I was actually asked a few times about the writing process in general. I make absolutely no claim that anything I do in terms of writing this book is “correct,” or even any semblance of “right,” but this is just my personal process. I know my friend, who is probably a far more serious writer than myself, has a completely different way of approaching things. For instance, she likes to seclude herself from anything positive and write in the most depressing environment that she can think of. She can also write, for the most part, whenever she has free time and in a variety of places. As for me, I’m very peculiar about how, when, and where I write. I generally only write on my home computer with music that I’ve listened to over-and-over before and, even then, I only write in 3-5 hour sessions once every few weeks (though, when I start a chapter, I generally try to pile as many sessions into a row as I can). Now, for the generic feedback that I responded to someone else with. As a warning, it ended up being a far longer response than I had originally intended… But what else can you ask of a bored, drunk writer?

The reference I made to LOST was a thinly-veiled insult at both the show at my own writing process. It’s a commonly-believed theory that the writers of the show really have absolutely no idea what kind of stuff they’re building up to, much less an idea about how they’re going to end the show in general. The producers, in fact, have openly admitted that they have no ending planned whatsoever and are just discovering things along the way. I personally don’t mind except when the show completely loses track of some of my favorite subplots by either giving a lame explanation or just dropping it off the face of the Earth without so much as mentioning it. As a specific example, the show was originally going to have Michael Keaton play the role of one of the central characters, Jack, with the intention that the character would never live past the series’ opening episode. Though, what ended up happening, is that Matthew Fox filled the role and the character of Jack ended up being one of the series’ most important and necessary characters, but that’s neither here nor there.

My writing process is similar, to be honest. I started the book with an introduction which placed the unnamed character in a pitch-black room. He eventually got his bearings, found a light switch, and as the flourescent lights warmed up, realized that there was a crucified corpse hung on the wall opposite him (which he realized in the reflection of a dirty mirror). I was going to use this “vision” as the first piece of the book that would tell the reader that the narrator of the book wasn’t all right in the head. I was building to the idea that the narrator suffered some kind of delusion which created the world of the end-of-the-world shelter and then created his own situations about people that would justify him killing them in his world… But being that he was just absolutely insane, the book would eventually switch to a real-world detective and provide his thoughts towards figuring out what was going on. Eventually the book would reach the conclusion that the main character was actually killing people in the real-world as we know it, and then so on and so on.

What happened, though, was that after I wrote the first full chapter (which wasn’t entirely different from the current draft) is that I actually really quite liked the direction things were heading with the idea of a dystopian society created out of the necessity of human preservation after a potentially world-destructive nuclear war played out across the surface of the planet. I also grew attached to the main character (Adam); this attachment became especially apparent after some of my close friends read the early chapter and noticed that Adam had taken on a number of my own personality traits, conversational manner, and so on. Eventually I just completely redrafted the goals I was planning to take in the future and came up with a rough idea for where to proceed from there. Granted, I was completely clueless on what the central conflict of the book was, along with what the hell kind of ending I was going to be working towards… But I figured that would just come to me in time.

This project was originally started with my junior-level Creative Writing workshop class that I was taking from January through April, so thankfully I had a whole classroom full of students whose grade depended on reading my work and providing feedback. The things I heard back from on the first chapter (and especially the introduction) were… Less than stellar, to say the very least. I did a decent amount of restructuring and rewriting of the first chapter — along with heavily simplifying the original grammar and language that were utilized — and eventually my teacher said that it was one of the most single-improved works in the class. After I submitted the second chapter for workshop, the feedback was almost universally positive. Some even quite liked it, dare I say that some raved about it. Some people declared me as the most bold and imaginative writer in the surprisingly-talented class I had. I say this not to toot my own horn (though that was a nice perk), but because those were the comments that really convinced me to continue moving forward with the book. The change in comments, the obvious increase in people who actually loved the second chapter (in comparison to the first) told me that the changes I made in terms of overall plot, tone, mood, and writing were definitely a step in the right direction.

So, with Chapters 3 and 4 of the book, I have really started taking a step in deciding what the overall conflict of the book will be. I’m not going to reveal it, because that would be simply mean and uncool, but I’m fairly certain that it’ll be far better than anything I had in mind from the start. So, while I look forward to continue working on the book, I highly doubt that the kind of free time that I had this week to start and finish a full draft of Chapter 4 is something that will be afforded to me often. Though, in general, the average turnaround from new chapter to new chapter is about three to four weeks, so yeah. There’s that, I suppose!

Well, I actually followed through with my own mandate to myself today and finished up the fourth chapter of my beloved Paradise today. I probably started at about 2:00pm and by 5:30pm I had written a solid seven pages of content and brought the lengthy chapter to a close at about fourteen pages (with 1.5 line spacing). Now, by the time I considered the first full draft of the chapter “finished,” I think I honestly felt like my brain was just going to be set to “Gone Fishing” status for the rest of the day. Eventually, though, after I fed it some of the healing powers of the almighty beer, a good shower, and a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats it did, in fact, decide to come around and perform its purposes again. So, joy to the world and such.

Now, about this fourth chapter: I think it’s one of the better ones thus far. I still introduce a new character and a couple completely new environments, but as I begin to settle into writing the various characters, the story begins to come out more naturally. Up until now, I’ve have been jumping all over the place in terms of scenes and themes and exploring characters in their own terms, but I think this is really the chapter where the story actually begins to come into its own. The third chapter gave indications of story, but I don’t think it really succeeded in its goal (a heavy rewrite is in for it a bit further down the line).

In a general sense, I’m really starting to enjoy the work that’s being done on the thing in a general sense. I can’t say that I really know what the “main” storyline of the novel is going to be yet, but with each chapter I get an increasingly better idea of the kind of direction that I’m going in; for instance, in Chapter 4, there are a number of opportunities setup that I can use to jump into the “main” plot or just develop some threads into smaller subplots. I mean, to be honest (and I’ve given this example a number of times), when I started this project I had the goal of making the main killer some psychotic serial killer who was simply housing the described world in the depths of his brain as he enacts violence against people in the real-world or… Something. Either way, this is the kind of dynamic storytelling that should get me a job writing for LOST. Yeah, sorry, that was a low blow.

Before I convince anyone that they should read this chapter immediately before they even think about drawing their next breath, I should probably point out that it’s fairly necessary to read the introduction and the first three chapters… They can all be found at the book’s main page: http://www.polycat.net/fiction

Anyway, time for a snippet from Chapter 4:

Adam put his hand on her shoulder, and rubbed it a bit, then withdrew it. “I know the feeling.”

“I’d hope you don’t, actually. The day I found out about this place by some random black guy in the archetypical government suit, I was thrilled. My fiancé and I had just split up the day before… And, well, the idea of getting away from everything was so perfect. It was like a sign. Or something,” she let out a seemingly bitter laugh.

“The whole situation seemed that way for a lot of people,” Adam said. It was true, too, even if it wasn’t a sentiment he shared.

“Maybe,” she said. She said it in such a way that Adam felt that she was thinking about whether or not to say what she wanted to. She started to speak a moment later, but apparently thought better of it.

“What’s up?” Adam prodded.

“I’m still not sure that I even feel bad about what happened, Adam,” she said quietly; looking up to him as they still stood facing each other where she had stopped walking earlier. “And I’m scared about what that means.”

As I’ve said before, I’m not a big fan of the idea of “snippets,” but they’re still put into the announcement of every finished chapter due solely to popular demand that they be put into the announcement of every finished chapter.

I figure I’m eventually going to get to a certain point of completion in the novel where I should probably start taking down every chapter and start working on keeping it private until I, say, find a publisher or something. If that’s what I end up doing. I probably won’t, if solely due to the fact that I’m kind of lame and shy… Yeah. Anyway, for now, I need all the feedback and comments that I can possibly get. Hence the near-unnecessary amount of blogvertising that I do for each chapter.

Anyhoo, thanks to all those who read this and figure out a way to get in contact with me (via e-mail or just via entry comments) to provide some feedback. I figure the fifth chapter will take at least three or so weeks to reach completion… And that’s a conservative estimate.

I’m beginning to realize that Michigan’s seemingly-schizophrenic weather patterns actually do follow some kind of predictable logic. Not in when things occur, of course, but there are definite “seasons” that begin and end, honestly, whenever the Elder Michiganians Up High designate that the season in question starts and terminates. For instance, summer is just now beginning as of May 27. Would you like to know how I know this? Because the weather forecast for the next week is all eighty degrees or greater with a minimum of 75% humidity. Perhaps you remember this gem from July of last summer? Well, I do. That’s a Michigan summer for you. Sure, our temperatures may appear mild compared to somewhere like Phoenix or Houston, but we like to even the gap a bit with humidity.

Well, here’s a plot twist. I have air conditioning this year. Take that, nature.

Also, about a week ago I made a deviation from my standard practice and posted a fairly personal entry and, across the gambit of sites that I generally mirror entries on, I actually received some pretty fantastic feedback from a whole crap ton of people. The summary of the last week, as far as that entry is concerned, is that a day or two after it was posted I got to thinking. Actually, I got to thinking during and around the time I was posting it as well. Either way, I did my bestest to try and fix things, coming “clean” about my own insecurities and worries about relationships in general and all that jazz. Long story short, things are going to work out.

Something that I have been negligent about pointing out over the course of the entire month is the fact that I’ve seen two movies in theaters which are absolutely worth telling my loyal reader-base about: Thank You For Smoking and Mission Impossible III. Just how great the former of the two wasn’t really a surprise, to be honest, but it was still a fantastically entertaining and hilarious movie. The surprise of the bunch, though, definitely goes to MI3 with Tom “What Would Xenu Do?” Cruise leading the cast of the second sequel to one of my favoritist movies ever. MI3 ended up being such a surprisingly entertaining movie that my two friends and I, upon seeing the credits, had absolutely on idea that the movie was actually more than two hours long. The action was intense and engrossing, the acting was great, the plot was more like the original movie than the John Woo abomination, and it was simply a hilarious movie. Good ‘ol J.J. Abrams may have absolutely no idea how to handle subplots in Lost (there were also some entertaining allusions to that show in MI3 as well), but he sure as hell did a good job with MI3.

And I don’t care how batshit crazy Tom Cruise may be in real life. He’s still a good enough actor that I love him in movies. Plus, and let’s be honest here, the craziest actors are generally amongst the best. I mean, seriously, Sir Anthony Hopkins frickin’ eats people when he’s not filming movies.

Er, wait. I think something is wrong there. Oh well.

I started playing Heroes of Might and Magic V today and I came to a very important conclusion: I don’t like games that make me feel like I’m playing a My Little Pony simulator. I’m sure the game is a fantastic turn-based fantasy game, but… Just, wow. I can’t even think about the things that occur in that game without either being repulsed by perty little mini-horses or worried that just witnessing the game makes me level up my nerd passive ability far more than I feel comfortable with. So, for the meantime, I’m just going to go ahead and leave my “game of choice” as Rise of Legends, which is still providing me with a whole buncha real-time strategy goodness even as I trek my way through the familiar ground of the single-player campaign in an effort to get back to the start of the Cuotl campaign (the third of the three offered).

Sounds about good for an entry, I suppose. Tomorrow should involve me writing the finishing pages Chapter Four of the book. It’s currently at about seven-eight pages, and it felt good when I wrapped up yesterday’s writing session with confidence that it didn’t suck. Well, at least, it didn’t suck nearly as much as I still feel Chapter Three does. I’m still convinced that the “modern day” thread of that chapter is incredibly weak — especially compared to the introduction of the “letter format” to the main character’s wife. That kind of stuff can be ironed out down the road, though. With this fourth chapter I think I finally am getting an idea of what the main conflict of the book is. If nothing else, I know what the entry plot point into the main conflict of the book is. To be honest, I haven’t really had an idea of where I was going with the book since I made the main character switch from a psychotic serial killer to a far more protagonistic kind of guy.

But that’s for tomorrow. Unless I don’t reach a good point for the chapter to end on, in which case I’ll either post a quick update about it or I’ll just wait until it’s done to put it up.

I figured it was damn near time that I actually wrote about a game and there’s really no better title to suit that necessity that the only game I’ve been playing for about the last two months (I was on the beta): Rise of Legends. This is the second title from developer Big Huge Games, which features Brian Reynolds at its helm (who, if memory serves, was a kind of protégé to simulation thinktank Sid Meier. The first game from BHG was the very well-received Rise of Nations which, in my mind, was kind of like an orgasmic middle-ground between Age of Empires and Civilization. With their second outing into a new game, Big Huge Games wasn’t just content to make a sequel to one of the bestest RTSs I’ve ever played, but rather take the gameplay that made Rise of Nations so awesome and apply it to an entirely new IP.

Thus, Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends was born with one of the most redundant and unnecessary titles I’ve ever seen from a game. With this new title, though, came three completely original races: the Vinci, the Alin, and the Cuotl. Each race is so fantastically different in both play style and visual style that it simultaneously serves as RoL’s greatest strength and weakness. The plus side is that all of the units are ridiculously neat in terms of their design, realistic animation, and art style as are the architecture of each race’s buildings. The downside is that all of these differences make getting into the game a tremendously difficult experience. There really isn’t a Starcraft-like quality to the game’s races in terms of logical play style. What I mean, for instance, is that you can’t just say: the Zerg are quick and rely on numbers, the Protoss rely on ridiculously strong units but with a far higher price tag for each, and the Terran are the defense-oriented median between the other two. In Rise of Legends, each race has a variety of strengths and weaknesses, but there’s really no simple classification (at least, not one that I’ve found in my time with the game)… And this makes the game a lot less accessible than most of the other RTSs I’ve played. I’d give it the title of “Real-Time Strategy With The Most Deceptively Strong Learning Curve” — it’s a title-in-progress, obviously — but I’ve played Earth 2160 and Perimeter, and that would just be unfair to compare RoL to those two… Games?

One very fantastic thing about the game is that Big Huge Games has performed a near miracle in the way that the game’s interface has been designed. It’s deceptively simple but after I had been playing for a while, I started to realize that there’s a decent amount of depth to the whole ordeal that I was able to glance over from the beginning. I was also not a big fan of the lack of builder units in the game — I mean, I love seeing my little construction workers erect giant buildings in my base — but the point-and-click to construct a building at any place within your “influence” area is something I’ve come to appreciate and enjoy as well. I do think that the amount of units on-screen is a bit excessive at times, and can occasionally make battles a bit difficult to manage, but I do like the sense of scale that all the units creates. It’s also a blast to see a giant spider-mech thing stomp down on an unsuspecting foot soldier and watching him fly into the air as one of the game’s ragdolls. If nothing else, Rise of Legends has a true sense of destruction associated with it that makes a player, for lack of a better phrase, feel all warm and squishy inside.

In order to keep the detail up without getting some mind-boggling slowdown in some of the larger conflicts, you’re going to need a fairly extensive rig to play the game. I’m currently running on my AMD64 3500+, 2gb DDR400 RAM, and a 256mb GeForce 6800GT, and while I can play the game with fairly high detail levels (though with most extraneous polygonal details, such as trees/shrubs, and a lot of the physics detail turned down or off) major battles really make my computer want to go into a corner somewhere and cry until he’s just crying air since its tear ducts have dried up. Sure, I could make the game ugly, but with all of the textures, building/unit details, and shader/effect quality up the game just so damn perty. And it has some of the best fire, smoke, and explosion effects that I’ve ever seen in a game. Period.

It’s a shame that Big Huge Games had to record all of the special effects inside an aluminum can instead of putting more time into getting some really quality sound effects. Currently the game is like watching a supermodel play volleyball and then hearing her occasionally talk and make your ears bleed. Sure, it may not be quite that bad, but the sound effects in the game sound so muted and tame that I’ve now resorted to just playing some music through Winamp to drown out that aspect of the Rise of Legends experience, if I may.

To be honest with all y’all, I have yet to even attempt to venture into the multiplayer aspect of the game. I suppose the act of reviewing a game isn’t really complete without that aspect of it really being tested out, but outside of my beloved Warcraft III I’ve never bothered to play more than one or two games online with an RTS. I care primarily about the quality of the campaign and the skirmishes than I do that the multiplayer portion. Though, to be honest, I can say this about a vast majority of the games I play. Social experiences are totally overrated. And as far as the single-player experience goes, I’m glad to say that Rise of Legends delivers. The campaign is kind of a neat, though mildly linear (compared to the Conquer The World campaign in Rise of Nations, anyway), Risk-esque map that allows you to pick-and-choose the order with which new territories are conquered. This campaign is split into three parts, and I’m now going through the first part of the campaign, since I had played through the first and second on the beta, in an attempt to get back to where I was so that I can give the third segment a go. The storytelling is a bit wonky (I’m being generous, here), but the overall experience is still one that I’m getting a whole lot of enjoyment out of, so I suppose that’s all that matters.

Overall, though, Rise of Legends really meets my seal of approval as the RTS that I’m most likely going to be playing until Supreme Commander or the new expansion for Age of Empires lands. It’s not perfect, by any means, but it is still a very fun real-time strategy game that has a mildly overwhelming amount of depth — depth which may jump out of the bushes and maul you if you aren’t prepared. But… I still maintain that the sound effects in the game are best left unheard by any mortal. I’m fairly certain that if you had Hansen playing in the background and heard some of the effects in this game, you’d actually be sent into a homicidal rampage. Or your ears would just sever themselves and run away from your head. Forever.

Great game, though.

Prepare for melodrama.

I’m going to go ahead and violate so many of my own site-writing rules at once that, in fact, I may never be able to write again just out of the shame of my own writing infidelities. But, currently, I think this is something that needs to be done. Some people, when bad events occur, hole up in their living room with a bottle of ice cream and watch depressing movies. Some go on murderous rampages. I write a lengthy treatise on why I am the way I am in a romantic sense. Some people juggle geese.

For about the last month and a half, I have been doing my part to attract, woo if I may, a young member of the womanfolk crowd. We met in one of my creative writing classes, and eventually used the good ‘ol college-stalking network known as Facebook to accumulate knowledge of each other through ridiculously lengthy e-mails which, by the time they had come to a close, had exceeded a solid 12,000 words. Then the logical advancement to instant-messenging was made, and more talking commenced. Eventually a date for breakfast was set, and things went well. A week later, and the jump into a committed relationship was made. And a bit less than two weeks later, the committed relationship was ended. By none other than me. This seems like the necessary amount of summary for me to delve into the bulk of this post: me. Because I’m my own favorite subject to talk about.

Actually, that’s a lie, but that’s neither here nor there.

To be totally honest, I’ve done a fairly good job of staying outside the dating pool throughout my time in college. I knew enough of my own tumultuous high school relationship to know that the best way for me to get into a relationship is to not be in one. So… I haven’t. Whether this is for the lack of womenthings that I’d actually want to get into a relationship with or entirely of my own design I don’t know. Either way, I simply hadn’t even thought about a relationship (dating, yes, but not a relationship) in a long time. Though with this girl, English Girl as she had been so affectionately nicknamed by me and mine, I thought I honestly could get into a long-lasting relationship (which seemed — and is — what she wanted) without having to worry about my own skittishness which I had become so familiar with over the course of my life.

Here’s generally how it goes: the first week is awesome. If something goes wrong in the first week, then I generally bail without a second’s thought, because things shouldn’t be that complicated that early on. By the time the second-third weeks occur, though, I become ridden with doubt about what I’m doing in a relationship. It doesn’t matter with who, or what’s been happening, but whenever I get the glimpse that there might actually be a future in any given situation, I bolt like a frightened bunny at the sight of a lawnmower. Sometimes I can get over this without a problem… Though very rarely. I can’t even say I get the skittish way I am. I don’t think of myself as an immature person — well, except when it comes to relationships. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a general inclination to continue my fairly simple, uncomplicated, and fairly hermit-like (I use this very loosely; it’s not all that hermit-like, though I don’t generally feel the need to fill my day with things to occupy me) daily routine. Add that with the knowledge that I get easily freaked out in relationships which seem to be moving a bit faster than I like (which generally means that they don’t lie stagnant in one position for a long length of time).

But, if I have to try and really find the root of this little self-destructive dilemma of mine, I’d say that it’s still because I believe in some weird kind of fantastical romance. I’m not a very emotional person, nor a very romantic one, but I do hold on to the thought that the “right” relationship will be one where the first month (or, preferably longer) simply go so well, so smoothly, and are simply so fun that there’s not even a need to think about anything too serious. I figure that when I’m in the “right” relationship, that all of my romantic oddities will simply disappear, and I’ll be left with only the feeling that everything about the situation is so right that when problems crop up, that I’ll actually want so desperately to work through. Whenever I end a relationship, I’m left with the lingering feeling that the whole “romantic idealism” is simply impossible and that I just let the next-best thing pass me by… Though when that little thought pipes up, I generally just crush under my emotional boot and then it remembers not to pipe up about romance ever again.

And then there’s also another issue I have. An issue which is probably far more applicable to the current situation; I don’t want to toot my own horn or anything, but the problem is that I’m too nice. When I get into a relationship, I should just be selfish and think about my own feelings for the interim period until, like, the two people in the relationship form some kind of shared consciousness together as they bask in the sunlight on a romantic horse ride along the shores of the coastal beaches in the Caribbean. But, instead, I worry just as much about how my own indeterminate actions — my “defeatist attitude” if I may — will affect the other person, rather than just focusing on my own feelings. This sounds like a fairly good trait to have, but I’ll be honest: it’s not. It basically means that my own fears and insecurities are amplified by the lack of certainty with how the other person will feel when (there’s no “if” in the thought process) I screw up. It’s a fairly vicious cycle.

I mean, I realize that no relationship will ever be a completely perfect fairy-tale caliber kind of thing. Though I do maintain the viewpoint that the beginnings of one — say the first month at the least — should be the “high” of a relationship. Things shouldn’t be difficult, but rather the interactions between the two people should feel perfectly natural and should be having the time of their lives… Or something.

Anyway, this has been entirely too much of an emo entry, and for that I do apologize. I did serve a bit of its therapeutic purpose, so I guess that’s a good thing. I think I’ll go drink a big helping of testosterone so I can become one of those guys who hits on the drunk womenfolk at parties/bars, proceeds to have a one-night stand, and then forget about them forever.

But, no joke, I know I’ll never be that guy.