Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

Not really, no. I'd like to get it published one day - hell, I'd love to make a living writing books, if I could - but I haven't really looked into pitching it to any agents or publishers. This again is partly a function of job-related burnout, but it's also partly a personal insecurity that I need to get over. I *know* it's a quality tale, but I never feel like it's good enough, you know? Like there's always something I can improve, and that I shouldn't send it off until it's perfect. "Art is never finished, only abandoned," as the saying goes.

Professor Bickham put it this way. "You can tinker with it endlessly and rewrite it over and over, but there comes a point in which you never improve it, only change it."

Yep, fear of rejection is a powerful disincentive, but I imagine I'll throw a few more copies the editors' way when I run out of things to do.

Someday....

My first manuscript really pissed off my prospective agent fifteen years ago, but most of my predictions have come true anyway, including my most controversial positions that the agent said no publisher would touch unless I toned them down, made the speaker an object of ridicule, or eliminated certain prognostications altogether.

Yes, he loved my writing but dismissed my premise as scare-tactics [even though my plot was] based upon demonstrable facts backed by precedents in recorded history. The title of this 300,000 word unpublished manuscript is: The New Dark Ages: A Tale of the Twenty-first Century. As I said, it's more fun to write games than [fictionalized accounts of how unprecedented threats will deliver] a death knell to my country. I wrote this more than 10 years prior to 9-11.

[Edited to remove factual political content in the real world, agreeing with Garrett this is not the proper forum. I have left the bare bones that describe one of my unpublished novels, appropriate to a storytelling forum, as all of our RPG themes address threatened societies, albeit of a fantasy nature.]

I can't speak as a pro writer but I can speak as someone who took a languages college major out of natural aptitude, an accostumed proofreader and
a hobbist poet. Writing is never easy - its both a bloody war within oneself and a harmonious, gentle dance under low lights, it all depends on how you feel
what must be done, how fast and how well, but it always ends with a degree of struggle.
Writing is not unlike trying to make something out of nothing. Imagine trying to form a brick out of dust - dust being the airy, volatile nature of human thought
both as an entity and process - and bricks are words, you attempt to solify that concept that seems so perfectly shaped into your mind, attempting to bring it into being. Its a form of trangression, a borderline transcursion, a change of environment; beneficial when done but difficult to process.

Ah, now Bill I don't think politics belongs here. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth and is unfitting of such a forum or gathering as this.

Incidently, you should check out this guy's old site. I've talked to him before, but that site leads you to believe the man's unstable to say the least.

http://nightwolve.web.officelive.com/st ... ia.net/%3f



Meet Nightwolve, hacker of a few Ys PC games and a few more Turbo Grafx translations.

I agreed with your statement and edited my post.

I also waded through some of that fellows invective. Unless I misinterpreted something, he seems to covet payment for his English patches. To me, that is just plain wrong. If someone offered to pay us for our work, I would (will) tell them to order the Japanese cartridges of the games we translate.

Another reason I haven't pushed to publish my first novel is I've always feared [if it was successful] the wrong people would seize upon it as their burning bush, people I don't identify with or approve of their crass/extreme methods of opposition to what I consider threats to our way of life.

Surely you must admit, though, that the Three Stooges and other takes on the shoe-throwing incident in Iraq are absolutely hilarious. If I had been the Prez, I would have handed the guy back his errant footwear and suggested that he calm down, hee-hee... I understand passion and frustration. These are crazy times... The nuttiness going down in Slayers are metaphors for typical turmoil on Planet Earth.

Oh, that shoe throwing incident is one for the books.

I would have no objections to a thread on political discussions, but I would much rather engage in heated argument than actually discuss such a subject as civil and nice people.

A paucity of civil and nice people in the world is the reason heated arguments (that usually solve nothing) exist in the first place.

When a smattering of the passion that poured my emotions into my first novel spewed forth as fodder for contemporary debate here on these boards (even though written around 1992), I realized I was on the borderline [by disclosing the premise behind the tale of a postulated second American Civil War that makes the first one look like a croquet match at a Sunday School picnic] of discussing story-writing theory via an example that might spoil the fun we all share, for a few.

Anyway, I want to use most of my energy, passion, and time this weekend to advance the Slayers story closer to the halfway point. I just rewrote the Liddick Tower #2 scene about 12 times, then fought the toughest battle in the game thus far.

Oooh, here's a tip I got quite a long time ago, but only just remembered as I was sitting down to write tonight. That tip is this:

Never ever stop writing if you get writer's block, or if you hit a particularly difficult part of text. The best places to stop are when the writing's easy - this way, it's that much easier to get started again the next time.

Woo, editing is finally done! Patch coming tomorrow.

Congrats Gid! I'm looking forward to it.