Space Marine and Dragonwrangler Bar & Grill

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Raventongue

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Hi folks! Racing to finish backreading all 5 pages before I have to catch my bus. Since I love to complain I must say that though it's helped a lot, I'm getting kinda tired of seeing different kinds of professionals at three friggin' offfices in three different parts of the city. When I rule the world I will make a law that they must all share a building. With no coffee. It will be chaos. *steeples fingers*

Muahahahahaha.
 

Raventongue

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You know what? Bugger it. I have 9 minutes, I'm not gonna bother to backread. Look at that, I'm a f***in' rebel.

I will of course give in to the irresistible urge to backread later. :D

ETA: And who the heck set the library computers to give you a 9 minute warning before you run out of alloted daily time rather than 10 minutes before? I mean, why did they bother for one measly minute of difference?

ETAA: If you ever get a chance to go to trivia night a a bar/pub, do it. You will have too much fun to ever pass up. Especially if all your friends are weirdos. Like mine. :D
 

Admiral Snuggles

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ETAA: If you ever get a chance to go to trivia night a a bar/pub, do it. You will have too much fun to ever pass up. Especially if all your friends are weirdos. Like mine. :D

Ya this is the most funnest thing ever. I moved to a small town from a big one. A bar here had trivia nights once a week, which was awesome, made it feel like home. Then a few weeks later the owner of the bar was put in jail for not paying child support and the bar closed down. :*(
 

LadyV

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Finished one critique for the writers meeting. Now I'm just waiting for the other. I also submitted mine. :e2woo:

ETAA: If you ever get a chance to go to trivia night a a bar/pub, do it. You will have too much fun to ever pass up. Especially if all your friends are weirdos. Like mine. :D

Sadly, I don't think there are any places around here that have trivia nights, unless it's a special promotion. :(
 

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Afternoon, Cantina! :D How are things?

Well, today, so far, has been okay. Still kind of tired but I'm still working my way through a cold.

I'm also trying to (better) convince myself to write what I like or whatever I want to write. The whole "focus-on-the-story-the-genre" thing. I really think it's hard for me to pleased with anything I write at all. This could be because I'm mostly comparing myself to other authors who have had loads more writing experience and/or life experience than me at this point. However, some part of my braid feels that this is still a good idea to compare myself to them. I just try to ignore it and not question it. But ignoring it is just hard. :D

But I'm still going to continue with this WIP I have right now. I do like it. Somewhat at least. But I'm still in the beginning phases of it. Also it's still kind of helping me figure out what kind of writer I am I guess. As far as what I like to write and how I write and what works for me. So, I'm still figuring all of that out. But I feel as though I have at least gone, maybe, anywhere from a half of step to two steps forward. So, yay progress! :D
 

jallenecs

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Isn't it odd how story ideas evolve while they're rolling around in your skull? I only wanted to outline a simple story about resistance fighters hiding out in the Appalachian mountains. But when I tried to figure out who they were resisting, things got weird incredibly fast. Now I'm stuck with some interesting characters and a premise I really like, and no idea what to do with them.
 

Reservoir Angel

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I just ended up writing a 2070-word response to a random homophobe on the interwebs.

If only my stories could inspire me to write so much so quickly...
 

maxmordon

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Isn't it odd how story ideas evolve while they're rolling around in your skull? I only wanted to outline a simple story about resistance fighters hiding out in the Appalachian mountains. But when I tried to figure out who they were resisting, things got weird incredibly fast. Now I'm stuck with some interesting characters and a premise I really like, and no idea what to do with them.

Mmm... Perhaps this story helps:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/histo...aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582
 

zanzjan

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I'm also trying to (better) convince myself to write what I like or whatever I want to write. The whole "focus-on-the-story-the-genre" thing. I really think it's hard for me to pleased with anything I write at all. This could be because I'm mostly comparing myself to other authors who have had loads more writing experience and/or life experience than me at this point.

Definitely write what you want to write. Genre is nothing more than a marketing category; worry about it when you're ready to sell your story, not before. Also, comparing yourself to published authors' work? Keep in mind that not only is it published, but it's a final version after who knows how many drafts that's been through the hands of editors.
 

jallenecs

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Mmm... Perhaps this story helps:

Fascinating article. it goes in my notebook. Unfortunately, while the Appalachians are isolated, they're not THAT isolated. So I'm going to have to keep looking for that hook.

What I need is somebody for these little freedom fighters to be fighting against. I thought aliens at first, but why would aliens come to Appalachia, right? If I were an alien invasion, I'd attack the big cities; why go into a backwater?

Then I thought, civil war. But who is against who?

Grrrr.....
 

CobraMisfit

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Definitely write what you want to write. Genre is nothing more than a marketing category; worry about it when you're ready to sell your story, not before. Also, comparing yourself to published authors' work? Keep in mind that not only is it published, but it's a final version after who knows how many drafts that's been through the hands of editors.

This.
 

CobraMisfit

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Fascinating article. it goes in my notebook. Unfortunately, while the Appalachians are isolated, they're not THAT isolated. So I'm going to have to keep looking for that hook.

What I need is somebody for these little freedom fighters to be fighting against. I thought aliens at first, but why would aliens come to Appalachia, right? If I were an alien invasion, I'd attack the big cities; why go into a backwater?

Then I thought, civil war. But who is against who?

Grrrr.....

For aliens: They may not have the strength to attack a major city. Invasion requires a lot of build-up and they could simply be an advanced party/scouts. They set down where populations are minimal and then work their way towards the outskirts of the city in order to collect data for a larger attack force. This would be especially crucial because even with advanced senors from a ship, nothing beats intelligence collected on the ground.
 

jallenecs

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For aliens: They may not have the strength to attack a major city. Invasion requires a lot of build-up and they could simply be an advanced party/scouts. They set down where populations are minimal and then work their way towards the outskirts of the city in order to collect data for a larger attack force. This would be especially crucial because even with advanced senors from a ship, nothing beats intelligence collected on the ground.

Wait wait wait. So you're saying to start the story when the invasion starts? I was originally thinking the invasion happened about six weeks prior, and these guys up in the woods are basically refugees after the fact, a la Red Dawn. But if I do it your way, the aliens have managed to land in the backwater, established a beachhead without the rest of the world noticing? Like Heinlein's Puppet Masters?

That's extremely interesting. And Appalachia would be the perfect place for such a beachhead. We have ZERO military installations, the population is sparse, isolated, insular, and we are so off the radar of the national consciousness that you could set off a nuclear device here and nobody would pay any attention. But despite all that, we're not a day's drive from the Capitol, within a day's driving of half a dozen military bases, less than a day's drive from at least five major metropolitan centers (Atlanta, Cincinnati, Chicago, Nashville, St. Louis).

In other words, the perfect spot for a quiet little beachhead and launching-off point for in-depth recon and intelligence gathering.
 

Raventongue

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I just ended up writing a 2070-word response to a random homophobe on the interwebs.

If only my stories could inspire me to write so much so quickly...

Maybe this is why I don't seem to have issues sitting down to write... Everything I write is sort of like, "Hi, I'm 20 years old. I'm angry. Here's an in-depth look at something I'm angry at, and why you should be angry too, and what if anything you can do about it."

I do have major issues writing coherently though. I guess I just get carried away. Not to mention all these things in the world that seem so obvious to me because they make me angry have to be pointed out to folks who may not have seen or heard about them yet. And even when I get something where people can tell what happened in the story/plot and when and how it happened, I then sometimes have to work on it even further to make the whole "why tell this story" bit that's visible to me visible to the reader.

And then, when it's readable, I have to change it even more to make as many people as possible want to read it.

I think this is why I seem to love editing and hate creating the stuff I later need to edit. The end result of wordage is, at best, some vague tale of something remotely related to something that makes me angry; the end result of editing is, hopefully, a damn good story that just happens to also make people angry in all the right ways and amounts.
 

maxmordon

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Fascinating article. it goes in my notebook. Unfortunately, while the Appalachians are isolated, they're not THAT isolated. So I'm going to have to keep looking for that hook.

What I need is somebody for these little freedom fighters to be fighting against. I thought aliens at first, but why would aliens come to Appalachia, right? If I were an alien invasion, I'd attack the big cities; why go into a backwater?

Then I thought, civil war. But who is against who?

Grrrr.....

Mmm... What about some kind of resources not available in the big cities for the aliens? Flora, fauna, minerals, heck, even water. They could have already destroyed other places as such (Amazon rainforest, the Pacific Northwest, etc.) they try to fight back.
 

CobraMisfit

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Wait wait wait. So you're saying to start the story when the invasion starts? I was originally thinking the invasion happened about six weeks prior, and these guys up in the woods are basically refugees after the fact, a la Red Dawn. But if I do it your way, the aliens have managed to land in the backwater, established a beachhead without the rest of the world noticing? Like Heinlein's Puppet Masters?

That's extremely interesting. And Appalachia would be the perfect place for such a beachhead. We have ZERO military installations, the population is sparse, isolated, insular, and we are so off the radar of the national consciousness that you could set off a nuclear device here and nobody would pay any attention. But despite all that, we're not a day's drive from the Capitol, within a day's driving of half a dozen military bases, less than a day's drive from at least five major metropolitan centers (Atlanta, Cincinnati, Chicago, Nashville, St. Louis).

In other words, the perfect spot for a quiet little beachhead and launching-off point for in-depth recon and intelligence gathering.

I don't want to steer you away from the story you want to tell. The refugee thing works just as well as an advanced party concept. The idea is that they are there either advancing or fleeing. Heck, maybe they got lost on their way to a big battle. Trust me, that can happen.
 

Reservoir Angel

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Yeah, if I could somehow create fiction that I'm angry about while writing it I'd probably get a lot more done.
 

jallenecs

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I don't want to steer you away from the story you want to tell. The refugee thing works just as well as an advanced party concept. The idea is that they are there either advancing or fleeing. Heck, maybe they got lost on their way to a big battle. Trust me, that can happen.

No no no, you're not steering me away from my original idea. You're just giving shape to a rather amorphous starting concept. Before, they were just resisting for the sake of resisting; now they could have a REASON for resisting.

I see these guys as civilians; I'm actively resisting the urge to make them teenagers. When the bad guys arrived, they were able to get out ahead of the sweeps to kill or capture the locals. Now they're sheltering in the hills until they figure out what to do next.

The whole story idea came from a story my sister told me, from some research she was doing for a book she's writing. Seems, according to her reading, during the Revolutionary War, some British general came into the Appalachian mountains (I want to say somewhere in the Shenandoah, but don't hold me to that). He was badass, and didn't think much of the local residents. He supposedly said, "I'll not leave these mountains until we've won." And he didn't: he's buried on top of the same mountain where he made the statement.

I don't know who the guy was, or if the story is even true. But it made me start thinking about just who he thought he was going up against when he started boasting he could whip the Appalachians. Hell, the entire U.S. government couldn't get us to stop brewing moonshine! How the hell could aliens think they could do jack or shit?
 

CobraMisfit

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How the hell could aliens think they could do jack or shit?

Yeah, the invaders could be afflicted with overconfidence with their own technology or tactics or simply ignorant about us as a species.

"Hey, these bipeds are so cute that there's no way they pose a threAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!"
 

BigWords

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I see these guys as civilians; I'm actively resisting the urge to make them teenagers.

I am usually more interested in stories if the characters are a mix of twenty-somethings, middle aged and older characters - reading younger characters gets very samey after a while (and I love grizzled, old, set-in-their-ways characters).
 

jallenecs

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Mmm... What about some kind of resources not available in the big cities for the aliens? Flora, fauna, minerals, heck, even water. They could have already destroyed other places as such (Amazon rainforest, the Pacific Northwest, etc.) they try to fight back.

I'm betting that, if I go with Cobra's suggestion, this little landing isn't the only beachhead. It wouldn't make sense to have just one on a planetary invasion. Maybe there is one in the Amazon, in Siberia, maybe in the Namib: places where they can get the measure of the planet and the people, without drawing too much attention.

The Appalachians -- at least the part I know -- is very rich in resources; even an old cripple like me could go up into the woods and forage off the grid for a long-ass time without too much trouble. I don't know that it would make it an appealing target for alien invasion; I rather imagine the people would be the interesting commodity for them.
 

jallenecs

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I am usually more interested in stories if the characters are a mix of twenty-somethings, middle aged and older characters - reading younger characters gets very samey after a while (and I love grizzled, old, set-in-their-ways characters).

Agreed. I had not considered a mix of people, but I like your suggestion. And it would be well-fitted to the setting.

I DO plan to have at least one encounter with moonshiners. Sometimes the cliches are true: just because the government's been trying to stop 'em for the last 120 or so years hasn't even slowed the moonshiners down!
 

BRDurkin

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Now I want to read this. Make it a book already! :p

But about the Pacific Northwest...I guarantee they would get a stiff fight here, haha. Just sayin...
 

BigWords

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Aliens don't ALWAYS have to be part of an invasion - if you extrapolate an alien society from human ones, then there will be tearaway psychopath kids running around in their parents jeeps and firing off their shotguns at postboxes. Taking it one step further, alien ASBOs on the run from the law... And if you are gonna include moonshine anyways, drunken ASBO aliens is just too tempting not to use. :D
 
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