alanajoli | Entries tagged with choosing fate

As the first Sunday of the month, today was Mythic Greece day, and I had a lovely time in the company of heroes. This was my first attempt at presenting one of the well known heroes of the Trojan War as a child (we're just enough before the Trojan war that these characters are all around, but are youths and young teens). I'm finding myself fonder of Odysseus as an eleven-year-old than I was of him in The Odyssey, but I suspect that's because I'm trying to make him likable to the players (since they'll be traveling with him starting next session, if all goes well).

This was my first attempt at running a 4e session without any combat, and I was roundly thwarted. The players wanted combat, and the 4e rules are really designed so that combat is an important focal point of any adventure. The skill challenges are great, and we had a lot of good role play--but all the cool stuff the PCs can do really revolves around their combat stats. I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this. Combat is certainly imperative to this type of adventure game, and I pretty much like the 4e rules that have been created for it. But I also like adventures where combat can be avoided, evaded, talked around, or otherwise handled--or at least those in which combat is neither a major focus nor necessary to the plot. That said, as a 4e player (my main 4e PC at this point is a fighter), I know I'd be disappointed if there was no fighting in a module, simply because that's really what my character is good at.

That said, it took me all of five minutes to piece together a combat encounter that was not only appropriate in challenge and to the plot, but was also exactly the right amount of xp to get four of the players to 2nd level. I think that's really a great strength of 4e: the speed at which impromptu encounters can be created.

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In other, completely different news, a short story I wrote awhile ago for a Dark Quest anthology, Crown Tales, edited by

dqg_neal, is up for order online. I got this gig through Empty Room Studios, and while I didn't work directly with the Dark Quest editors, I definitely enjoyed having the chance to play in their world. Their material is very rich, and they're playing with some really neat religious concepts--which I made heavy use of in my short story, "Choosing Fate." The anthology also features fiction by Mark Adams and Daniel Tyler Gooden, ERS compatriots of mine. (Mark worked on Steampunk Musha's most recent incarnation, and Daniel is a Baeg Tobar writer.) If you enjoy short fantasy fiction, go ahead and peek over at the sale page and give it a look. :)

Well, as timely as the short story I'm writing is (Tara's still being threatened by the M3), I think it's not going to work for the open call I was hoping to submit it to. I reread the submission guidelines and think they're looking for something far more science fiction and far less urban fantasy.

I'm going to look up other places that'll inspire me to give it a deadline, but in the meantime, I think it's back to work on paying gigs. And editing "Choosing Fate" before the deadline, of course.

Yesterday was a fun productive day. I finished off "Choosing Fate" and got some work done on "Saving Tara." I also did Tae Bo. Now I am suffering. Apparently not stretching ones rib muscles (my sister the massage therapist will be irritated at my calling them that, but I never took anatomy) for months means they get sore when you stretch them and throw some punches. Ow.

So, since Zoukuto seems to be down, today we have word counts via Writertopia:

Choosing Fate

Saving Tara

Not too shabby.

Following the meme trend on

fangs_fur_fey (started by

melissawriting here), I thought I'd post the soundtrack for my books. Here's the rules:

"Pick one of your novels, screenplays, graphic novels, or short stories.

Tell us the name, the pub date & house if there is one. If not, just tell us the name & if the novel is in process, sold, shopping, or something else (i.e. everyone can play not just those on a shelf somewhere).

List 3-6 song titles (& the artist singing the song) that will give a reader a taste of the tone of said novel. Tell us why if you feel so inclined."

I'm just seriously picking one for this game (

frost_light was great and listed a bunch of hers) because there's only one that's really obvious to me. Into the Reach (White Silver, 2006) has a full CD soundtrack, Harris Moore's Stone Circle. I actually went out and bought more of this artist's music to write to because it was so perfect for the mood I was trying to set. (I'd bought the first CD in Ireland, and was relieved that they were on CD Baby as well.)

I think if I were trying to pin down Departure (White Silver, 2007), it would be somewhere between the Celtic instrumental stuff from Harris Moore & friends and the faux-Anglo Saxon riffs from Lord of the Rings, but adding French Horn. I have no idea of such a thing exists. And Regaining Home (White Silver, ?) would build from there, and include more drums.

I borrowed this from

eclectic_writer. It's pretty nifty.

( Who comments the most on this journal? )

I'm amused at how high "Anonymous" is on this list. Although it doesn't really surprise me as editor Shawn Merwin used to post a lot sans screen name before he became

smerwin29. (Wow, is getting a screen name like becoming a superhero and having to take on a secret identity?)

Now, back to writing comics and short stories and things I'm supposed to be doing. (I did a marathon on "Choosing Fate" on Friday night and need to finish the last three scenes. Because I've got them outlined, it's oh so much harder to get back to it. Outlining definitely helps me remember where I was going with ideas, but it takes away a lot of my motivation.)

Or I could go back to playing Knighthood on Facebook. It could go either way today.

Here it is, already December, and I have short stories banging on my door to be written in between the skads of reference work I've managed to bury myself in. As is my usual, since my deadlines are a little bit away, and I just finished a project, I'm letting myself breathe. If I followed this tendency a little less, I would probably not go psycho when my deadline rolled around. I don't consider it procrastination, exactly--it's not like I'm doing things other than work to avoid work, I've just put relaxing higher on the priority list for now.

Enter psycho-busy 'Lana who didn't blog for a week because she was knee deep in coding-author-biographies-xml-help!

But now that I'm on top of the pile for a moment (or have only fallen in up to my ankles as it begins to pile around me again), I wrote two new script pages for Cowboys and Aliens, did some brainstorming with Jeremy Mohler on Worlds at War, and in general got that part of my schedule straightened out for a week or so. I still need some bonus pages, I believe, but nothing I can't manage.

The short stories on the other hand... well, I had three scheduled for December/January, but it looks like one, that was for a contest, is going to get dropped from my plate. (This is okay, since I think

tltrent's piece that I hope she's submitting will rock all the other submissions out of the water. *g*) Which leaves me with two. And they have names, so I'll actually put up the word counts here.

Wish me luck!

"Saving Tara"