters. I'm about 20k words in and the only character with something similiar to an arc is the protagonis, it even ties into the themes I had planned for the story.
But the only likeable guy dies in his first appearance.

But what basicly ruined my abillity to write is that I don't use my native language much anymore. Others writers I know have long since switched to English, but mine is simply too bad and I'm too conscious about that to get immersed into the creative process.

Mine is going alright. In terms of writing anyways.

Right now I'm actually in a stage where I'm world building, and plan to release it in small modules designed for any game system. The story is just there, but with no actual mechanics.

Nothing major. Just small stuff to sell and get a small audience.

From there, start writing small stories set in this universe. Maybe see about sending the short stories to some publications, garner more interest in it that way so I can say I was "published" while still writing about this world.

And then when there's a decent amount of people who've been following along, release a full novel.

What sort of setting is it?

>that song

Is this some weird sequel to the Miami Connection?

Nope, it's the first song they play in the movie!

Stereotypical fantasy kind of. Elves, humans, dwarves, shit like that.

This time though it's a bit reverse. Elves are the dominant people in the world, and aren't stereotypical "live forever muh magic" kind either. Just typical people who exemplify art and culture and stuff. Think pointy eared french people who like to build big sprawling gardens and crap like that.

So they're at the height of their power, and humans first start showing up. Don't even know where they came from. They literally just came out of nowhere and start setting up shop off of their borders.

Threadly reminder.

So why call then elves?
At that point it may as well be an all-human setting.

Actually... That's a good point.

I might have to go revise some things here in a bit. Thanks user.

I don't have one yet but my friend has written two novels i'd like to shill (because he really, really needs money for more soup). The Agent of Argyre series by Jeremy Varner. Don't mind the shitty cover art, it's actually a modern fantasy detective novel about a guy whose shitty with romance working for the Federal Bureau of fairy immigration. Long story

I've had a couple ideas for stories but as soon as I got one or two chapters in I lost interest. So now I'm just worldbuilding until I make something that I can actually get passionate about.

>The Agent of Argyre series by Jeremy Varner
100,000 words. Pretty respectable.

I've been toying with the idea of a steam punk story about a siege of a fortress (think Iron Warriors siege methods and WW1 era style weapons and tech).

Idea is every 3-6 chapters the protagonist switches as at the end of that many chapters the protagonist is killed and their killer becomes the focus.

that sounds pretty interesting

cool idea

It's interesting. Experimental formats such as that would actually probably work better grounded in reality rather than in fantasy. A flat out retelling of the Somme using that method would be a very interesting read.

Please tell me these are real.

They're real.

What is that song so awesome?

You really should. Devise and revise human cultures instead. I have no idea why that aspect is so commonly overlooked.

You evidently don't spend much time in the worldbuilding general threads. I think you'd like it there.

They're still a minority compared to how many take the "token races" approach .

Elves are basically just 95% human anyway...

> an impenetrable fog has covered the world, tribal era humans live together in small communities
> the sentient fog enthralls people who feel alone by laying larvae in their bodies that control them and can use magic,
> the thralls try to kidnap people so the fog can enthrall them, hence the tight knit communities
> a mother, after her entire tribe disappeared, only has her baby and her dog left, and raises the baby alone
> now the baby has been taken, and mother sets off with her dog to find him

its barely a concept right now, dont know if people would even want to read it, does it sound interesting?

Sounds pretty fucking cool AND it's a strong woman don't need no man story. Does the dog die, though?

no idea
hes there so she doesnt feel alone and get eggs in her brain

Indeed. Using the classic races can only go so many ways:
1) play em straight
-works well for RPGs and such as a sort of shorthand; the writer saves time by playing into expectations su they can focus on other aspects of their story. Typically found in mediocre, Paoloni-level fantasy and RPGs.
2) subvert or invert
-use the classic names but change them to be all but unrecognizable. Usually comes across as a gimmick, plus you're still dependent on your reader being familiar with the Tolkien tropes. Making something be the opposite of what is expected is not originality. Often used by authors trying to be edgy, or those doing the Harry Potter/Dresden/Artemis Fowl shtick of "this is what the races are REALLY like and your expectations are from misinformation." So, again, gimmicky.
3) humans with fantasy race names
Tends to happen on accident. Writer uses classic fantasy race names because they are "expected" to have them in a fantasy setting. Usually comes across to the reader as being pointless, which it often is, especially when it's actually a botched attempt at scenario 2.

I usually suggest writers either go with human-only settings or do the Codex Alera/Ender's Game (piggies, not the bugs) thing and actually make their own races. This is difficult, obviously, since you have to make a culture that is truly inhuman, but being difficult is what makes this option worthwhile in the first place.

>Jurassic Park meets Game of Thrones masterpiece

>Not Billiy and the Cloneasaurs meets Game of Thrones.

>> the sentient fog enthralls people who feel alone by laying larvae in their bodies that control them and can use magic,

Sounds good, but I'd change this by altering so people don't really HOW the fog is accomplishing what it is. Larvae give it automatically a biological angle while "fog simply takes people over and no one ever survives from the villages that get overtaken so no one can testify" keeps it mysterious. Unless, of course, biological aspect is what you're going for.

I wonder, where do Malazan races fall under that if you've read the books?

Haven't read it. Sorry.

It's Urban Fantasy, is that OK? I promise there's no twinkly vampire twinks mooning after high school ingenues.

>Woman starts to see strange creatures and landscapes after she murders her graffiti-artist boyfriend
>Realizes these are stronger when she gets close to certain strange people (mostly homeless or mentally ill)
>After stalking one of them for a while, she learns that they're exiles from an other, far more magical alternate earth.
>Magic-earth has been using earth as a prison for things so powerful they can't be killed (necromancers, demons, liches, demi-gods, etc)
>Magic is much weaker on earth, so by dumping them here they're no longer a threat to anyone
>Woman realizes her boyfriend was a warden from Magic-earth and the "grafitti" he painted was magical wards keeping shit in check
>the hallucinations she's been seeing are the auras of the prisoners, getting stronger as the wards fade.
>Some of the prisoners have realized what's happening and plan a "jailbreak"
>since a couple of them are Eldritch Abominations capable of swallowing the universe, this is a goddamned problem

Yeah, he wrote two. He's mildly OCD. he hid a secret message in the first letters of every chapter.

...

Why did she kill her boyfriend?

Not really, but some of them are.

The "Blacklands" is an actual region of Texas, named for its black, incredibly fertile soil that's great for farming. It's a big strip of land between the Piney Woods and Dallas, all the way down into Hill Country. Because it's so fertile, it was one of the first places settled by Anglos under the Empressario system before the Revolution.

There are quite a few black people in the tribe in this book, but race has largely ceased to matter in any significant way in this setting. It's far, far more important where you come from rather than your skin color (with some exceptions like New Saigon and Czechlund).

There is room in fiction for all types of dinosaur

Well okay, just checking to make sure this wasn't some weird supremacist fantasy.

im writing sword and sorcery about a thief and his big girl who helps him out of situations and they fugg alot its basically just erotica.

gay erotica. Its basically women getting cucked by homosexuals constantly. my girlfriend loves it. she tells me she wants it to happen in real life. I want to stop, but I love the attention it's getting me online.

>Why did she kill her boyfriend?

She doesn't know why she did it at the start of the book - that and the hallucinations are the mystery that drive the first third or so. First chapter is her freaking the fuck out over his body, thinking she's having a psychotic episode... Which isn't helped when she looks out the window and sees a pack of foot-high goblins skinning what looks like a scale-covered six-legged goat in the middle of the driveway outside her house.

Later on she finds out he was using magic to force her to love him (he was kind of a jerk). She'd become pregnant with his magically-gifted kid and that was granting her a small level of magical power of her own, enough to subconsciously fight against the mind-rape; hence the murder.

Her trying to get away with the murder is supposed to parallel with the prisoners trying to escape earth. One of the major problems with the book right now (I'm planning on rewriting it for NaNoWriMo) is that there's no satisfactory payoff for that plot thread. I'm thinking she needs to get arrested for it at some point, but that fucks up the ending (in which she assumes responsibility for painting the wards)

You aren't?

You're making me worried, user.

I decided to just write blogfaggotry because at least then I can write a short piece publish it and forget about it rather than agnonising over putting an entire story together and how shitty every paragraph chapter word and sentence is and the idea is trite and cliche and awful then abandoning it all and starting again over and over again.

How about supernatural punishment? Like she gets pursued by some sort of ghostly avenger thing that she hears about from the prisoners, and they make her think that it'll kill her for her crimes.

However when it gets to her turns out it's one of those "can see everything" type supernatural beings and judges that she was manipulated, so it doesn't kill her, just cuts off her hand or something more proportionate to her circumstances?

The descriptor for that book looked like ass.

As much as I hate forced multiculturalism, it looks like the whole point of the setting is that it's a diverse mix of weird races and philosophies. It's not 'diverse' as in 'black people are everywhere, such multiculturalism', it's diverse as in 'demons and shit is everywhere, such weirdness'. But I agree that it's just a Planescape knockoff.

Book is done, in the hands of some editors and awaitibg revisions.

Then it's off to publishers to see if anyone is interested.

What sort of book? Do you have an agent?

I agree here. You'd get a much bigger audience if you used reality.

Is dogscape but without the horrific transformations, and humans enslave other humans to carve them up for materials in a work that otherwise lacks material too edgy?
In my defense there is a very, very, very good reason for it.

Is dogscape but without the horrific transformations, and humans enslave other humans to carve them up for materials in a world that otherwise is devoid of material too edgy?
In my defense there is a very, very, very good reason for it.

Fantasy novel about a guy who just wants to be a composer getting conscripted into a war, and will then use his experiences over the three years he's in said war to write his magnum opus.

No agent yet, but my wife did suggesr I check out authors.me which is looking pretty cool so far.

I...I don't know what that means.

Sounds gross. Most publishers will pass.

I'm not explaining the problem very well, I think.

Right now, a lot of the conflict in the first half or so of the book comes from her trying to act normal while seeing all sorts of crazy stuff - she's worried people will suspect she just went crazy and killed her boyfriend if they find out about the hallucinations, so there's scenes where (for example) she's trying to not acknowledge seeing the police precinct turn into a Catachan-type jungle filled with monstrous predators while being questioned there. And her trying to deny the hallucinations is paralleling her trying to deny the guilt she feels for killing her BF.

...Then none of that shit matters in the second half, where she finds out she's not going crazy, she doesn't need to fake being normal in front of anyone and the conflict is "stop the scary monsters from blowing up the earth".

And I guess I don't know how to make the first half and the second half feel like a single cohesive story?

But from what you're saying the story shifts gears completely when she realizes she's not going crazy. Just have it as a "everything clicks" moment and write the two parts as you feel they should go.

>I...I don't know what that means.
The premise is that humans literally have immortal souls which is why God is such a big deal. But that's a plot point for later. Anyways, in Hell human souls provide a constant regeneration effect on the human body even capable of recreating a human body from scratch in the case in the case the body is too far gone for repairs.
Humans in are dumped into Hell for being experimental failures. The problem is that Hell is completely empty of anything but Humans and human byproducts. But still being in a fleshly body, humans still have senses and feeling there driving them which is hunger, thirst, lust, and pride. Most humans in Hell are insane from starvation. So what will insane humans do when consumed by their instincts and literally nothing else is available? Use other humans.
Well yeah, it takes place in Hell.

That just sounds disgusting. What's the actual story?

Working on the basic skeletal structure and reasoning within the characters.
Sword and board fantasy with very few races besides human and very limited magic. The weirdness is due to the breakdown of reality. BBEG is a godshard who is basically the inevitable heat-death of the universe incarnate.

semi-sexual story of a girl in fairly generic low-magic fantasy world. family dies in a cart accident and she's found and adopted into a tribe of amazons. ends up having to deal with the culture shock of a hunter/warrior lifestyle, dealing with various prejudices, finding love in the girls her age and adoptive mother, and learning about the aftermath of the giant wolf that her new mother slew that's started speaking to her

also about 100 pages in and most of it mapped out, so pretty much the most progress I've made on a genuine story (rpg book's still out with an editor)

Non-human spirits such as Angels, while very powerful immaterial are woefully finite and limited. While not possessing a natural life span, they can be destroyed. Unfortunately this law of the multiverse applies to all natural spirits, God included. Souls are nearly immutable so instead of changing Himself he places his gaze outwards.
God, Lord of Lords and King of Kings, the biggest baddest spirit in this domain ( convenient, because that's how a domain is defined in canon ) decides this isn't adequate. If anything more powerful than Him shows up he could die and his Angels wouldn't be able to protect Himself for very long.
God in his infinite glory and wisdom devises the ingenious plan of creating immortal soldiers that are infallibly loyal to protect Him and his interests. Of course, God is successful in this endeavor.
Human souls are frail and almost powerless, limiting most of their achievements to the material. This is -infinitely- counteracted by the fact human souls are literally invulnerable and are capable of creating matter. These souls can even reproduce. God is the fucking greatest.
There was a minor hitch in the plan, however. Human souls aren't infallibly loyal by default. It would be pretty bad if any other spirits got their hands on a reproducing couple if they were. So, God created Earth as a training program. He would bring any infallibly faithful and loyal humans into his kingdom. Earth is an environment made purely to test this faith and loyalty. Those, who regardless of their circumstances, are blindly faithful to a God who works in mysterious ways are raised into His kingdom of Heaven to serve and obey him. Everyone else is...well you don't want the failed experiments spoiling all the other experiments. Or spoiling the successful ones. Or getting into the hands of other powers. So God created Hell and dumps the failures in there.

Those books were so freaking bad.

You've actually read them? How bad are we talking?

How tribal era are we talking here? Early iron age or even earlier?

I like it, but I agree with that having the larvae adds nothing unless you're specifically going for a body horror theme.
pic

84,000 words, 209 pages. About 1/3rd of the way through.

It's ok - I'm really just writing until the thing's done, then I'll figure out what to do with it.

>It's ok - I'm really just writing until the thing's done, then I'll figure out what to do with it.

Good attitude to have. Too many people go "I've finished my masterpiece and now I'm done" when, in fact, you've just finished your first draft. Now comes re-reading your book until you're sick of it and making changes.

I'm intentionally writing a piece of YA trash. I have a problem with not being able to just put words on page because I'm too self critical, so if I think of it as the whole project will be shit anyway, it doesn't matter how bad what I vomit onto the page is.

So far it has served admirably, and I'd like to think it will end up being in the upper echelons of YA trash quality. (Not that that's saying much)

what the hell is YA

>I'm intentionally writing a piece of YA trash.

At least you can potentially sell it. Unlike pretty much everyone else in the thread.

Young Adult. Twilight etc...

Here's the thing about publishing YA though right: there's about an eight month lead-in. By the time a fad gets going, and everyone becomes aware of it, the fad is already passing and publishers are entering the first phases of the new fad.

Wizards came and went, Vampires came and went, Dystopian is on the way out, so you either need to write the bones of something generic and then rapidly fill it in with details once the new fad reveals itself, or write you werewolf/victorian/space opera YA and hope that becomes the fad within the next few cycles. If he's writing YA to the latest fad, he's already too late.