I came across an article² talking about making your stories into RPGs for some cross promotion if it’s applicable. I did my usual thing and ignored the cross promotion aspect, instead going back and thinking about these stories I’ve made. And you know what? Syndicate could work.

Over the course of the series, there are a lot of things that get introduced to the story universe. There’s a system of magic for different types of people, there’s things that could be called classes, theoretical stats and campaigns. Every quest is essentially a dungeon crawl if you look at it right, but there’s opportunities for much more story driven campaigns as well.

The only issue is that it’s really more of a single player game as the universe stands now. I focus a lot on the freelancers and they aren’t all that keen on getting a group together and splitting the profits in the end. Sure, it happens. It doesn’t happen often enough, though.³

However, at the end of the series, Wipe happens.⁴ After Wipe happens and things start moving from there, the universe opens up a little more to multiple and single person campaigns. There are more enemies, more chances for random encounters, more of just about everything that would make the world a lot more dangerous to play in, and therefore more fun.

Granted, I’m sure there’s plenty you could do with the universe now, but I rather enjoy the prospects of a land fraught with danger than an organization that people have to report to.

I might have to make the game, is what I’m saying. Eventually. Once I do my research and get the stories themselves written. But one day, you may see the game out there.

1. I also played some White Wolf in there too.
2. Of which I just can’t find
3. Well, technically it happens all the time in other districts, but those never get covered in the series.
4. No, I won’t be elaborating on what exactly Wipe is just yet. It’s something several years away.

After all, I have a laptop.

In the mornings, I write. Every morning. Just like they say you’re supposed to. I get on the skytrain at the ungodly early hours of the morning, open up the laptop and have my very own little solo transit write in. It’s a good forty-five minutes of writing in the morning. I can work on new stuff, rewrite old stuff or just babble.

Honestly, though, I do find myself babbling in the mornings more than anything else. While I do try to write something I can use, sometimes my brain doesn’t have that kick start yet. And then there are mornings like this one, where I am coherent enough to write something that might actually be seen by another living human.

Other mornings I’ve worked on developing story concepts so that they make sense. Some of them I can’t make sense of while fully awake, so it works out wonderfully. I’ve spent a lot of mornings getting the details of a project figured out. My comic project (one of them) is just about ironed out to plot. Which, I have to admit, is really exciting.

Last week I wrote Xombie at last. It’s not actually on my to do list of writing, but I’ve been wanting to write it for a while anyway. It’s a lovely little story in the Syndicate series about – well, I guess you can find out when it actually comes out.

And then there’s the benefit all this transit has on Transit, that story I’m writing in a decade when I think I’ll be ready to write it. That story takes place mostly on transit told from the half perspective of someone who is on the trains and buses all the time. This is all excellent research for that one.

I am still trying to figure out my evenings, but my mornings are working out pretty well so far. And the new job is something I won’t be talking too much about, so don’t expect work rants in the future. In the mean time, however, I still have several stops and I think I know a story that needs details ironed out.

Wikipedia
Great for the first stage of research. If I ever need to look up the basics of something, I usually check Wikipedia first so I can get a good grip on what the subject is before I go out looking for more information that might not be explained so plainly. Also, it usually has good links to more information.

Snopes
Given that I deal with a lot of weird themes, Snopes is a must have for me. It’s a site that lists common urban legends along with verifying them or disproving them as the case may be. It’s actually full of pretty fascinating stuff and lots of story sparks also come from here.

TV Tropes

Be warned, once you start you may fall victim to TV Tropes and be stuck on there all day. Despite it’s name, TV Tropes lists all sorts of tropes used in fiction, as well as examples of where to find them. It’s always nice to get an indexed example of who is using what techniques in storytelling, as well as getting a few ideas of things to try in the future.

Urban Dictionary
Slang can be hard, but it can also be essential to some of your characters. Urban Dictionary is a great source of information on slang terms and how they are supposed to be used.

Seventh Sanctum
My go to random generator site. If I just need something quick, it’s usually got a generator for that.

Baby Names
Names are hard. When I have an idea of what I’m going to name a character, but don’t know what to do with that idea, this one’s a big help.

Nymbler
If I have no idea what to name a character, or if I just need a name quickly and at random, I use this one.

I speak, of course, of the Old Spice guy.

Those of you who subscribe to him on Youtube will already be familiar with it. He had a wonderful back and forth with Alyssa Milano, after all. He took questions from Twitter, Facebook, Youtube comments and other places I can’t name off the top of my head from users of all sorts. He even went a little meta.

Now to explain. Paricipatory Culture is when the fans, haters or general observers of something become an active part of contributing to it, whether they necessarily realize it or not. Many times, they will come to realize their part in the property quickly. In this case, fans contributed questions and the Old Spice guy tore down the fourth wall to respond to them.

It’s not necessarily an easy thing to do. Constraints need to be made to preserve whatever narrative or structure the base property requires. If you can find a way to balance it out, though, it can turn into quite a bit of fun.

I’m of the opinion that a straight adaptation does no favours to anyone. From a viewer’s perspective, they look like they’re just trying to cash in on a property without hiring a creative team. From my perspective, most of them also look like they’re saving money by not hiring a few medium consultants to fix the writing.

When adapting things across mediums, it’s always important to remember that different mediums allow for different storytelling methods and some methods that work in one don’t work in another. Movies are not comics. Comics and novels have different methods of showing and telling. Television shows cannot always be condensed into a neat little 120 minute package and not every comic would make a good movie.

Media specificity plays a huge part in why some things fail in their adaptation. Take the Sandman: Dream Hunters adaptation. While the text does a fine job of telling everything, comics are a visual medium. If the action isn’t shown panel by panel and is instead shown through the text, then you aren’t doing a very good job. The medium is important to take into account, as are the constraints that medium holds.

The other problem with straight cross media adaptation is that it actually adds no value to the property. If I’ve already seen the movie, why would I spend money read a comic with the exact same story, lines and outcome? Maybe if I were a collector or a completionist, but if you aren’t even going to do it well I don’t know if I’d bother.

There’s other ways to put properties into other mediums that will not only add value to the property, but will also work well within their mediums and may even draw in a larger fanbase, which is part of what these adaptations are all about. How do you do that?

Ah, that’s a post for another day.

To promote their product, TomTom seems to have only started by harnessing the Star Wars fanbase with their commercials, which feature such amazing things as Darth Vader trying to say “Round about” and force choking the hell out of anyone who dares tell him he’s doing it wrong.

But it doesn’t stop there. On top of that, they’ve created an interesting game to go with their contest to win a free one, all based around Star Wars which tests your ability with the force. If you have a webcam, I recommend at least checking it out because it’s incredible.

And, to make this somewhat credible and not just gushing over an advertising campaign, a little explanation on augmented reality.

Augmented reality is when you have to do something in the real world to affect the game world. I have a little experience doing this but, that was an art installation and not quite as accessible as this one is. It can involve things like an augmented reality tattoo or just physically moving in front of a camera and interacting with the system in the physical world without using a controller.

And, it seems, that these are better pulled off by advertising companies as small gimmicks than game companies who try to do whole games based around them.

Although I do wonder if you could implement some of these games into an alternate reality game in the future. It would certainly make the experience a little more immersive … but I’m getting carried away and this is a much longer post for another day.

The feasibility of it is pretty dependant on funding, so they aren’t quite so common right now, though there are more coming out of the woodworks. Yoda and Vader yelling at you for failing the Force test certainly isn’t the first example of it, but it’s certainly the coolest that I’ve personally come across.

The funny thing was, the story didn’t focus around any particular characters or story lines. Sure, there were recurring characters and bits of longer plot threads that popped up here and there amidst the shorts, and a few characters definitely got more attention than others, but this thing I was writing wasn’t a novel. It wasn’t even really a sequence of shorts because, try as I might, these stories needed one another and were going to come as a group.

It’s around this time I learned about the novel in story format (Which appears to no longer exist according to Wikipedia) via more unconventional means. By that, I mean I watched an anime called Boogiepop Phantom, which more or less illustrates what I’d started to create.

A novel in story is a format whereby each chapter reads like it could be a self contained story centring around a central setting, person or possibly theme. The stories are told sometimes linearly, sometimes in an anachronic order, however the author chooses to tell them. When put together, they create a more complete story, though ideally they will all hold up individually as well.

These shorts will sometimes even connect directly to one another via an overlapping character or crossover scenes told from different perspectives. When writing, it’s a little tricky to make sure the details of the scenes still fit, but if it works it usually works as a bit of an “Aha!” moment for the reader who recognizes both. That, and it helps to put the stories in time line context of one another.

Myself and Boogiepop Phantom aren’t the only ones to do this, though admittedly I haven’t found many more. The comic series and Sin City have done this as well. As for books, it’s a little hard to tell because anything that suggests itself as a collection of shorts usually is categorized as an anthology regardless of the context.

The question then becomes: What is the difference between an anthology and a novel in story?

For me, I think it’s those little details in creating crossovers between chapters, episodes, issues or stories. When the parts all really feel like they were meant to fit together somehow and not just written separately, then grouped together because of similar theme.

Now that I’ve seen it in video and comic format, though, I would like to see what other authors are doing with the format. Does anyone out there have any suggestions?

As Wiseau Films is discovering after taking down two videos from popular internet review site, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com, upsetting even a potential fanbase who is tech savvy is a bad idea. Upon releasing a video mocking the situation and clearly pointing the site’s fans in the direction of the people responsible for the removal of the review¹, their Facebook has been flooded and those fans are also presumably flooding the site with emails.

The review in question? It was for a cult classic due to being hilariously awful, The Room.

One of the two reviews removed have subsequently been reuploaded to Youtube² and are being shared among fans who have started a boycott and have informed Wiseau Films that, while they had been considering purchasing the movie, they now will spend no money on it. They point out that Fair Use places reviews and parody as exempt from copyright claims.

This isn’t the first time there’s been a fan backlash due to copyright. I, myself, will not read Anne Rice due to her attempting to sue fans for writing fan fiction of her works. And there was Metallica and their fans.

Just don’t piss off fans or potential ones. It’s always a bad idea. All press is not good press.

1. Not that this is necessarily the best move in general. I can see a few issues with harnessing your fanbase’s rage intentionally. Whether this video is an attempt at that, I don’t know, but for those thinking about doing something similar, think really hard before doing so.
2. I’m a little disappointed that only one of them was uploaded. I really did like the one by Obscurus Lupa.

It’s just a fact. They’ve given us a lot of weird stuff over the years, from a wide variety of Hello Kitty paraphernalia to… actually, I think I started with the weirdest thing I could think of there. Anyway, it’s a strange place and has spawned a whole genre of animation and even a type of game called a visual novel.

Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books from when you were younger? A visual novel is a game that operates sort of like that. You get a scene with an introduction to the cast, each of them sliding in and out with different expressions and saying their lines to exposit the scene. It ends with your character at a crossroads with several choices to direct the story.

I’ve been trying to do research on these games and figure out how they operate. There are playable areas with mini-games in some, while others rely on the story to be the driving force to get the players to complete watching. Really, it’s a bit of a comic/CYOA novel hybrid where the “player” gets to choose where the story goes and how events will play out.

I’ve been trying to play the free games that have been translated as I lack the funds to invest and the ability to read Japanese. The ones I’ve had access to have two key things in common. First, they are largely based around relationships. They have been largely about the token male lead trying to woo one of the female cast in the harem to him.

The second is that there’s a lot of porn in these games.

Like, a lot.

Rather than focus on that, I’ve been trying to think of ways to make this into something that I’d actually be able to work with. Given that I’m not Japanese and I don’t really want to tell any stories with a guy trying desperately trying to pick up school girls, I have been thinking of ways to make it a little more western. And by western, I mean something that I would actually write.

Change the first, of course, is to change the art to something western. That alone will change the aesthetic to something a lot more western as it is. But that’s not quite enough.

Next, animation. There are some animations in them already, granted, but those seem to be in much higher budget games and limited mostly to lip flaps and big dramatic cinematic. Western audiences seem to like seeing things move on their screens, so an animated sequence, or a generally more cinematic approach to the medium would be a great means of making it a lot more western. Budget comes into play, but I’m going to count this as a bit of a wish list item to the medium.

Lastly, the stories. The stories are almost all either romance (From what I’ve played) or creepy horror mystery stories (Or so Higurashi is supposed to be) and not as many of the latter than the former. With the game play abilities that they’ve implemented, there’s got to be a way to create an immersive experience in the more western, non-harem themes.

It’s on my list of things to try to write one day. I have a few stories that could work really well in the medium, though they will have to wait a bit. I do still have a book to write.

A pantser is someone who starts writing and keeps writing straight through until the end of the book, making no plans in the mean time and letting the story take them where they will take them. It’s a somewhat stressful, yet still pretty fun way of writing, hoping that you encounter no problems but if you do, you can go with your instinct and keep going as you want.

A plotter is someone who plans out their story before they sit down to paper and get writing. They come up with characters, plot and any little details they think they’re going to need while they’re writing. They know the ending already and they go at their writing without worrying about not knowing where things are going, instead running into the trouble of their story taking on a very different turn than they want to go in that isn’t a part of the plot.

I’m a plotter myself. I tend to get ideas when I’m in the midst of working on something else and jot it down when I can, then let it stew in the back of my mind until I have a little time. From there, I work out what needs to happen in the plot, some semblance of an ending and the main characters. I also get a notebook for the project so I have a space to jot down any further ideas and have a dedicated stack of paper to write on while I’m working on a project.

Still, I do like a little spontaneity when I’m writing. As such, my plots tend to consist of only about 3 pages of points I have to hit in order. I don’t plan out how they get from point to point and I don’t plan out characters outside of the main cast. Even those characters are subject to change as I’m writing, as are the plot points. I find doing this keeps things interesting enough that I don’t get bored while I’m writing.

What about you guys? Are you pantsers or plotters?