To Unicorns, with Love....

The Author Up Challenge by @ShesNovel

I'm going to be taking a 30-day challenge for writing--one, to see if I can do it, and two, because I feel like I need to be doing something more with my time and talent besides just doing some RP here and there and writing here and there for my World of Warcraft characters.



Looking back over some of my past blog posts, I have to admit that I was pretty impressed with what I saw there.  There were a lot of ideas--a lot of thoughts that were clearly important to me in some way, and the fact that I spent all that time and effort getting those ideas down in a blog was important.  It showed me the importance of research, showed me how much time I spent doing that research as opposed to actually writing the article, and reminded me that ideas aren't as easily come by as people like to think.  Some days were a windfall of amazing ideas, and other days there was a dearth of information.

But here I am again, ready to face some new challenges and try to find some ways of expressing my own ideas--instead of just bringing to light the ideas of others (though I will freely admit that there are so many great ideas out there, I used to despair about ever getting to find them all; hint: no one will ever be able to find them all--don't despair!)

A lot of the stories I'm looking forward to writing are going to center around my characters in World of Warcraft--an MMORPG that I've been playing for what seems like forever--but has been just over 9 years.  Over the years, the game has never really lost my interest--its lore, while somewhat lacking in certain places, a good idea for a beginning of how to develop a world and its people.  Those ideas are what keep me playing the game, even if the game designers haven't quite capitalized on it as much as they could have.  I was just thinking, for instance, how much language lovers might enjoy learning and discovering a new language within a game.  Or how history buffs might enjoy finding out how cultures and people lived "way back when".  But you'll rarely see games centered around that these days.

Dear Esther -- A game from The Chinese Room

One of the few games that I really enjoyed playing recently is called Dear Esther.  It's a game devoted to exploring a narrative--and a place.  There are vocal cues at certain points of your exploration that help to tell something of a story, and they're not always the same--as in, you can play the game more than once and get different quotes at certain places in the story.  This makes it interesting, and it was fun playing it with Scott and John as we all sort of built a narrative around what we saw and what we heard.  We even looked up some of the symbols and the like that we saw in the hopes that we could understand something more about the story.  If you haven't played it, and are looking for something mindless to do of an evening, I suggest picking up this game and running with it.

Back to the writing, though....

While most of the stories will be about my WoW characters, some of them might also be about a book idea that John and I have been tossing around.  We haven't done a whole lot with it yet, which is part of the reason that I want to play around a bit with characters and ideas for its eventual creation.

And if all else fails, ...I'll just put down on "paper" whatever happens to come to mind.

Last, but not least, I've been going through a lot of old boxes of writing of mine, and some of that may eventually get revamped--especially a lot of the poetry.  You may find some of that up here, too, and you're welcome to leave your thoughts and comments.  For the most part, I'm generally curious about how something made you feel--what you felt the character's motivations were, or if you felt they were acting in accordance with the way I was writing the scene.  For example--if a character seems to be sad, and then starts laughing hysterically--it should fit the narrative.  Maybe everything was just so awful that they broke inside.   BUT, if they just started laughing hysterically at something someone said--that might not make as much sense.  So seeing what you think does and doesn't work helps me get better at describing things as a writer to convey ideas for characters, places, events, etc.

John just ordered the next Witcher game.  We haven't played any of the past games (or at least I haven't,) but we decided that we were going to play this together.  As I write that, I am grinning, because it will be fun to see how everything shakes out.  And, if you're lucky, I'll leave a few thoughts here for the perusing.

We Could Be Villains by Missy Meyer

Also, ...before I go, I want to just recommend a fun book I read recently by Missy Meyer.  It's called We Could Be Villains, and I am really hoping that she's considering writing another.  John and I both enjoyed the book, and while it isn't anything too serious, and there are some typical themes involved (girl meets rich, handsome, fun guy; guy isn't all he appears; superhero/supervillain money is no issue ideals...) it was interesting enough, and engaging enough, to hold our interests until the end.  The world that this book alludes to has some interesting possibilities, and I think that's what has us hoping that there might be a sequel.

Well, ...that's it for now.  I hope it rains, even if the weather man is evil and says there's only a 20% chance of rain--because clearly it is the weather man's fault that the weather is the way it is....

-- Jenni