2011 is Dead. Long Live 2012.

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As I write this, 2011 is drawing to a close and none too soon. A lot of things about this year have been pretty fantastic, most notably the founding of this site, but in many other ways this has been a year I’ll be happy to forget.

2012 is 45 minutes away, so I’m taking this chance to think about what I want to accomplish in the year ahead with some resolutions.

Reading

Photo by Adokos/Flickr (Creative Commons)

The first of my resolutions for 2012 is reading. I will once again participate in the Goodreads Reading Challenge, but I will not be setting a goal of 100 books this time. 30 books will be fine to start, and I can update that higher if I finish too early. It’s been months since I dared read a long book, and I miss them.

On the positive side, I DID finish my 100 book challenge for 2011! I had to read 9 books over the 30th and 31st of December to do it, and obviously they were very short books, but I did it legitimately and it feels pretty awesome.

Writing

Photo by Adokos/Flickr (Creative Commons)

I have two writing resolutions.

The first: I will take part in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) again come November. And I will win again.

The second: I will take part in WIP500, a new challenge to write 183,000 words over the course of the year by writing a minimum of 500 words every day. (2012 is a leap year, for those who did the math and wondered how 500 times 365 equals 183,000.)

The nice thing about doing both is that WIP500 counts any words you write for NaNoWriMo, so if you manage to stick to at least 500 words a day on average right up to November and then go on to do your 1,667 a day for NaNoWriMo, you’ll finish WIP500 before you even finish NaNoWriMo, let alone before year’s end.

I have a bonus third not-quite-resolution that I need to investigate but hope to implement, which I’m stealing from Judith Graves, who in turn got it from Scott Myers. It’s a progress chart that will probably help a whole lot with my progress on finishing Prices.

Speaking of finishing Prices:

Publishing

My final resolution is to publish 4 things in the Amazon Kindle store and hopefully other fine eBook vendors like the Nook store and the Apple iBooks store.

Happy New Year everyone! Hope 2012 is far better than 2011 was regardless of how well 2011 went for you.

2011 Fiction Hiatus

I suppose 2 days isn’t much of a hiatus.

I’ll be blogging today and tomorrow (the 30th and 31st) instead of writing fiction, as I’ll be focusing pretty heavily on finishing my 2011 Goodreads Reading Challenge. I’ve written before about the challenge in my post about self-imposed limits. It’s come down to the wire now and when I started today I had read 91 books with 9 remaining to read today and tomorrow. 

I now sit at 95 read, with 5 remaining, one of which I’m going to tackle before I get to bed. Naturally I’m having to read very short books, but even short books take time to read, so this is also a short post.

I’ve met every other challenge I’ve set for myself this year, from NaNoWriMo to writing on a consistent daily basis, so I’m not about to throw this one aside either. Wish me and my soon-to-be aching eyeballs luck!

Star Wars: The Old Republic is a Writing Inspiration

I’ve done many types of writing over the course of my life including many types of fiction and non-fiction. Some of the most fascinating writing I’ve ever had to do was in video games.

I’ve written before about how oddly liberating writing under constraints can be, and game writing is some of the most restrained writing you’ll ever have to do.

Lately I’ve been playing Bioware’s new Star Wars: The Old Republic game. It’s an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online game) similar to World of Warcraft in many respects, which I was never really a big fan of.

Bioware, however, is well known among gamers for the incredible quality of the storytelling in their games. The problem was that they weren’t known for multi-player games; mostly they created epic-scale games with incredible stories that you play through on your own.

It’s long been hoped that they would be able to bring a richness of story to MMOs that has so far been lacking. They met my hopes, and then exceeded them. Not only did they craft stories (multiple, yes) that are as good as those found in their other games, they’ve done unique story lines for different types of characters you might play, different decision paths you as the player may head down, and most impressively at all, they’ve included some stories called Flashpoints that accommodate several players at once.

The general complexity of these multi-player conversations is nothing I’d think of as out of the ordinary. During the course of a conversation, the character your group of friends is talking to will speak. (And in The Old Republic, they really do speak. The amount of voice acting in the game is astounding, and of incredibly high quality.)

Mass Effect, another Bioware game featuring fantastic voice acting.

After they’ve said their piece though, you’ll inevitably come to a decision point. This is where in a typical solo game you’d choose what your character says, and the game goes on from there, telling you what the reaction is depending on how you act. Generally you have several possible ways to react to any decision point - a “good” option and a “bad” option, and sometimes a middle-of-the-road option.

That’s exactly what happens here too, in multi-player flashpoints, with several big differences I’ve never encountered before.

If you are playing along with 2 other people and they’re both part of the conversation, all of you decide what you want your individual character to say. All 3 characters are present as a group talking to the game character.

Once you’ve all picked your dialogue option, the game “rolls the dice” for you and assigns you a number.

Once ALL of you have picked your dialogue options and have your numbers, the game decides which character speaks. The rule seems to be highest number gets to speak, and in the case of a tie, the one who chose their option fastest speaks.

Game dialogue has come a LONG way from these days.

I can’t express well enough just how unique and exhilarating it was to have conversations like this in a game where I wasn’t in complete control over what happened. It lead to me seeing dialogue options I wouldn’t otherwise have seen, which was fantastic; it felt like a much more living, breathing conversation where you’re not just talking to a computer. It felt much more alive. It was hard to believe such a simple mechanic could provide such a huge benefit.

Context is everything when writing dialogue, whether it’s in a book or a video game. I often find myself falling into the habit of just writing dialogue lines straight out, with little or no context. So far everything I’ve got up in the other sections are first drafts, so that’s okay. Star Wars: The Old Republic has reminded me to make sure I have good context for any conversation.

Free Christmas Fiction from Tad Williams

A Stark And Wormy Knight (affiliate link) is a new ebook collection of short fiction from Tad Williams, available for $4.99 for the next month or so. In celebration of the release, SF Signal and some other sites have posted a short story that was not included in the collection for free. Check out The Sugarplum Favor.

Fiction Improbable on Google Currents (I Hope!)

I have to call on my American friends for help today. I spent some time earlier setting up a Google Currents edition for Fiction Improbable, but being in Canada, I can’t install or run Currents on any of my devices. This means I had to try publishing the edition blind.

If any of you use Google Currents and wouldn’t mind looking Fiction Improbable up on it, I’d be greatly appreciative if you could let me know whether it works, and if it does, if it looks okay.