Subject: ??
Author:
Posted on: 2013-06-24 22:16:00 UTC
How can Valon be both jumpy AND mellow?
Subject: ??
Author:
Posted on: 2013-06-24 22:16:00 UTC
How can Valon be both jumpy AND mellow?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dAHItOdWvikOr1Jc9p-PZfAHTuEVJOWOHXSgfXJsMjc/edit?usp=sharing
I don't know whether this would work as one, but... eh.
This happens right before Kinky like STABBING YOU IN THE FACE, which I co-wrote with Lielac.
Both of those links lead to the same place, New Lodgings. Meaning you're missing the link for Kinky.
Enclosed in one post!
Sample: New Lodgings
Agent name: Valon Vance
Department: Department of Mary Sues, Freelance division
Weapons of choice: Guns, hammers, improvised weapons
General demeanor: Cheerful, jumpy, mellow
Appearance: Scruffy beard, thin mustache, short and greasy brown hair, tall and thin, blue-green eyes, crowded teeth
Good points: Generally cheerful, wide array of knowledge, humorous, slow to anger
Bad points: Easily startled, talks too much, has little in the way of common sense, lacks spatial awareness, colorblind
Agent Name: Jean Chandler
Department of Mary Sues, Freelance division
Weapon of choice: Saber, small arms
General demeanor: Hotheaded, serious, determined
Appearance: Well-groomed brown hair, green eyes, lean build
Good points: Good with a saber, inquisitive, dedicated
Bad points: Irritable, ignorant of a number of continua
First intended target: Sukai Toppa Gurren Lagann
I'm aware Neshomeh has already said this, so I'll try not to repeat anything. I also, obviously, won't say anything about Permission - I think Nesh's post constitutes a reply to that question.
Okay, starting with the agents... I'm rather concerned that you went from 'I'm not sure what Jean's going to be like' to posting a bio in 12 minutes. That doesn't seem to be long enough to put together a full character - and, in fact, the really tiny bio seems to support that idea. A few specific points:
-You asked 'is this a good contrast with Valon?', which is a decent question - but shouldn't be the core of your character design. A character needs to stand by itself, not solely as part of a pair.
-Um... since Jean in English is a female name, but in French is a male one (and shows up a lot in English usage that way)... is your character male or female? This actually doesn't matter, but it's one of the first things most people decide on making a character. The fact that you didn't mention it suggests you were rushing (or that you have a deliberately genderless character, but I doubt it).
-You just... haven't said very much. We can tell that Jean is probably fairly headstrong - but does 'hotheaded' and 'inquisitive' come out as 'impulsive', or do 'serious' and 'dedicated' make 'painstaking'? Both are reasonable conclusions. There are heaps of other unanswered questions, too.
Moving onto Valon, then... I have only one real question:
-What sort of colourblind is he? Because there's a lot of difference. 'New Lodgings' suggests he might be at least red-green, since he apparently missed the Big Red Button that turns off the console (and if you didn't do that deliberately, you should have!). On the other hand, as someone who actually is r-g colourblind, I suspect that would make him incapable of seeing urple (since r-g means I can't see a difference between purple and blue - or pink, depending on the purple). If he's fully colourblind, all these apply even more - I know someone who is, and yes, everything is literally shades of grey. There's also blue-yellow, which is rare, and I don't know much about it.
If you're putting something into a character, you need to know how it works - how it will affect them. Every time I write a story with Dafydd, I have to remind myself that he only has one hand now. If you have a fully-colourblind Valon, but have him marvelling at the vivid greenness of the trees... well. (An example: we have a camellia bush. Every spring, my family insist they can see those flowers from the far end of the garden. They're clearly lying - I have to be within five meters to notice them...)
Moving onto the story... Nesh is right that there's something faintly off about Valon's lines. Partly, that's also a storytelling issue: his monologue actually repeats something the narration has already told us. It may be a perfectly natural reaction for him, but consider this.
The horse slid slowly backwards into the crevasse as my partner approached.
I shook my head. "That's not something you see often - a horse falling into a pit."
Mortic arrived at my side. "Okay, what'd I miss?"
"Well, a horse just fell into a hole in the ground," I filled him in.
Mortic's brow furrowed. "A horse? Into a chasm?"
Yes, they might well say those if they were real people - but by this point the audience are screaming "GET ON WITH IT!". In your specific case, I'd probably have cut out the recap altogether:
... he looked around the Response Centre.
"Well," he decided, "Lovecraft nods his silent approval. I guess this place got imported from Innsmouth or something."
And another point on continuity (to go with the colourblindness): are you keeping all that stuff? Are you going to use it? What I mean is, are your agents going to hang things on the skeleton, perch on the table, complain that the sofa's rotting and throw darts at Cthulhu - or are they going to exist in a vague, generic space with a console, a cupboard, and maybe a chair or two?
If you actually use it, I think the Response Centre Of Terror could be a brilliant way to liven up the intros and extros of your missions. If you don't, it'll be a somewhat jarring waste.
A few more points:
-Most people on the Internet paragraph by leaving an empty line. It's a lot easier to read. You have got indenting going on (which is incredibly rare online - probably because most places don't support tabbing in!), which is the usual approach in print - but I think I still prefer blank lines for the screen. That may be just preference, though.
-Marking comments as resolved doesn't get rid of them. ;) The best way to publish things through GDrive is to, well, publish them. You'll find it at File>Publish to the web, and it strips out a lot of the user interface to leave a nice clean page like this.
-Some of your description is a bit confusing. I'm looking at Valon dragging his bags into 'what could charitably be called a broom closet'. Is that supposed to mean the RC is tiny, in which case you've got a lot of stuff in there? Is there an actual broom closet, clearly marked so he could find it, but too dirty or something to be a proper broom closet? Is there a bedroom or something which is very small, and also very easy to find? I can't tell.
-... I'll leave a newline for this one...
--> ALL THAT BEING SAID... I actually quite liked your intro piece. I'm nitpicking because I'm currently wearing my Permission Giver Hat, but I think Valon has potential to be pretty funny, given the chance. And I do like the RC Of Terror.
hS
Thank you so much for your input, my writing desperately needed unbiased and constructive criticism. That applies to Nesh as well.
I suppose I should clarify some things...
I'm going to guess that most PG's don't frequent the IRC, since I've mentioned several times that Jean is a girl.
I did in fact plan on doing some things with the skeleton.
Hm, I didn't know that red-green color blindness would make one immune to urple... And him not noticing the Big Red Button was just a happy coincidence, since I didn't know about it at the time. I made him like that because... Well, he's kinda me. Yes, I'm partly colorblind, which makes certain tasks a bit difficult.
I have written a separate piece for Jean, but I can't link to it from my phone. I'll be sure to do that when I get home, though.
Once again, thank you both for your thoughts. I'll try to improve the stuff when I get off work!
is sort of a different place from the 'Board. As hS says, you sort of need to have everything in one place. Techno-Dann, just Dann on the IRC, is a PG; I am a PG; Makari, if I'm not much mistaken, is also a PG. But the three of us are not always going to be the ones with the time and energy to respond to a request. Since they must be submitted here, some of us might not see them for a few days - I saw that Neshomeh and Huinesoron were responding with more constructive criticism than I had in me, and left it be.
But yeah - if you mention a few threads down that Jean is a girl, but forget to give a gender here, the PGs who read that thread might notice, but it's going to make them go "...wait, consistency?"
I can't speak for 'most PGs', but I never set digital foot in the IRC. The point was more about putting everything in one place - I did assume you knew whether she was female or not. ;)
As to colour-blindness and urple... urple is defined as the worst possible combination of pink and purple. If you can't see purple, that makes it a combination of pink and blue, or of pink and pink. For myself, I always visualise it as being hot pink - that, or that weird visual effect you get when you put red and blue against each other in MSPaint. Regardless, if the purple component is essential to the full effect, it won't hit someone who can't see purple as hard.
('Certain tasks', huh? I'm a laboratory chemist... it's heaps of fun trying to distinguish the purple->blue endpoint of a calcium titration...)
hS
but I'd rather ask here than start a new thread just to ask one person one question:
Huinesoron, how did you decide on "hS" as your signature, as opposed to, say, "HS" or your full username?
This image is why. Those are Tengwar (or Tolkien's Elven letters, if that didn't mean anything to you) for the letters H (in yellow) and S (in blue - technically this one is backwards). As you can see, the H is distinctly smaller - and when I draw it by hand, it actually sits entirely inside the loop of the S. Small h, big S - hence, hS.
hS, and that's the first time my signature has been the most repetitive part of a post
And what is the significance of that image? Did you see it somewhere, or did you just make it up?
Like I said, it's a set of initials that happens to look quite stylish when done properly. The name 'Huinesoron' came first, then I noticed that the hyarmen can nestle into the silma, and the signature was born.
hS
*hopes desperately that no one ever asks about the randomly capitalized letter in her screen name, since she's forgotten why it's there*
That was a pretty fascinating post, though. Actually, a fun thread would be one where everyone either explained or said something interesting about their screen name. We should do that sometime.
~DF
We last had it just over a year ago, and I seem to recall at least one more In The Mists Of Time... which all goes to show that there's nothing new under Hawkelf* - and that good ideas just keep coming back round.
hS
*Er, this might need a bit of explanation... Hawkelf was a Boarder way back in the day. She lived in the ceiling for reasons beyond remembering. Since the Board is clearly not outside, that means we're not under the sun, we're under the ceiling - ergo, under Hawkelf.**
**Yes, this is the same Hawkelf as appears in OFUDisc - which includes at least one reference to the ceiling thing...
How can Valon be both jumpy AND mellow?
He's not bothered by a lot of things, but anything sufficiently loud and sudden will startle him.
I hate not being able to edit.
Anyway, intended fic for first solo-writing mission: Sukai Toppa Gurren Lagann
Do you mean you're planning to send Valon in alone (against the express wishes of the Flowers), or that you've got a partner lined up for him? If the latter, I'll need to see the partner's bio, too. If the former... er, why?
~Neshomeh, currently reading "Kinky Like Stabbing" etc.
Department of Mary Sues, Freelance division
Weapon of choice: Saber, small arms
General demeanor: Hotheaded, serious, determined
Appearance: Well-groomed brown hair, green eyes, lean build
Good points: Good with a saber, inquisitive, dedicated
Bad points: Irritable, ignorant of a number continua
Is this a good contrast with Valon? Jean will appear in my first actual mission.
In theory, yes, but this is a really bare-bones style of description, and I haven't gotten to see her in action yet.
I think you should take some time—at least a week, more to be safe—and work on your characters some more, write a bit of backstory or something for Jean to give us an idea of who she really is in practice. Then come back and put together a solid Permission request, with all the pieces fully prepared and put together in one post that you've checked over thoroughly before you hit "Post Reply." The ability to think things through and put your ducks in a row ahead of time is important for mission-writing.
On the plus side, I will say that Valon looks to be in pretty good shape, though I'm relieved that you weren't planning to write a whole mission of him talking to himself. It's really hard to carry that off in a way that sounds natural, and it doesn't quite work in the writing sample. However, his interactions with Maggie are fine, so I'm not too worried about it as long as he has someone to bounce dialogue off of.
I also think your writing is pretty solid in general, and has good humor, though you belabored the description of the response center a bit. I personally didn't need to be told it was "like a haunted house" and "the ultimate in cheesy horror." The two lines are fairly redundant, and you'd already shown me those qualities in the preceding paragraph. Also, watch out for picky things like when to capitalize (usually not for generic terms like "response center"), when to italicize (almost always for titles of long works like Psycho and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann [but not Bionicle]), and when to use semicolons (to relate independent clauses to one another, not to introduce material; that's what a colon is for).
If you're confused or have questions about anything, please ask. I'm happy to help.
~Neshomeh
I'm still working on them, though. I'm not sure what Jean's going to be like, I'll get back to you on that.
Agent name: Valon Vance
Department: Department of Mary Sues, Freelance division
Weapons of choice: Guns, hammers, improvised weapons
General demeanor: Cheerful, jumpy, mellow
Appearance: Scruffy beard, thin mustache, short and greasy brown hair, tall and thin, blue-green eyes, crowded teeth
Good points: Generally cheerful, wide array of knowledge, humorous, slow to anger
Bad points: Easily startled, talks too much, has little in the way of common sense, lacks spatial awareness, colorblind