New Testingstan

He underlines shit. That's just bizarre mang.

Oh yeah, Red, Allen's 'with respect' line probably has the first ' in the wrong place. Polish harder, you git.



What else is there to a novel?

I think underlining looks terrible myself, but it's standard manuscript format because it's much easier for the typesetter to notice an underline than italics. I could have italicized here (I had to redo the formatting manually because it didn't copy over), but I'm so used to underlining that I completely forgot I could italicize.



What else is there to a novel? [/quote]I actually really like reading baroque descriptive passages, but I'm terrible at writing them. My physical descriptions basically are just, like, "um, it looks like a spaceship lol".

Also I'm not good at elaborate plots or mysteries. I want to write noir detective fiction, but I can't come up with a crime that the reader couldn't solve on the third page.

Go figure, now I know something else about publishing. In any case, not being good at writing super-descriptive passages may be a good thing, because they can suck up bunches of your time to no real end. I mean obviously not every description is going to turn into a Robert Jordan-esque demonstration of how fashionable you are, but in my opinion at least it can turn into a whole lot of padding. Then again, no description kind of sucks, doesn't it? I remember posting my first version of that Gundam thing on SDN and someone was like 'hey what do people look like' which was something of a wake-up call.

And mang, fuck crime fiction. That shit is bullshit to write.

crime fiction isn't the real problem

complex political triple-fakeouts are hard

but yeah descriptions are lame which is why i think bad writers (ie jordan and lovecraft) focus on describing easy stuff like trees and GAMBRELS instead of people

mang fuck describing machines too

i can totally understand why red is all nah can not do it

you gotta use metaphors for that shit


also do not be complaining about the difficulty in writing fakeouts

all characters tell lies = easy

F it's not planned it's just nbdy style 'a wizard err the butler did it' shy

it's got to be set the fuck up

Oh hell, I should probably contribute something. After recently going through some stuff I had written years ago, I found this to be one of the more entertaining descriptive passages I had ever written. Possibly because I just like writing about very uncomfortable things.

The set-up: This was taken from a novelization I made of an RPG game I ran that was loosely based off Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Vampire: The Masquerade. The PCs had recently fallen through a dimensional rip after a botched attack and ended up in the realm of spiritual corruption, Malfeas. They had been engaged in a running fight for several hours, just desperately seeking a safe place to rest for a while:

------

“It's a... church,” Natalie looked around in fright and awe.

“It's a momentary safe spot, pull those pews in front of the door,” Charlene pointed, “We can probably catch our breath here, but we'll have to move on soon.”

Natalie looked about absentmindedly, hearing the dull gong of church bells over the sound of Kouzo dragging the pew across the stone floor. Everything in here looked like it was made out of a dull grey granite. Azure torches and high, narrow windows dampened everything with an insufficient, cold blue light. There were engraved murals and religious iconography on the imposing walls, separated by columns. Though there were numerous parallels to the type of Christian imagery Natalie could see on almost any street corner, each and every one was altered ever so slightly so that it became something ugly and corrupt. In one unreachable window Moses parted a sea of blood and pus with a stave made from the petrified skeleton of an asp, revealing a trail constructed out of ground bones for a legion of ravenous, slavering Israelites to cross. On a cobalt-lit wall an unnaturally well endowed Satan tempted an exquisitely formed, fully nude Eve with far more than just a simple apple. She didn't seem to be objecting too much to it either.

Natalie had never been too much into religion. Her father attended church maybe once a month. Her mother... well that was self evident. She never cared too much about it. Even without any religious ideals to offend by this, though, Natalie still felt spiritually unclean simply by being here. This wasn't a healthy place to be no matter what your religion. It was a blasphemy against the soul. The virgin birth, a demon planted in the belly of an unwilling mother, now tearing itself out of the womb in a torrent of blood and afterbirth. The sermon on the mount, an orgy of fevered preaching, damnation, flagellation, supplication and appeasement.

Natalie found herself drawn to this train of thought over and over again as she wandered idly towards the profane altar. Somewhere inside she knew why it was happening too. She didn't want to think about her mother. The past few hours were disjointed, uneven. An unsorted blur of sensations. There was a sort of numbness on her now, an emptiness where the pain and sorrow over her mother's death should be. Those feelings weren't there yet simply because so much had happened that Natalie hadn't had a chance yet to arrange them. That would require rest and reflection. So long as she distracted herself with examining the blasphemous imagery and swimming in the overwhelming horror of the situation, she wouldn't have to think about it. Continued mental torture was the key to avoiding further pain, paradoxically.

A muffled sob drew her attention. They weren't alone in this cold church, with its softly droning bells, the muted sound of distant thunder and the steady drip of polluted rain seeping through unseen cracks. Tired and hurting, Natalie painfully drew her pistol. She had seen enough not to take anything, even a plaintive sob, at face value. The source of the sound came from somewhere near the massive altar. It was rather pathetic, a barely audible litany of soft cries and covered pleas. No distinct words, but a general tone of pleading and sorrow.

Natalie found her as she drew even with the blasphemous altar, placed next to a bloodstained baptismal font which boiled over with heavy, yellowed vapours smelling of sulfur. Kneeling before a statue of a lecherous, demonic Jesus wrapped around a rusted iron cross in unholy lust, was a naked figure. The voice and general body-shape implied it was female, but it was hard to tell for sure from this angle. Its back was towards Natalie, ribs showing plainly though the thin, deathly pale skin. It was bent over in prayer, tiny rivulets of blood oozing from the many lashmarks that dotted its back.

“Jesus, are you okay?” Natalie whispered hoarsely as she ran over to the figure, now definitely identified as female.

The girl continued crying and whimpering, paying no attention to Natalie. Natalie put a comforting hand on the cold flesh, unconsciously avoiding the bloodier sections of her back. The girl's face was obscured from view, covered by tangled, matted hair. Natalie tried brushing it out of the way, repeating the question, this time without any references to deities. “Natalie,” it was Charlene calling out from several rows back, “I wouldn't do that if I were you.”

“But she's injured!” Natalie said, brushing the greasy hair out of the way so she could get a look at the girl's face, “She needs-”

Natalie's words died in her mouth. The gun clattered to the floor as she stumbled backwards, tripping ungracefully over a pew. The girl's face was just as emaciated as the rest of her body, but that wasn't what had caused the fear. There was a reason the sobs and cries had sounded so muffled and indistinct: The girl's mouth had been stitched shut with chicken-wire. Her eyelids sagged inward, no orbs beneath them and similarly stitched closed. Her ears were likewise stitched shut, the lobes completely ripped away. The thing's gender was once again put into question as there were only two areas of stretched and crudely stitched skin where the breasts should have been, still dribbling blood. Natalie even got a brief glimpse between the thing's legs, something she really wished she hadn't. Thankfully the sight was masked with deep shadow, but even then Natalie saw a dangling piece of chicken-wire attached to a bent needle.

The thing, the mutilated girl implored Natalie with a desperate mewling, reaching towards her with hands bound tightly with rusted barbed wire around a steel, thorn-covered cross. Natalie froze, too terrified to move or even attempt to defend herself against this strangely pathetic yet infinitely horrifying creature. The blinded, deafened head wobbled back and forth, the restrained hands thumped clumsily over one of the pews. Eventually the girl gave Natalie up as lost, or simply lost interest herself, and resumed her sobbing position in front of the grinning idol.

Natalie jumped as a warm hand was placed on her shoulder. “W...what is it?”

“An emanation,” Charlene explained, “a piece of spiritual essence molded to appear human in form and action. They aren't people, they simply are the spiritual representation of the dominant emotion in an area of the umbra. You can often figure out what kind of umbral realm you're in by watching how the emanations act.”

Natalie's fear melted a little and she watched the thing prostrate itself. What was it supposed to represent? “It looks scared and unsure to me, what's that supposed to mean?”

“Fear, guilt, blind devotion to religious authority, both sexual repression and objectification. The worst parts of religion,” Charlene said, “This is Malfeas, the home of corruption. And among humans, religion is one of the greatest and most easily utilized sources of that.”

Natalie began to get a nauseated feeling, crawling around in her stomach like a centipede. The back of her throat burned, splashed with bile. This place was more than just creepy scenery and demonic creatures frolicking about. Its terror wasn't just in imposing gothic architecture and gut-twisting paths that defied the laws of physics. It was the manifestation of pure corruption. The perversion and decay of human ideals and institutions. The insidious process of making a power structure corpulent and rife with internal corruption. The abuse of authority, taking the trust others place in you, deserved or not, and using it to vision physical and emotional devastation on them to satisfy your own unnatural urges. The reckless defiance and wrenching of even the laws that made up the very basis of the physical world. “This is... this is what the Wyrm wants? Why?”

“You've heard the story, right?”

“Well, summarized, yeah.”

“How's Haru doing?” Kouzo interrupted, “Oh, and we've got the main doors sealed off, doesn't look like there are any other entrances. So on the plus side we'll know what direction's something's coming from, on the downside, we have no way out when it does.”

Charlene glanced over at the unconscious form, blanketed in her own jacket. “I think she got a pretty nasty concussion from her fall. Bad news if she were a human, but she'll recover soon enough. Thanks goes to that leech, she wouldn't be alive otherwise.”

mang i should make that fic by, like, april 1 or something

well i guess i see where you are coming from

how do you appropriately foreshadow ACTUALLY ILLUMINATI without giving the game away

i think having a character that steals messed up memories via tentacles is pretty swell in that regard

more seriously i guess you have got make the reader a detective which is probably a lot harder than it sounds

and it sounds like ninja gaiden on acolyte level bullshit

Not necessarily. Just remember this very simple rule, which I've heard many years before but I've forgotten the original source (I think JMS said it in relation to how he planned the B5 arc).

If you're going to shoot someone in act V you need to show the gun on the mantlepiece in act I.

You're thinking of Chekhov's gun.

I am indeed.

thing with the gun of chekov is that it is really easy to use subtly in a visual medium

but in a book it is really easy to over telegraph shit

so instead of it being a shocking revelation the reader just smugly rambles about how obvious it was

I think the Edgeworth game managed to do a pretty good job at not over-telegraphing who really did the crime until more than halfway through. But then again it wasn't trying too hard to be realistic either.

i am not sure that really works as an example

if you over-foreshadow it's too obvious

if you under-foreshadow you're agatha christie and have a new guy show up that you could never have possibly expected

i think the aim is to set it up so that people don't feel ripped off that their expectation was wrong because it is acceptable that the 'twist' occurs

and not mystery novel style OH YEAH AND THE BUTLER IS A NINJA ASSASSIN stuff

is the butler allowed to be a ninja assassin if it is appropriately foreshadowed

only if he is also a time traveller or invovled in a curse

can he kill people with dental floss?

only if the detntal floss has an undisclosed poisonous or explosive component there is no way the reader could know about

Okay, for the sake of it I thought I would post some categorically awful. Last night I had an hour free and wanted to get thati dea from a couple of pages ago out of my head, so I tried writing the opening scene, but found I couldn't, so I just wrote whatever. Pretty much everything about this is dumb and juvenile and creepy in a 'ugh ford what the fuck are you doing' way so maybe it will make other people feel better about their writing (like Stark, who should post shit which I know he's written). Initially I was going to name the villain after Stark for lolol reasons but in practice I felt bad about that so he just has a placeholder name which is still somehow less dumb than the main character's name.

ps there is actually more after this in my head but i thought it would be thematic if i ended on a point where everyone died like last time


“Garcia, SAR umbilical cable connected.”

“Umbilical cable link confirmed, doctor, switching from SCBA.”

Garcia held his breath, as the little holographic display played a cute animation as the source of his air switched from pressurised tank in his backpack to the pumps. When the display flashed blue, he let out a sigh and trudged towards the gleaming slab and the white-suited figure standing over it. “SAR active, suit environment at 100%.”

“Jesus, check out the rack on her.” Tynes said, tapping one rubber finger against his visor. Garcia tried to focus on the stand of surgical tools, but couldn’t manage it, and glanced sidelong at the naked body laid out on the steel table. She’d won the proverbial lottery, couldn’t deny that. Feeling suddenly ill, he picked up a scalpel and waved it in Tyne’s general direction.

“You know Jon, that’s pretty sick.” Garcia said, stepping closer to the slab. “Setting aside the fact she’s dead, she was sixteen.”

“Lighten up mang. Like you said, she’s dead.” Tynes held out his hand, his fingers wrapping around the butt of the scalpel. “Still, seems like a shame to cut up something that pretty. You know, I hear on the grapevine that she’s the reason why McEvil and Leonhardt are on the rocks. Normally I’d think you’d crazy to go elsewhere if you were tapping Matilda Leonhardt, but Jesus, look at those tits.” For emphasis, he pressed the tip of one finger into the flesh just below her nipple. “Man, still soft.”

“Tynes, it takes forty minutes to get out of this lab. Don’t make me vomit in my helmet.”

“Yeah, Garcia, people would like you more if you didn’t have an eight foot rod shoved up your ass.”

There was a click in Garcia’s ear, and a bored female voiced streamed from his earpiece. “Boys, the director is in the room with me.”

Both pathologists turned towards the observation window above. Director McMullen, tall and rakishly thin, could be seen fitting his headset over slicked back hair. “Alright gentlemen.” He began, as languid as ever. “What we have here is our first and likely only opportunity to examine the effects of SUNSHINE on a human. Miss Bishop can still contribute to this project. This is just preliminary, so … are her eyes open?”

Garcia turned lowered his gaze. Though she hadn’t moved, silver-grey eyes were flicking wildly in her sockets, and Garcia recoiled, tripped over his steel-toed boots and fell to the floor, taking his stand of tools with him. Tynes stumbled backwards, his mouth working around words he couldn’t form. The girl slowly pushed herself up, one shaking hand finding its way into her chin-length black hair. “Holy shit.” Tynes managed finally, as the girl drew her knees up to her chest.

“Anri.” McMullen said, this time over speakers. “Anri Bishop. Can you hear me?”

“Yes.” She said, softly.

“Remarkable.” McMullen said, though he sounded only mldly interested, as far as Garcia was concerned. And speaking of concerned, he was in the same room as a chick that had just come back from the fucking dead. He opened his mouth to voice his concern, but he has barely sounded the first syllable before McMullen was chirping in his earpiece. “Just sit there. Security is on its way. She’s not going to be dangerous if you don’t provoke her.”

He spoke again over the speakers, this time with almost paternal concern. “Anri, there has been a terrible accident. Do you remember?”

“No. Maybe?” her arms wrapped tightly around her knees, one of her feet jittering. “I remember a tear. I remember being cut.” He foot stopped jumping. “You were going to cut me up.”

“Anri, I know this is going to be hard to believe, but you have been dead. SUNSHINE … do you remember SUNSHINE? You were working on the latest specimen with Doctor McEvil. You were infected, and it killed you.”

“I’m not dead.” Anri said, tilting her head up to stare at McMullen. The director was leaning against the observation window, staring back.

“I know … we know that now. I’m sorry, but I need you to keep calm. We’re going to work this out.”

Anri’s eyes slowly narrowed. “First and likely only opportunity.” She said, about as harshly as her quiet voice would allow.

Above, McMullen looked to one side and rubbed his eyebrow. Below, the girl was swinging her legs off the slab, and McMullen pulled his headset off. A shutter snapped into place as Anri stumbled onto the floor. “Hey, what the fuck?” Tynes snapped. “Boss, what are you doing? Patricia, are you on the line? What are you … oh, shit. Oh, shit, shit Rick she’s walking at me, the fucking zombie is coming right for me I have been hung out to dry by Robert McMullen and a fucking dead chick is coming at me.”

“Don’t provoke her.” Garcia said, weakly, as he used the slab to pull himself up. Anri Bishop was stumbling forward, every step becoming firmer and stronger. Deliriously, Garcia couldn’t help but admire her plump, shapely ass as she advanced on Tynes, who continued to back up towards the wall. “Just, just leave her alone and wait for the goons.”

“Rick, okay, maybe you missed this but she is actually standing right the fuck in front of me.” He had both of his rubber gloved hands in the air, the scalpel gleaming. Garcia didn’t have the angle, and he was being distracted by a poorly timed erection, but he thought the girl might have been staring at it. “I want to leave her alone I really do I really fucking do but I don’t think she’s going to leave me alone.”

“Just, just wait.” Garcia gasped. The only thing that was really running through his head was how his only friend in New York was probably going to die and he had a fucking boner. He couldn’t help but laugh.

“Aw shit Rick.”

“I heard you.” Anri said, rubbing her face with one hand.

“What’d you hear?” Tynes asked, his voice rising towards a squeak.

“You touched me.”

“You were dead baby!” Garcia watched, fascinated, as Tynes squirmed against the wall, and tears streamed down his cheeks. The pathologist’s fingers tightened and retightened around the scalpel, as Anri took another step forward. “Oh Holy Mary Mother of God I know I shouldn’t have but I thought you were dead!”

“I’m not …” as she spoke, Anri turned away from Tynes, and he let himself slide down the wall. Garcia tried to follow her gaze; with a little searching he found a dimple in the roof. It was part of the sprinkler system that every lab had. Some rumours floated around that suggested that there were tanks of fluoroantimonic acid ready to be linked up at a moment’s notice, to clean labs of serious accidents. Garcia had never considered that particularly likely, until they came on and everything in the lab just ablated.

I'll post the title sequence from my final script. It should be pretty clear what the story's about and where it's set, and the title sequence I think gets across a buttload of exposition into a stylised and compressed package. The first act is all about knowing who these antiheroes are and the tension of them avoiding the police to accomplish their plans.

The song mentioned is here.

If she does end up going all Prototype-style tentacley she should be able to sprout razor-tipped death-tentacles from her murder-nipples.

WHORES KILLING WITH THEIR BLEEDING MILKBAGS

I'm not entirely sure tinypic's "Image deleted" notification really needs an NSFW tag.