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That if I let myself go, I'd be at hS's ego until it was. Apolgies for the connotations.

Yeah, hS's was one of the first spinoffs I read, and I am... unusually enamored.

The fix is to have a length limit and an end point in mind when you start writing. If you get to the end point and you've exceeded the limit by a significant amount, you go back and figure out what you need to cut. Not every joke is your best joke; not every charge is a vital one. There's always something you can afford to lose. Your beta(s) may be instrumental in helping you identify what that is.

Your end point will, of course, influence your mission length. If you're PPCing 20,000 words of fic, that's probably going to result in a longer mission than 12,000 words of fic.

More agents also tends to result in higher word counts, which is one reason two is the ideal number.

~Neshomeh

P.S. Thoth, I'm sure you didn't mean to imply that hS has an overinflated ego? {= )

Actually, I think you may be echoing something I said about myself at one point... but the rest of that comment was that I still like it, even if I don't need it. ^_~

Notable exceptions being doctorlit, HG, and Tomash, who have a great record of responding to everything they possibly can even if they should probably be eating or sleeping instead doc. ^_~

But yeah, for the rest of us? Input has to equal or exceed output, or the system is not sustainable. That's a thing we all need to be aware of in all our relationships, not just here, and make sure we're doing our part to keep them alive and well.

For the record, I'm awful at this. I've heard you shouldn't keep a ledger for your relationships, but if I don't I'm way too inclined to just take whatever I can get and run. I keep a balance sheet when I care enough not to do that. I reckon our resident Aspies can relate to this?

~Neshomeh

What I really want from a review is to know how the work made you feel when you read it. I want to know if you laughed or not, if you sympathized with the characters or not, if you cared or not.

That's pretty much it. I know not everyone is great at active reading—being aware of your own responses in the moment; having a sort of dialogue with the work as you read it—and that does improve with practice, but there's no special art to conveying this information once you're aware of it. The stream-of-consciousness type commentary you guys do is great for this. Please keep it up!

Technical points are great, too, but honestly, that's of secondary value. If the thing I did didn't have the impact I wanted, that's a sign to me to analyze my technique and seek more input about how I could have done it better. First and foremost: get on the couch and tell me how it makes you feel! ^_~

~Neshomeh

I'm on a bus, though, so I'll keep to this bit for now.

Why I personally may not review:

Sometimes I may feel I have nothing constructive to add (and we did go through a period of people complaining against one-line "this was good!" type comments, IIRC), but it's usually because I didn't read it.

Why didn't I read it:

- As hS says, as an adult, the time and energy commitment is costlier to me than it was when I was in college. If I have a choice between devoting my free time to reading and reviewing a mission or something else, the mission has to be more rewarding than the other thing.

- To be blunt, it usually isn't. It's nothing personal. It's just that I've been a PPCer for fifteen years; I've read a LOT of missions. It takes more to get my attention these days, even if it's in a continuum I know and by a writer I like.

I'd like to stress that I don't think this means the writing quality has dropped off (how would I know?) or that the community has changed for the worse (more thoughts on "drama" another time). Mostly, it's that I have changed. I'm at a radically different place in my life than most of the rest of you. That's no one's fault, and nothing to panic over.

- I may not care for the continuum or the style of the writer. We all have our preferences.

Now, let me answer the corollary of why I may read and review:

- As an older, more experienced member, it's something I expect of myself. Occasionally this feels burdensome, but I figure if I'm going to hang around with you kids, I should at least occasionally make an effort to embrace my adulthood and the position of mentor.

- As an older, more experienced member, I DO often have thoughts to contribute that others may not. Sharing my expertise with someone who values it is rewarding for me.

- If I like you and have a good relationship with you, I'm way more likely to read and comment on your stuff. I know I personally don't make it too easy to get to know me, though, so I don't fault anyone else on this point. More on community another time.

- If you engage with my writing/other output, I'm more likely to engage with yours. More on the social contract another time.

I think that's all the major points? Again, though, on a bus. I may have missed things.

~Neshomeh

So the way I see it, there are a few common obstacles to missions. Here they are, itemized. I'll also try and propose some solutions or something.

1. Mission Length: Missions have been getting longer, yeah. Go reread the Blood Raining Night mission again, and at the front, Past!Nesh talks about how 30 pages is HUUUGE for a mission. Nowadays, that's... pretty average, I think. No real easy fix for that.

2. The Comicbook Problem: As you write more missions, continuity piles up, making the whole thing increasingly inpenetrable to newcomers. A lot of spinoffs get bitten by this, but I think Ix gets it the worst: Ix's spinoffs are really long, but also have a strong character drama focus, with an overarching arc of character development throughout. As such, if you don't read them all, you find yourself at a disadvantage because you're missing stuff—at least, that's the impression I've gotten, part of why I haven't gotten into them yet. Let me know if I'm wrong.

There are a few ways to deal with this:

-Don't build strong continuity: If you don't have a strong arc and character development focus, this isn't so bad for you. Trojie and Pads are a great example of this: that spinoff has a ton of missions, but you can pretty much read whatever you want, and most of them can more or less stand alone. Larf described the spinoff as "like a Saturday-morning cartoon" once, and I think he nailed it. A lot of early spinoffs also did this, as the emphasis was more on the snark and goofiness than the characters in the early days, but they were short enough that it didn't really matter.

-The "Cosmere" Approach: Dubbed as such after Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere. Sayeth TVTropes, Sanderson created the Cosmere because he "desire to create an epic length series without requiring readers to buy a ridiculous amount of books." But TVT isn't the most accurate source, I can't be sure that's true. Anyways he interlinked a ton of shorter series that all stood on their own into a larger, overarching universe. That way, newcomers had a wide variety of entry points, each series was short enough not to overwhelm, and you still got the benefits of a larger, more elaborate setting if you were willing to read all the things. In the PPC, the strongest example of this sort of thing is by far hS. hS's spinoff stuff is big. Really big. There is quite a bit of it. But see, it never feels big, because it's split up into a large number of interconnected series that can be, more or less, read in any order, each with satisfying character arcs (well, most of them, anyways. The arc-centric ones). I first started reading with Lofty Skies, Crashing Down, Not the DIO, Swan's Egg, and Tales from DoGA. But had I gone through Newbies, Origins, Wanderer, DWT, and Elsewhere In Action, I would have been just as able to comprehend things. This is a massive strength, and a credit to hS's writing. It's also a credit that he uses the large cast he has to make the PPC feel really alive and active, and to keep the goofiness of the PPC alive while he actually does genuinely serious character arcs. But enough stroking hS's ego. He doesn't need it.

-Not writing many missions: This is the simple approach: you don't have to manage complexity if you never create it. Although it has its own problems, of course. Many PPCers use this strategy. Like me! (but I'm working on it.)

3. The Canons-you-don't-know problem: I'll be honest... I don't see this as a problem so much. I mean, it is slightly, but it's not disasterous. The first trick is ensuring that people who don't know the canon don't get lost, which... I am notoriously bad at. Heck, I failed to get my Permission first time around for a large part because I didn't give proper context for my characters and most of my betas knew them already such that they couldn't catch the issue ahead of time. Massive failing on my part. So... if you want your mission to be decipherable to people who don't know the canon, get betas who don't know the canon, and get them to tell you when they're confused.

The other trick is holding the uninitiated reader's interest. This is really a test of your abilities as a writer, and of the strength of your agents. Because in the absence of canon knowledge, the horror of the fic's crimes against that canon aren't as strong a draw, nor is the joy of seeing all those bad tropes you see in your ff.net browsings day after day getting ripped into. So what remains is the strength of the characters and their interactions (and their snark—this is the PPC after all), which really ought to be the central focus anyways. We may be critics, but the primary focus of a PPC mission is to entertain.

Part of the reason this has never been so much a probkem is because reading fics in canons I don't know well or don't care about was a big part of my PPC experience. I don't even know if I'd read LoTR when I first stumbled across TOS, and even if I had, I was mocked at the time for not knowing the difference between Barad-dur and Khazad-dun. I wasn't a dedicated Rings fan, but I devoured TOS and OFUM, because they were funny and clever and enjoyable. Heck, a good mission can even get someone into something. Seeing Nume and Illraen deal with Young Wizards made me want to read it just as much as the board threads that were appearing at the time, a Labyrinth mission is what definitively put it on my list for watching (I will, I swear!), if I hadn't read LoTR by then, ToS inspired me to do so, Suicide put GoF on my radar and got me to read it (and made it weird as hell but that's another story), and while Pern had been on my list for a while, Nume, Illraen, and Derik sealed the deal.

That's about it for now.

I admit I don't know enough about music to really delve into the intricacies of how they're written.

But I will take the opportunity to gush about one of my favorite soundtracks, namely to the musical Hamilton. An obvious pick, yes, but I love the clever lyrics, use of different music styles and the way the story is told. The words flow together smoothly and the music reflects the character and story beats (and being me a history buff doesn't hurt my enjoyment of the musical one bit... even if there are some creative liberties taken).

Sorry for the simplistic terms, I'm not smart enough to understand all the technical details. I could link to someone else who understands it better than I could...

I love id Software. The board ought to know this by now. So let's start there. IMHO, Wolf3D doesn't stand the test of time, so on to the next one.

Enough has been written about the Doom soundtrack. It's great. It's also MIDI, so everyone will probably hear something slightly different. Anyone remember MIDI? Yeah.

Also, it just rips off a ton of metal. All the metal. Still great though.

Quake! Wait, Quake had a soundtrack? Yes. Yes it does. Composed by Nine Inch Nails, no less. You probably haven't noticed it because it's really ambient. Well, except for that title theme. If you have the Steam version, you may never have heard any of that, because Quake had a Redbook soundtrack. Read: the CD was actually an audio CD, and the game won't play the soundtrack unless it's in the drive, because it doesn't exist on disc. So the Steam version doesn't even contain a soundtrack. Thankfully, there are ways to get it working again if you download a modern sourceport.

Quake 2 got hit with the redbook problem too. Which is a shame, because speaking as a metal fan, Quake 2's soundtrack is killer. I mean, listen to this!. Q2's soundtrack is the best part of that game, easy. Which isn't hard, because it's the weakest Quake game, also easy. Throwing out the horror and oppressivenes for sci-fi action and space marines killing borg didn't serve the game well, and neither did the endless brown and grey. The Edge was a bangin' DM level, though.

And finally, Quake 3, the best deathmatch game ever devised by man. I know that's high praise, but I really really really really really like this game. They brought in a few bands on this one, including the Quake 2 guys. Sonic Mayhem 1 and 5 are particularly memorable, but the one that sticks out to me most is probably this one. Because it seems to play whenever I load up Q3DM17, which is probably the most played map in Quake 3 by a mile. It's also not a very good map, but that's another story.

But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Unreal Tournament, Quake 3's competition. Because that game also has a soundtrack, and what a soundtrack it is. Alexander Brandon is widely regarded as brilliant, and this more theatrical soundtrack doesn't disappoint. The song everyone remembers is Foregone Destination, which backed Facing Worlds, the UT99 equivalent of Q3DM17. Well, that and the fantastic Menu theme. That thing is great.

Even better, and by the same guy, is the theme to Deus Ex. Oh jeez. I can listen to that all day.

More to come, probably.

I'm writing this as you were three chapters in, and I'm very glad you're liking it.

It does sound like a really fun idea, but I can definitely understand being thankful for a youthful endeavor being kept out of the wider world. In fact, I just watched a video on that same subject. It's quite amusing.

It really does seem a lovely subversion of the whole "child of destiny" shtick. It reminds me of something, too, but I can't for the life of me remember what.

But my vote goes to Alchemy or Chemistry. I really love And It Goes All the Way Down, it's got a great sense of mystery to it, but I just can't say no to a college student interacting with dragons and alchemy and the like, especially in Scotland.

AKA, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone... translated into Scottish.



Just from the chapter list alone, the Sorting Hat is the Bletherin Bunnet, Quidditch is Bizzumbaw, and Diagon Alley is The Squinty Gate.

Voldemort is You-Ken-Wha, Snape is Snipe, Dumbledore is Dumbiedykes, Filch is Feechs, Slytherin is Slydderin, Hufflepuff is Hechlepech, Ravenclaw is Corbieclook ... It's pretty glorious.

A few equally glorious sentences from this book:


"WHEESHT!" yelloched Uncle Vernon, and a couple o ettercaps fell aff the ceilin.


"Whit are these?" Harry spiered to Ron, haudin up a poke o Chocolate Puddocks.


Ron had awready had a muckle rammy wi Dean Thomas, wha shared their dormitory, aboot fitba.


"Whit wid you ken aboot it, Weasley, you couldnae even affort tae buy hauf the hanule," Malfoy snashed back.


He'd jist got awfie crabbit wi the Weasleys, wha keepit dive-bombin each ither and pretendin tae faw awff their bizzums.


Sae usefu tae hae him swoofin aroond ike an owergrown bawkie bird.


...It was $12 with shipping for me from the Barnes and Noble website, if you're interested in this amazing translation.

At this point, I've mostly resigned myself to the fact that all of my published missions and interludes might as well be writing for the drawer. Length of missions doesn't have anything to do with it; while my cowrites tend to be rather... on the long side (to put it lightly), my average mission is about 20 pages in a Google Doc, or 8k words. I'll get one, maybe two comments on any of them if I'm lucky.

The only thing people turn out to read these days are the bigger event pieces. Ix and Charlotte's wedding had the most responses that I'd seen on any of my missions since... well, around the time I did Little Miss Mary. The last two years, people have just... sort of stopped responding.

And yes, I know I don't exactly help the problem. I can't remember the last time I bothered to read a mission that wasn't by an author whose agents I didn't already know.

Confession time: it's because I'm petty. If nobody's reading my missions, why should I bother to do the same?

To take a specific example: Blank Sprite is perfectly enjoyable. I remember only the vaguest things about the agents, know nothing about the canons, but I've read three chapters so far and will be moving onto the fourth when I've stopped replying to things on the Board. ^_~ The problem has never been that I start reading and go 'uggh, who are all these people?' - it's that I never start reading at all.

And partly that's length. When I wrote the Woodsprite of the North mission, it was ridiculously long, clocking in at around 11,500 words. Terri's note at the top of it describes it as 'one of the more epic DOGA missions'.

Well, Of Wolves and Fellowship (my most recent full-length 'real' mission) is only 3000 words shy of that. Ix and Delta's mission at the bottom of the front page is 2000 more than it. Compare that to TOS, where around 5000 words is fairly normal. Missions have been getting longer - and I've been getting lazier.

And partly it's lack of connection. Back In The Day, I talked to loads of Boarders on MSN Messenger; I was friends with them on LJ. When Gundamkiwi wrote a mission, I didn't go 'oh, anime, skip' - I went 'hey, it's Kiwi!'. Now, even the people I know best on the Board, I only interact with here or in occasional emails. I know, other options are still out there, but I have my own issues with those - not least of which is time.

And partly, yeah, it's time. I used to read every mission that came through, because I was a university student with loads of downtime and no friends. Now, I'm at work all day, spending time with my wife in the evenings, and entertaining small children at the weekends. Whether it's 5K or 15K, I don't have the time to settle down with a mission I'm not sure I'm going to enjoy. (Most books I read nowadays are ones I've already read, too. I'm working through the latter Discworld novels at the moment, among other things.)

What can a writer do to counter that? I don't know. I've tried various things myself - short missions is my big one - but they didn't have a huge impact. Too many confounding factors. I don't know.

hS

How understandable/enjoyable should a mission be if you don't know the canon? Does it depend on the fic and what exactly's bad about it?

(And, from what I can tell, all we know about the related question "How understandable should a PPC story be if you don't know the spinoff?" is that many recent stories are having problems in this regard.)

- Tomash

I've written my own view of what would happen if a time traveller with access to the PPC's abilities decided they had the right to fix things; it's not pretty. Much like superheroes (hello, Injustice!), time travellers have to be limited in what they can do, or else you end up facing the simple question: why does anything go wrong? (Which is also a question that bugs religious people no end, though there are plenty of answers on that end.) That goes double - triple - when they're limited to a fairly compact group of people, and PPC HQ is smaller than a major city.

hS

Morgan doesn't have a monopoly on protecting the PPC - she just feels like she should. So anyone who started doing 'her job' for her would, in fairly short order, have to deal with an official visit from the Tigereye Castellan.

Which is fine if that's what you want to write (and if you get permission to borrow her, obvs); but that doesn't seem to be what you were thinking of.

My point with 'small setting' is that it sounded like you were planning on having Grace mostly move in HQ; whether you assume 1000 or 100,000 agents, that's tiny compared to the universe the Doctor is looking after. That means a roving temporal mechanic (so to speak) will either a) have very little to do, or b) be flabbergasted by the number of ways agents nearly destroy the fabric of reality, which (given the people in HQ) would lead directly to c) lots of other time travellers and the like interfering with her by trying to fix things themselves.

As to the hiatus on Emergencies... I actually graphed this a few years back, and it turned out that there wasn't really a hiatus at all. Take a look:



I'm not sure what's happened since 2015 that would qualify, but I'm certain there have been some. Just because we didn't tack the label 'Emergency' on the Blackout, for instance, doesn't mean it isn't one... :)

I still hold that time travel within HQ must be wildly dangerous; moving in a six-dimensional space that's already known to have multiple alternate timelines would be a nightmare. Your brief description for Grace's story didn't sound like it would recognise that, which is what I was responding to.

And, well... you did ask... ^_~

hS

On the this-isn't-a-good-idea side: a potential problem with Time Gentry who specialize in HQ is that they're very hard to ignore: much like Emergencies themselves, a character who is involved in running the timeline as a whole is also involved in the timeline as a whole. And that's a thing we've been avoiding for quite a while, in favor of wanting people to write their own stuff rather than being caught up in centralized continuity.

It's good! ^^

Or, if Middle-earth isn't your speed, you could try one of the other OFUs. The only trouble is, if you want a finished one, there... aren't very many.

I've just been and updated the Wiki to list all the finished OFUs I could find, and... well, <a href="https://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/OfficialFanfiction_University">there are six. That's taken from both our own records and Miss Cam's list. So yeah... if you want to read the LotR, Harry Potter, Hetalia, Discworld, Dragonball, or Pirates of the Caribbean OFUs, there's good news for you! If not... I hope you like cliffhangers.

(I hope to one day be the first person to finish an OFU sequel. Of course, to do that, I would have to actually start writing OFUDisc 2...)

hS

I could quibble over some of your concerns with Friday, but it's also the series I have the least sense of how it should go - I like Grace as a character, but I couldn't pitch the story for the first character arc there the way I could with the others.

(It also... kinda bugs me that you, having written Morgan, are saying (paraphrased) "I don't think you should write a character who protects the PPC like Morgan"? So I'm trying to avoid responding to that bugging.)

Perhaps I've mis-pitched: I wasn't picturing the story as saving the multiverse every week, that seems like it would get old quickly. Rather, I've been thinking of Grace as a vaguely Doctorly figure; albeit one whose bailwick is centered on extradimensional and interdimensional spaces. (And in the PPC, limited by some sort of understanding/policy/Department creation at ~2008 HQST, when the hiatus on Emergencies began- Grace is one of the answers to "wait, why did things stop going terribly badly all of a sudden?")

(Additional quibbling: I guess I don't think the PPC is that small of a setting, if you think of it as a fandom rather than a single world? It seems to me that there's lots of spaces for AUs and other alternate timelines and thanks to plothole shenanigans, they probably interfere with each other far more than most more settled 'verses. I could see a mess there in need of a minder or three.)

Bleh. Please understand that I really appreciate your feedback? You've written in vaguely this space before, and I deeply respect your experience- my desire to quibble is driven far more by my feeling like I've miscommunicated the idea than that I disagree with your feedback.

-Delta

"And thanks." Farah continued, pulling out a chair to sit down in. "You look pretty good too."

Once again, I feel like I'm in a stealth Jurisfiction crossover - and that's not a bad thing! New ways of looking at the multiverse are always welcome.

Interestingly, for all that this is a very action-packed chapter, it feels much more personal. This chapter is very much focussed on Sergio's strangeness; we see it through pretty much everyone's eyes. The equally strange goings-on (and do I feel a time loop forming?) take second place, and the action, for all that it's well-written, comes in third. It's a well-written chapter, with good storytelling technique.

Favourite line: What was she? A fairy with an Internet connection?

hS

Right. There are seven Shadow-Bats mini-Balrogs in the theme so far: the five I included, plus these two, who don't have official pictures yet:



Irritatingly, they don't make a rainbow; I'm colour-blind, but I'm pretty sure they line up like this:



So who are they? None of their purported names (or, as I like to call them, secret identities) appear on the lists of minis, but... what if they're nicknames? Hippo could be one of the minis for 'Fellowship', for instance - Felloship, or Followship? - and Molo could be Carmollen, the mini of Cormallen.

But Phyll? Furi? There's nothing in Middle-earth even close to those.

Perhaps instead they're seven of the ten members of the fellowship.

: Ahem...

Sorry, Lord Elrond, the NINE members of the Fellowship... but which?

Well, Molo and Phyll simply have to be minis Merry and Pippin, the Urple Bandits - look at the colours, and their names even start with the same letters! I feel like Hippo must be a Sam mini, too - look at that happy smile! D'aww.

Four to go. Is the Frodo mini being driven crazy by the Ring - or is Crase more of a Boromir? Does Vespe's war-paint make him a mini of Aragorn, or of Legolas (who I can absolutely imagine spending an OFUM arc going full Maladict and thinking he's in 'Nam)? Myzo's colour-change makes him a shoe-in for Gandalf the White (perhaps he's a mispelling of Mithrandir?), and Furi's adorable rage fits nicely for Gimli... which means Vespe is more likely to be a Legolas (since those two are inseparable), and the fact that we've got the other three hobbits means Crase should be Frodo.

So there you go - the question you never thought would be answered. ^_^ And with a bit of browsing the mini lists, plus a little creative thinking...



OR

Sham - Froedo - Glimi - Legoles - Mythrandir - Merrry - Piphin

: You're not very clear on the concept of 'undercover', are you?

Oops. Er... sorry, Miss Cam. _{I'm going now.}

hS