Anchorcrab

My tumblr is

captain-unbreakable.tumblr.com

Whoa, I have only been reading Homestuck for a few weeks now, but I am totally hooked. I love this series so much- especially Jade. She is adorable. The trolls are cool too. The kids are cool, the trolls are cool, the sprites are cool, Dave's bro is double cool, IT IS ALL COOL. I'm only to Act 6.3, but it's totally awesome. I can't possibly gush enough about it. 

After much procrastination, I have decided to occasionally upload select articles that I wrote during my tenure as a columnist for Riders, Rangers, and Rambles. It was a small website that spun off of a podcast I enjoyed. The podcast is still going strong, but the site is dead. very dead. Even if it was still going, it wouldn't matter to me because when I resigned from the staff last November, all the people I actually cared about had left the site much for the same reasons I eventually quit. Yeah, I guess you could say I was among the last to abandon ship before it sank...

My writing style has definitely improved since I wrote these articles a year ago. That's good, but at the same time it means that these reviews I'll be uploading aren't good examples of my style. They definitely reflect my sense of humor, though.

I have certain rules that govern how I write. These rules are completely self-enforced so as to shoot down any potential "asspull" explanations for things. I don't expect other writers to follow these rules, these are just the rules of my personal writing style. There aren't many of these rules, but there are definitely three big ones that I have kept in mind when writing and revising my (currently unpublished) book, The Crossroads (tenative title). These are my big three rules of writing:

1. Dead characters stay dead!
If a character dies, they cannot be revived, not even by magic or futuristic technology. The reason for this is, that in shows and books where it is indeed possible to revive the dead, dangerous situations are not as tense as they should be. I really like Dragonball Z, but I think the later sagas don't have much tension during the fights because the dragonballs can and will be used to revive anybody who dies. It doesn't leave much of an emotional impact as it should when a character dies. "Oh, looks like they killed Krillin again. Whatever, they'll wish him back later." Because of this, dead characters stay dead in my stories. Of course, there might be situations where a character might fake their death or it's ambiguous as to whether a character has died or not, but if Character A checks Character B's pulse and confirms that their heart has stopped, then Character B is gone for good.

2. No time travel!
Time travel isn't a bad thing in and of itself. Doctor Who and Chrono Trigger are great time travel stories. However, I think using time travel is unjustified if time travel is not the central, defining aspect of that story. This is because the option of time travel raises so many questions. Why don't the heroes travel back in time and kill Hitler? Why doesn't the villain go back and kill the hero's parents before they even conceive him/her? What would happen if somebody accidentally killed their own grandfather/ancestor in the past? What would happen if somebody traveled back into their own past and gathered several copies of him/herself from different points in time?(Kingdom Hearts dealt with that last one) A really impressive plot can justify dealing with these timey-wimey problems, but unless time travel is the main topic of the story, it's best avoided, I think.

3. It's never "all just a dream"
Dream sequences are nice. It's a good insight into a character's mind and emotional state if done correctly. I really like weird dream sequences. I don't like when writers make it so certain things never happened because it was "all just a dream". The Wizard of Oz(the original movie) is a great example of this. Dorothy goes on an adventure and meets some cool characters on the way. It's good, up until the point where she wakes up. It's all a dream. She hit her head. None of it happened. Argh! What was the point of watching all that if it didn't even happen in-universe? This rule has a minor exceptions that some parts can be "all just a dream", but only one chapter worth of events(or less) can be negated by the "all just a dream" thing. Got to keep that sort of thing under control.

And those are my rules. I'm sure that all zero of my followers enjoyed reading them. Someday, when Crossroads is published and I'm famous, people might enjoy looking at this, though.

Oh, and by the way, the urban legend about The Dark Side of the Moon syncing up with the Wizard of Oz is totally true. I've tried it, it's amazing.

So, I've begun writing focus chapters for a great deal of my characters. I think that the greatest problem with the first draft is that the characters didn't have much depth to them. They had names, they went places and did things, but it seemed like they were just cardboard cut-outs of the real characters, the people I wanted them to be. I have remedied this by giving almost everybody a backstory- usually tragic ones. Also, I've got no shortage of character quirks. I've even taken to writing the ones I can't fit into the story on index cards. The cast is going to be very dysfunctional, but they'll definitely have much more personality on this go around. I see drama as being the fuel that feeds a story's "engine", so there'll be no shortage of that.

Yes, it's coming along quite nicely, I think.