Oh hi, S'up! and etc.
I haven't been here for quite a while. I'm trying to land myself a job at an education research institute, and that's got me effectively busy. I come back here once in a while, but I no longer spend the time I'd like to do things such as read and review a fic, for example.
The good news is that the selection process had gone wonders for me so far. I was even invited to a staff meeting between the lead programmers to see if my work style fits the institute.
The bad news is that I lost the last two weeks of advancement in all of my fics due to a power surge that wiped out my flashdrive's encrypted volume. Not only that, but what little I had indexed from 2008's Bold Topics (Jan 1 to Mar 12 2008) went all 0x00's too... I feel like what Sparkling Dragon has gone through, here... All was not lost because I'm genre savvy lucky: two weeks ago I had made a raw backup of all my fics because I wanted to adapt them to OpenOffice.org's "master document" model. Hadn't I done that, I'd have lost the last six months of fic development and thus the entirely of both my current works. Well done, me.
In the meantime I have been thinking all over again about what things I have to do. My fics are not on hiatus, but I'm writing far slower. What I have done, because I found it quite easy to do, was to sign up to Pokéteca (kinda the spanish-language Bulbapedia) and improve some articles there (the main Pokémon articles are really lacking in the narrative and description department). Seeing that it was getting easier for me to do things there than here, I kinds thought of a matter to discuss here, but I don't know how many of you can help me.
The thing is, I've found myself progressing at a faster pace when writing my fics in Spanish, my native language, and then translating at the end. So far (ie.: up until "Playfield") I was working by writing directly in English. The obvious disadvantage is that the whole process is 2x slower, but I was thinking that maybe it may be useful to write in Spanish first and then translate. I could even get to publish in both languages, but that's another matter entirely. So, for those among you who write in two languages, if any, do you think working native-first helps? What are your experiences, is there any advice you can give me?
Also, on the subject of the bold topics:
How flawed is/are your main protagonist(s)?
Like dotKarma, I'm not wlrking on my fics very much ATM but I have developed a lot of things. My characters are designed around a core concept from which strengths, weaknesses, competences and flaws can be "growth", not "created", so I can say they are "normally flawed". Plus I like them weird... :D
I had to develop Lileep for the occasion, and with not much to pick from in terms of personality I decided to go the obvious route, that is give him two or three basic traits and let things spiral from there. Fundamentally, the three things that define Lileep are that he is quick to draw conclusions, regretless about his decisions, and attracted more to questions than to answers. What resulted from there is a character that so far would look, I think, like a know-it-all do-nothing douché who simply crawls around reminding people the things they don't know but who does it because he doesn't know better (technically speaking, Lileep has no parents, he is being raised by what amounts to an attention-seeking Gyarados, a carefree Kirlia, an Electabuzz just like him but with 9000x more experience, a Registeel with Clippo installed, and two almost to-the-book "experiment observers"). That's a kind of personality I like to explore.
Then I have several other characters. All of them follow essentially the same model. Two or three defining characteristics (not strenghts/flaws, but "means to be"). Liberate and extrapolate from there. Results so far: a spoiled rich boy who wanders around doing battles because he can't care he is the heir to a small empire, he doesn't want to accept that kind of responsibility (Darius) because he finds it boring compared to other responsibilities he has. And other people like that.
At the risk of sounding hypocritical, has anyone (besides Bay) read Reviewing and You, or was that just a rant to myself? (from: Valentine)
I said two or three times I read it, too...
Bottom line, I'm sure we all here have, but I concur that Aurincha hit the nail very hard here with regards to that. If things could be worked upon from that perspective, so many things would change here. Unfortunately the only viable method that would work on in our current cultureset would be a "writer mentorship" sort of thing but I can smell from here that won't go good.
As an example of the "people who doesn't" kind of stuff, my last week at Serebii went hilariously reading how Serebii's "Fic Ideas" thread turned into a mess. Yami Ryu's most recent answer made me laugh so hard (not that I don't share the pain)...
I'll be gone for a while. I'm always reading here and some fics (note to self: find time to review "Mentor" again...) but I'll have less time to intervene in a useful manner, but I won't degrade myself to "tl;dr" or "rite moar!" kind of posts.
Random thoughts: I'm starting to like Calibri....
