Student of Trinity

I can understand wanting to talk about a book with other fans, but why do so particularly by writing another book with the same characters? That seems like running full tilt in an arbitrary direction. And if you're expressing yourself creatively, why accept the constraint of using a pre-established character? Isn't that like paint-by-numbers? I think the real spark must be the appreciative audience. People will do pretty much anything if other people will clap for it. And so the question seems to me to shift from writing to reading. The main answer to why people write fanfiction is probably that (enough) people like to read fanfiction. So why do people like to read fanfiction? I think it's a good insight that popular fictional characters are like celebrities, though it probably says something disturbing about Our Society Today that this insight wasn't expressed the other way around (celebrities are fictional characters). People do like to bond by knowing the same other people, even when the other people we both know aren't present and are unlikely to arrive. Perhaps it's some kind of evolutionary hangover that started with identifying common distant relatives, in a behavior driven by genes trying to determine whether we share enough genes for it to be worthwhile co-operating instead of competing. Or it's simply a good way to exchange relevant information quickly. If I can find a shared topic of interest I can quickly learn whether another person is an idiot, but if I can find a shared acquaintance I can learn that and a lot more. So perhaps chatting about shared acquaintances brings an instinctive feeling of security, that people like even when the knowledge they gain isn't practically useful. Maybe I'm just a psychopath of some sort, but I feel almost no interest in reading fanfiction. The idea just doesn't interest me, I think because I'm hung up on canon. If I get attached to a favorite character, then part of that, for me, is that it's important 'what really happens' to them. A story about them that isn't part of their 'what really happened' canon is intrinsically annoying, like a deliberate mistake. I would be much more inclined to read a new book with a familiar character by a different author, if the original author had endorsed the new book as official. I don't think this is exactly because I attribute such authority to the original author, as that I really want some kind of authority to establish 'what really happened', and the original author is the best authority I can find, so they get the job. Having said that, I could probably cope okay with a character who had a varied and picaresque career, into which some disconnected episode could easily be retconned, without any tension with a canonical story arc. It doesn't bother me at all to have many different actors playing James Bond or Doctor Who. I would also be quite happy with having a beloved character appear in a brief cameo in some other story, if the continuity were at all plausible.

I didn't mean to claim anything about fanfiction: I know almost nothing about it. Shared world series, which seem to me to be older, at least as mass market paperbacks, are all I can really talk about. I guess I just don't understand the appeal of writing about someone else's character, except maybe just as a lark. I could see writing a fun pastiche in which half a dozen famous fictional detectives all work in a laundromat or something. But a serious, longer work? I don't get it. If you've got an interesting and original story to tell, and some good dialog, then whatever characters do and say that stuff are going to take on a life of their own, automatically. Some of the most famous characters of all time are figures in plays, defined by nothing at all but dialog and skeleton plot. So why voluntarily put a ball and chain on yourself, by constraining yourself to a character that belongs in a different story? I guess I can imagine two theories for why people write fanfiction. One is that it's primarily an act of fandom. You're not really trying to write a story as such, but just to explore that character more, so you put them in a different situation and imagine what they'd do. It's not really so different from a kid making a drawing of Spongebob. You like the character so you represent them yourself. I find it a bit odd to be so fascinated by a character as to put that much effort into showcasing them — writing well is hard work; but maybe a lot of fanfiction is bad precisely because people don't really put much effort into it. The other reason I can imagine that some people might write fanfiction, in principle, is that they are trying to write fiction, but want some help with it. Featuring a great established character is a way to try to spice up a banal story. When all you have to cook are leftovers from the fridge, you open a bottle of Tabasco®. I'm afraid I suspect that some of this kind of writing might be people kidding themselves about their basic ability to write. They manage to turn out something passable, but the truth is that the only actually good element in their story is the part they stole. I don't really think that you have to be born a writer; I think you can learn it. My theory is, though, that the people who are meant to do something are the people that can't help themselves from putting effort into that thing. If you can let yourself do something without working hard at it, then doing that thing is probably not your calling. So if you can write with little effort — if you can resist the urge to look over that last sentence and try to improve it — then maybe you shouldn't try to be a writer. If anyone churns out lots of fanfiction, without really taking any pains with it, and thinks that this is helping them learn to write, then I suspect they're kidding themselves. On the other hand I can see that careful fanfiction might be a useful training exercise, up to a point. Writing good characters is hard — I've been trying to do it, I'm not sure I'm succeeding at all, and if I do succeed it will largely be by cheating, with characters who are highly abnormal people. What I have learned, though, is that at some point characters can start helping to tell the story. You find that stories spring up just from asking, What would she do, in this circumstance? Or you discover that the story you planned just won't work, because your characters just refuse to do it. The exercise of writing a story with a good established character might help you learn what that feels like and how that works, and give you a standard to aim for, in making up your own characters. I can see somebody doing that once or twice, as part of teaching themselves to write. I don't see it as an exercise that you can usefully keep on doing indefinitely.

There's clearly some truth to that, but on the other hand stories have also been settling for thousands of years into canonical forms that can't be changed or extended: Achilles dies, the fox gets the cheese, and so on. That's how the story really goes, that's all that character did, there is no more to tell. So perhaps there isn't so much a basic tendency to keep on expanding stories, as a basic tendency to keep on improving stories, until they're finally right. Once the right version is attained, people tend to recognize it, and preserve it. From this point of view, fanfiction that tries to salvage the good parts of a bad story would be in the long tradition, but fanfiction that tries to extend a story, which everyone agrees is close to perfect as it is, would be a recent heresy.

How much fanfiction only uses an established setting, and how much tries to use established characters as well? (Does anyone ever just take the characters and put them in another world?) Repeating a plot doesn't seem to count as fanfiction. That's just repetition. It wouldn't be very interesting to repeat the same plot with different characters, even. Shared world stories can be good. I quite liked the Merovingen Nights series when I was stressed out with my dissertation. It was also notable in establishing that, if you let her take twenty volumes to work up to it, C.J. Cherryh could manage to make one of her sudden violent endings actually make sense. But the shared world really is only sharing the world; people don't normally put each other's main characters in important roles. Sometimes the appearance of another author's character is more than a cameo, but usually not too much. And even then people are expected to expand the setting a bit with each of their contributions, not just maintain it. Agreeing to let each other all make canon is the main agreement. Shared plot is hard. D.L. Sayers organized a shared-plot murder mystery once, The Floating Admiral. She got a galaxy of famous mystery writers to each write a chapter. Each author had to have a definite idea of what was really going on in the story, that was consistent with all previous chapters to theirs, and they had to reveal a bit more of that story in their own chapter. But the result was a hopeless mess. None of the expert hoodunnit writers could guess where the story was going from the previously provided clues, so the result was a sort of random walk through murder mystery tropes. The various authors all supplied explanations for their chapters afterwards, revealing that none of them were ever on the same page at all.

Fanfiction seems to be a newish medium. I wonder why it has emerged now. Fiction and fans are both old, after all. I guess it exists precisely because it's almost always unpublishable and everyone knows it. Publication in the sense of posting on an online forum has zero cost and no threshold, so now fanfiction is possible, because unpublishable writing can now reach an audience. Not even very modest paper magazines would publish fanfiction, so this wasn't possible before. And I'm guessing that few people ever wrote fanfiction, on paper, just so that they and the friends they could reach with photocopies would read it. Nobody wants the trouble of writing if they have no hope at all of finding a larger audience than that. Fanfiction has in fact been published even in the old days, but it wasn't a thing. It was just that someone would write a sequel to a popular book, or a new installment in a popular series, after the original author had died. What occurs to me off the top of my head is The Seven Percent Solution, a decent Sherlock Holmes story by someone other than A.C. Doyle, though the main point of it was to re-write some significant Holmesian canon (turning Moriarty the master criminal into some sort of drug hallucination by Holmes, or something). And I faintly remember reading a sequel to Treasure Island that was not too bad. But these were works by fairly accomplished writers, ambitiously tackling classics. This kind of reboot of a dead author's universe wasn't something that lots of people who had never written a fresh story from whole cloth themselves would try instead of that. Some guy wrote a sequel to The Eyes of the Overworld even though Jack Vance was still alive. I guess Vance signed off on that, but he later wrote his own sequel (Cugel's Saga) that was completely different (and pretty awesome). I'm not sure I've even read any modern fanfiction. What are people trying to do with it? Why write it?

Spiderweb games aren't like thick novels. They're more like plays. There isn't space to explain everything. If nitpicky little things bother you, then put your nitpicky skills to work in rationalizing what the game does. There's always a way. In my experience this usually ends up being more fun than the game seemed at first, because I end up inventing a bit more story of my own, to make things fit. Sometimes the little rationalizations even end up making a big difference. For instance, perhaps the Gray Raptors just aren't actually as competent as they would have you believe. Their information doesn't get around, they're not really everywhere, they're not really inevitable at all. That's a bit like an echo of Avadon: powerful, but not nearly as powerful as it pretends to be, so ultimately kind of a fraud. Maybe all mortal powers are like that, and that's the point. You can end up looking at the whole game a little differently, seeing it as a sort of fugue on the futility of power. I'm not saying that's how things really are, and I'm not even saying that that's what the game Avadon 2 is saying. I'm saying it's a way to interpret the game, that makes some apparent glitches make sense, and that is actually kind of interesting. Jeff's games don't have airtight continuity, but they have enough coherence that you can always rationalize things, and I think it's worth the effort.

If you have to ask, you ain't never gonna know.

You can do that? Dang. No wonder I never got into comic books. All I could think was, How can these people even see, with all these big white balloons in front of their heads all the time?

I've met Rainer a second time after the first zone, having done some searching, and heard his story about what he was doing in the meantime. It doesn't sound evil, just ineffectual. Practically ineffective, and morally lukewarm. Whereas my PC, whatever she's going to do, is going to make a difference. Rainer doesn't seem to be in her league. Maybe this just means I'm going to be a nightmare when my daughters start dating. Note to self: watch out for this.

I'm only early in the game — so please, no specific spoilers — but I happen to be a straight male playing with a female PC. My daughter was sitting beside me when I made my character, and wanted me to make a girl. I mention this personal detail only because it may be relevant to the point I want to raise, which is: I don't see how this romance can get off the ground, because Rainer seems to be such a wimp, and my PC is already quite the heroine. She hasn't decided anything politically yet, but it sure seems as though she must be able to do a lot better than that guy. So my questions are 1) Does Rainer/Silke somehow turn out later to be more impressive, or 2) Is the whole premise of this relationship supposed to be that Cute + Weak = Attractive? And then if so, 3) Does this only seem like a problem for me because Rainer is male and men are supposed to be more than cute and helpless while for women that's somehow just fine? I'm really wondering whether this venture into romance by Spiderweb is something that only seems to work by very sexist standards. But loveshorsesgirl evidently tolerates it okay. Am I seeing this wrong?

What an awful loss. Even just here, Death Knight was a great character. He started some great topics, he made a lot of good posts. He pushed "like" for a lot of posts by other people, but he wasn't just indiscriminate. He was often the only person who 'liked' a post, but when he did, it was a good one. A couple of times he 'liked' one of my posts, and I was really pleased. Back in March of this year Death Knight posted a topic about feeling awful, and several of us really tried to post helpful suggestions about getting medical help. I wish we could have done more. Sometimes even the best help just isn't enough, though.

If at some point you're ready, Valdain, could you tell us who your brother was, here? Knowing someone online in a forum like this is only a small relationship, but many people will have been part of it. Being here was only a small part of your brother's life, but it was a part, too. We will have our own reasons to grieve your brother, and even a smaller grief is better shared.

Whadda buncha koan-heads.

Too late, eh?

Interesting; I never thought of those books in connection with my project. The sixguns are important in my case. My fallen colony world is a way to do Connecticut Yankee without time travel.

Among Spiderweb forums collectible cards, the Alorael card currently goes for $24.63 on Ebay, while the Lilith card is yet to break the critical $11.13 ceiling. She's climbing, but not there yet. I think the market has spoken on this one. Lilith is, however, correct about snakes. A sea serpent just went for over $10K (plus shipping), while "Big bag of all kinds of Snakes! (sorry no sea)" keeps failing to make the reserve bid, perhaps because the offer stipulates delivery by surface mail only. I'm not so sure about where krakens come in, though. The only market for them is in bitcoins on a mysterious dark net site that can only be reached by a terrifying ritual. Rumor has it that someone going by Druid Prophet Sylak is offering an astonishing number of coins for a kraken in good condition, but the exchange rate swings so much, it's still hard to tell what that means.

I am writing, to various degrees, about six physics papers. The 'various degrees' covers how much of the work is being done by my students or other collaborators, and also how much of a priority I'm making it to work on any particular paper. I have several backlog papers that I mean to finish Real Soon Now. I'm also writing at least one grant proposal that way. I'm also still plugging away on my swords-and-six-shooters-on-a-fallen-colony-world sci-fi novel. I posted some early chapters in my blog here, and added a few comment posts after I decided to stop posting chapters. I finished a 130,000-odd word first draft after exactly (by a fluke) one year, back in June. Since then I've revised the longish first-of-four sections of the book, up to second draft status, and spent a fair amount of time thinking how to fix the problematic third section. I spent a lot of time thinking about that section in first draft, but it still didn't really work; most of the stuff I agonized over ended up being invisible to any reader, hypothetical possibilities canceling each other out to leave a lifeless stasis for far too many pages. The villains were patsies and a depressed narrator was a bad idea. Now I essentially have to invent two dynamic major characters and give them a short but thrilling life of villainy. All right; game on. My impression at this point is that a first draft is just a beginning. Getting that far confirms that you have A story, but it's only step one in getting to THE story. What remains is a lot more than just trimming and polishing. Even if you do keep the basic story, and lots of good bits, you may really end up replacing most of the first draft. Cutting characters out, or writing them in. Dropping major scenes, or adding them. Some parts may get replaced several times. Some of the parts get replaced because they're good but don't fit. Others get replaced because they're just not good enough. No-one wants to read filler. The average good novel, I'm thinking, has been distilled out of at least three bad novels. That you have to write, to produce that one.

Dedrik is annoying because he whinges and dies too easily. Shamans are underpowered, I think. Alcander is grumpy about being conscripted but his complaints have a bitter energy and he's quite enthusiastic about advancing his family, and tinkermages are great. The others are intriguing, and I want to follow their stories, but I don't actually like having them around as much as Alcander.

Autohealing is important because it makes it okay for combat to have big hits, which makes it more exciting. In Avernum or Geneforge you really only worry when you're going into a battle with low health; Avadon is trying to make every battle like that. It doesn't entirely succeed, of course, because you get used to ending each fight with everyone at death's door, but I think it contributes to the brisker feeling of Avadon combat. But then to make the game playable with everyone coming out of battle badly hurt, you need some kind of healing. Autohealing isn't any easier to succeed at doing than managing a ton of potions or trekking back to town, but it's a lot less tedious. Within the game you can excuse it by some combination of (a) most of your injuries were really fatigue that goes away when you catch your breath, and ( Hands of Avadon have magic power to heal. When I was first getting back to Avadon combat two days ago, I complained about how Vitality is so hard to replenish; but I might be taking that back, after playing all day yesterday (holiday where I live). The whole point of Avadon combat is that your special powers are really quite impressive, and Vitality cost is an important limitation on them. If a Tinkermage fires up two top turrets in each battle, it's easy to steamroll, and that gets dull. Just to avoid the tedium of trekking back to Avadon too often, I've started making fewer turrets, and using the cheaper ones more, letting minor battles last longer, and losing more health (since it comes back after). I've also been trying to get more than one battle out of a turret whenever I could, by luring enemies back to leftover turrets. This has actually turned out to be more fun. Still, challenge enforced by tedium isn't ideal, in my view. Maybe it would be better to let Vitality come back in any safe zone, but lower max Vitality a bit, so that you worry about it running out during a single dungeon.

The middle of that post was also dense but intriguing, but I have snipped it because nobody's going to read it again quoted so soon, and in order to ask: Does all the stuff I snipped add up to being fun to read? I ask because I'm just not in the market right now for fiction as arduous self-education. I already have all the challenging intellectual projects that I can handle. What does it mean to not "pander to the whims of readers"? Letting Little Nell die? Or being hard to understand? There must be millions of grumpily self-published authors who proudly say that they refuse to pander to readers, and all that means is that they've written bad books. What's the difference between Pynchon's non-pandering, and badness?

It would be good if you could restore Vitality just by resting in some safe location like a friendly fort, instead of having to drain potions or go back to Avadon.

Never heard of that, but it's awesome. Here it's still not clear whether Hallowe'en is even a Thing. Some houses do it, but many don't, so kids don't know where to go; if you have candy to give out then sometimes kids find you, but often they don't.

I too am trying the Tinkermage and so far it's fun. I've only just gotten to Avadon, but I've done everything I could find to do before that. I even bought a house. Building turrets in combat is kind of bizarre, but it's sort of like Geneforge with immobile Artilas, or something. You don't have to micro-manage the creations, but they won't run anywhere stupid on you because they don't move. I was thinking I might end up just making a dozen turrets but it turns out two is the max, so I will have to develop some other skills and I guess that's good. I'm playing on Normal because it's been a while since I've played Avadon, but it might be a bit too easy. I'm not sure where this relationship with my fellow scout is going but so far it seems pretty ambiguous; until reading that quote from the manual, in this thread, I was not guessing that it was really supposed to be able to turn into a romantic one. I assumed it was just supposed to sound as though it could have.

I believe this is exactly what Jeff intends that people should do, instead of starting out on Torment because they are Tough and then rage-quitting before buying. So you are, in some strange, morphic field-ish kind of way, contributing the Spiderweb Software's survival. Yay!

Somehow I came across a Geneforge review by Four Fat Chicks, probably on tap-repeatedly.com. Their review of Geneforge still shows up on google but the page itself seems to be gone. Whatever it was, it was a good review, because it convinced me that I would really like that game, and I did. It must have been one of those extremely convincing reviews that first convinces you that the reviewer is a really smart person, because I don't think I've ever otherwise even thought about buying a game just from one online review.