Desiderius Price

39124

Last night, left Harry bleeding profusely on the floor. Just hold on there, lemme sleep a full night on it while you’ve got life-threatening injuries….. I wouldn’t make for a very good ER doctor.

39122

@JayDee You’re too talented to be capable of writing the worst story….. just saying

39120

So, this old fanfic is a pain in the neck?

Definitely not removing it, nor do I think I’ve got the best writing. Heck, english/lit was my most hated subject back in school, and I sucked at it, just scraping by enough to pass. Nor is writing like this common among my peers in my line of work, so I’m definitely of the opinion that it can always get better. And better I’ve generally gotten, you can even see it *in* that first story; even some of the reviews commented on this. That first story started off with present tense, script like, and wordy; but I’ve learned to focus the dialogue a bit more, add in detail, and even put in the occasional “mental peek” inside a character’s head. In that story’s sequel (which I’m now revising, again), I had thought was to mix in some first person POVs, but unless it’s just one character, that plain is hard to follow. Another improvement that I thought was good was long chapters, to try to make it “less” intimidating, so I clumped the chapters together into mega-chapters… until I realized I had 11 chapters for 500k…. one of them was 107k, so I had the Prisoner of Azkaban in a single chapter, with really lousy formatting so it was all together. Strangely enough, people still read and reviewed it. My current revision effort is undoing *that* change, undoing some of the edits that I had made along the way. So, yeah, it’s definitely been a learning process, even bought some how-to-books on improving my writing (only partially read). Having @CL Mustafic do a bit of reading/feedback on my original material helped a bit too. Biggest tip I’d make is to avoid write+post, to set the draft aside for a some time, after a bit of the next chapter has been written, before going back to proofread; as I find that waiting makes it easier to spot typos/grammar/etc – sure, not perfect, but it cuts out most of the bad stuff, and it’s a nice balance for posting serially for fanfiction/amateur writing.

Bloodshot eyes could just be a symptom of something else….

39118

39116

NoSex for all … and doom the human race.

You know how it goes, try one code, and next you know, you’re wanting them all (except for NoSex….)

39114

Poor dragons, always getting teased by the other kids on how they can’t even blow out candles on a birthday cake!

39112

39110

39108

39106

39104

39102

39100

If you read my first, you’ll see the evolution in my writing, heck, some reviewers commented to the same effect. Though it wasn’t until the sequel that I dropped that blasted present tense…

39098

While I’ve glanced at my first fanfic (different site) written/finished fifteen years ago, do I dare read it? Even more to the point, should I even edit/revise it? There’s a bit of beauty that it *is* my first, warts and all, that revising it kinda takes away a bit of that early magic. Sure, I can revise it, polish it up to my standards today, but at what point does it cease being my first story? I hear it in music. Sure, some bands do excellent work after they release their first album, but that first album has a different knack, a different charm, a roughness, an edge that can become quite dull..

I had to google, since I’m not an avid movie watcher, as I find it more fun to create than to consume. However, this reminded me of a criticism I had seen of Star Trek Voyager, how characters would suddenly have this new gift/insight/etc, for one episode only, but if you summed up all the traits, it’s an incredibly overpowered character. I know the temptation though, even if it’s through “training”. Had a point in Dale’s Game, where I wanted to train the main characters up, with their favorite sports team, but the more I thought about it, the less realistic it seemed – eventually I scrapped the training regimen because it’d change who my characters were. Sure, training a character is much more realistic than, say, having them get gifted a new set of abilities just by eating a box of Wheaties. However, the training alters the balance, and it was more interesting writing with the constraints of their inabilities too.