Subject: Yep...
Author:
Posted on: 2008-08-13 11:53:00 UTC
FF.net sure does like it's mindless praise, doesn't it? I came close to grovelling to the computer when I once got a good review.
Subject: Yep...
Author:
Posted on: 2008-08-13 11:53:00 UTC
FF.net sure does like it's mindless praise, doesn't it? I came close to grovelling to the computer when I once got a good review.
I've got an original fiction in the works and I'm a bit confused.
Would elves (though they're not Tolkien rip-offs like usual) be Supernatural or Fantasy genre. Because they do have roots in the supernatural.
Also, what's FictionPress's website? Or is there something better?
Thanks for the help, but I've since decided that it was fantasy. Supernatural is probably only ghosts etc, isn’t it?
Sorry that I couldn’t give a better explanation before, but my time at the library was almost up and I was about to get booted off the computer because of it. Anyway, here's the plot outline. It's still only a draft and could potentially change at any time. It's met with mixed comments from the few I've shown it to so far. I've also just recently changed a few things, so if something doesn't make any sense, call me out on it.
The year on Earth is 22?? (unsure of exact year. Probably the latter part of the century). Kyle Redfield, Europe’s stealthiest burglar, has been a thorn in the side of the police for over fifteen years. When a strange woman arrives at his door, bloodied and beaten, he feels a strange urge to take her in rather than send her to a hospital. As he nurses her back to health, he hacks into police files and finds no mention of the woman ever existing.
Demanding answers, Mala tells him that the worlds of magic and science used to be one, but split apart centuries before because of an unknown cataclysm/someone who wanted to separate them (haven’t decided). So far, so cliché. But don’t worry. I try to put an original spin on all clichés.
During the time they were separated, the magical world, Orlornu, faced a deadly danger and so the Circle was created, a ruling council with absolute power composed of a male and a female of every race: elf, nymph, troll, pixie, ogre, vampire and more. The Circle managed to save Orlornu from destruction, but the power they wielded began to corrupt them. Within a century, they had almost total control of Orlornu, but they wanted more.
Some of the rebels who refused the Circle’s rule attempted to fight back, but most fled through discovered rifts in reality and arrived on Earth in the early 20th century. Since then, the rebels have slowly tried to convince humans of the coming fight while the Circle’s minions hunted each of them down. While the rebel’s numbers were slowly whittled down to less than a hundred, the Circle’s power somehow continued to grow. Now, as their invasion force numbers into the millions, they have almost enough power to start to directly affect Earth and cause chaos throughout the planet: alter human minds on an immense scale to tie them up in massive, senseless wars; alter Earth’s geography to cause volcanic eruptions under major cities or even, if they so chose, burn away the atmosphere entirely.
Kyle refuses to believe her at first, thinking her to be a crazy woman who somehow escaped the government’s records. But when Mala is attacked by the ogre who caused her so much damage before, he starts to realise the truth of what she said. But will he be able to fight against the magic slowly polluting the world?
The answer is obviously yes as he’s the main character. I just nicked part of this off of a blurb I once wrote for it. It was riddled with clichés like that. Try this one: “If he wants to survive, he must fight for everything he believes in before it is destroyed by everything he doesn’t believe in.” Clichéd or what? Sounds like a B-movie.
But anyway, the magic is sort of undefined. If you want to do something, you can do it, as long as you have the power and the will to do it. It seems like a deux ex machine, but the Circle are the ones with the real power, not the good guys. All of the races have magic with the possible exception of vampires and the like. They might have something else. Cloaking and disguising spells are the easiest, which is how everyone moves around Earth without detection. Fire magic is the most commonly used as it’s one of the easiest things to summon and control.
This leads to the only way to detect a cloaked/disguised person: infrared (also the title of the series). Under an infrared detector, the person shows up as pure white because of the energy of the fire magic inside them. They can contain it inside them so that they don’t burn anyone they touch (though their skin always feels hot), but they can’t control it enough to appear as anything other than white on infrared. On a related note, exactly what temperature is white on an infrared scanner? Because I may need to change this slightly if it’s stupidly hot.
Yes, I know this sounds so dreadful that I should probably just give up now, but a) it sounds far, far better in my head and b) I just want to give it a try anyway. But any other helpful hints?
If they're the only magical element in an otherwise realistic setting, I'd say Supernatural. If there are other magical elements, it's more fantasy.
Myself, I'd use LiveJournal. There are numerous fiction communities there. You might not get as many reviews as you would on FictionPress, but the overall quality of your fellow posters is much higher.
"If there are other magical elements, it's more fantasy."
There are other magical creatures and random magic, so yes. It's also got some sci-fi in.
"There are numerous fiction communities there."
You mean like Deletrius, but for actual fics rather than sporks? I thought Deletrius only had the last twenty or so things posted, though. So isn't that a bad idea if you're looking for readers?
"creative writing," "fantasy," or other similar things for Interests, you will find numerous comms where people post their work for others to read. These can be much better than FictionPress if you're looking for honest concrit rather than illiterate praise.
If they were, in fact, supernatural, or other elements in the story pushed it into the supernatural, that might be different. As in, if you actually were using the Norse roots. But if you're not, then I'd say probably fantasy.
http://www.fictionpress.com/ is FictionPress's website. I don't know about where else to post original fiction, but I'm kind of afraid of that website because of the ties which link them to the Pit.
"As in, if you actually were using the Norse roots."
Elves are Norse? I thought they were German? I'm now picturing Elrond on a Viking ship. It's an odd image.
"I'm kind of afraid of that website because of the ties which link them to the Pit."
*shudders* The only reason that I go to FF.net is really because it's got the simplest interface that I've encountered. Is FP created by the same people, because the one time I went there, it seemed almost identical except for a red logo.
I've never truly read LotR. I once got to Frodo's section of The Two Towers and then gave up. That was three years ago. I'm trying again and they've just left Caradhras. Feanor was the guy after the Silmarils that Morgoth/Melkor/89 other names stole, wasn't he?
And is it just me, or is LotR a songfic in disguise? I'm not talking about the songs themselves, but how they speak. "Better the orc you fear than the wolf you hear," for instance. It's like 'Once More, With Feeling', only without a tapdancing demon in it.
It's cool if LotR isn't your bag, but comparing the classic foundation of an entire genre of literature to common songfic is not going to sit well with many people here. Just so you know.
The following isn't personal, it's just me tangentially explaining what I think.
Language and thought are connected. There was a time when speech took as long as it needed to say what was meant, before TV and the Internet came and thoughts were reduced to sound bytes and then became as stunted as the contents of the average text message. Maybe there's no room for lyricism in modern language, but I, for one, think that's an unfortunate loss. How do you learn to think in beautiful language if you never experience it? What can we say about the contents of our thoughts if we can't express them with some finesse?
I'm not saying that all language should be flowery and poetic, because that gets annoying, but there's a big difference between a songficcer inserting lines of pop songs into their writing because they thought it would be cool, and Tolkien inventing a little rhyme because, for that moment in the story, it said exactly what he meant it to say. That's part of what makes a great writer, after all: The ability to impart great meaning with a few carefully chosen words.
I'm going to get off the soapbox, but I close with a quote from Charles de Lint's "The Conjure Man," which sums up what good writing is all about:
"The stories are just stories--they entertain, they make one laugh or cry--but if they have any worth, they carry within them a deeper resonance that remains long after the final page is turned, or the storyteller has come to the end of his or her tale. Both aspects of the story are necessary for it to have any worth."
~Neshomeh
(platonically, of course.)
Yes, it is.