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The D2 Novel |
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This page is about the D2 Novel. The D2 Novel became The Fantasy Novel in mid 2003 when I finally realized how I would keep writing it, while having my work go towards something with some long term viability. More recent updates on the subject can be found on that page. Page down to the most recent entry if you've been here before, or click this ToC. The dates link to the archives updates on this page.
Halloween and it's nearly eleven PM, and I've done nothing on the story I was supposed to be posting on the D2 site about 12 hours ago. I think I'm going to be reduced to cheating and putting up part one now, and then doing the rest of it tonight and tomorrow. I know what's going to happen, but the chapter has gotten longer than I anticipated and I need to go over the ending a bit more. I'm posting it as a one time thing, but will almost certainly continue it. Most of my cool ideas for things don't come in until later in the story, but the first chapter is pretty exciting and sets everything up for the rest of the book. I'd like to do regular installments, bi-weekly or something, but as the chapters will be pretty long and I don't have all the plot worked out yet, I need to plot some more on the outline and get all organized. Which is hard to do when you're surfing for news and playing with rats and working on other D2 site stuff that you don't really want to work on, but are still doing before your own story which you supposedly do want to work on. Someone slap me. Sort of an odd day. All of the following, down to the news, relates to the Halloween story I posted over on the D2 site, so if you've not read it, the following won't make much sense, and will possibly spoil some parts of the story, if you're planning on reading it later. I'd recommend the story, and it's chapter one of a novel I'm probably going to write, so I think it's good, obviously. If you only enjoy the blogs and comedy stuff here and not the fiction, skip down a bit, I guess. As you tear out my heart and stomp on it. So for Halloween, I was doing a story for the D2 site. The story was going to be the first chapter of my long-planned D2 novel, but would work decently as a stand alone story, in case I didn't get around to doing more of it. I'd known I needed to get it written for Halloween (well I didn't need to, no one was pressuring me but me, but I wanted to do it) for weeks (months) but just kept nibbling at it, adding a little here or there, reading it and seeing that it needed this or that, but not having the interest to really dive into it and accomplish what needed to be accomplished. I screwed around all day Wednesday, and finally around midnight, after doing the update here earlier than usual, I got down to business and spent the next six hours on the story. I basically rewrote the entire thing, but kept mostly to the events as I'd originally plotted them, though I added a ton. Part One of the story is here, and I'll archive it on this site sooner or later. I'll expand on this in the story notes at some point, but keeping the story of the story short (I'm not sure why, it's not like I keep other stuff short around here) I rewrote almost every sentence, but preserved most of the plot. So I didn't have to think up too much new stuff, and could concentrate mostly on keeping the tone consistent and getting the wording nicely-arranged. Writing fiction is a lot more work than this, or the articles I do here. I'll proof read and rearrange stuff on this site, but not as much. These blogs are virtually unedited, but something like the Band Names, where I'm trying to convey a history lesson, snide remarks, rate the name, and throw in some amusingly-weird OT comments, all in 3 or 4 paragraphs, do get edited and worked over somewhat. And yet the most complicated and arranged band names entry on the entire site has less effort put into it than virtually any random paragraph in the story I wrote the last two days. It's not unpleasant work, editing and writing and arranging the prose, but it requires intense concentration. I found myself working at it a lot more diligently than the short stories I've been posting here on and off. Those are mostly spur of the moment things, and there is a far smaller audience here than on the D2 site. Also they are throw away stories, things I write in an hour or two and have no plans to revisit or expand. Yes, this is all very flattering for you readers, I realize. But this Halloween story is like "the big thing". Maybe. Start of a novel, possibly, and I didn't want to rush and throw up something that I'd reread in a week and ache for the lost opportunities that a bit more proofreading or care and watering could have created. Yes, I'm wandering. I'll turn off the TV. Anyway, my point is that I spent a lot more effort on it, and wrote from midnight until 6am, when I crashed, Friday morning. Maybe I said Thursday earlier? I'm confused. It's Saturday morning now, 3am. Okay, I wrote 6 hours and went to bed early Friday morning, after posting part one of the story. I got up 7 hours later and after a quick breakfast I started writing again, working on Part Two, which you can read with a click them golden letters. Part One was mostly redoing what I'd already done, but Part Two was almost entirely brand new. I had written up through the fight with the paladins previously, but I wasn't at all happy with it. It was too long and stilted in the action, and the paladins were all pompous; lots of, "Your evil will never triumph, foul demon!" type shit. Saturday morning cartoon stuff. I hadn't figured quite how they got out of the cemetery, and the fence got a LOT bigger and more dangerous in the rewritten version. I'd had the idea for the Necromancer to be able to summon up a golem from anything stone, giving him the ability to tunnel through or create a barricade any time, so it wasn't hard to expand that to Iron, being as he can cast Iron Golems in the game as well. I'm not sure where I'll draw the line on that one; I mean no one wears stone armor, but everyone is carrying metal weapons and armor. If he can just enchant anyone's armor or weapon it's way too powerful a skill. You'll note that he didn't do so in the story, but he's going to do it later on with some other metal structures, so I guess I'll have to define the terms at some point. Anyway, I had them initially just bashing the fence down and running, or maybe going back to the guard house and doing the cursing stuff there. It all got much larger in scale in the final version, and I threw in the Halloween tie in, which was a good thing. Initially it was on Long Night, or something like that, which was the winter solstice. Celebrations in the plaza, similar to this one, but 2 months later. I was thinking it would be way too cold then for how the girl was dressed, and this Halloween tie in solved that problem for me. I had no idea what was going to happen after the cemetery though. I couldn't come up with a valid reason for them to stay together (he's always a loner, and she's certainly not a party player) and didn't want to just create a mythological "buddy movie" where the opposite types are thrown together and hilarity ensues. There had to be some valid reason for them to quest together, hidden (reason) or not, and I wanted them to be equal in personality power. I.E. Vena isn't just doing whatever Quinoss says, since it's convenient for the plot; she has her own motivations and goals. Having the paladins (which were not part of the original idea; it was just some guards) and the resurrected guards after her to force her to leave the city was a lucky addition. I'm still not sure why they're going to stay together after this though, and might do a section where they are apart. Need to tie Vena into the long term/overall quest better now. She's tied to it later, but I need a way to bridge her to events in say chapter 8. And they're not going to part and then just happen to meet up again later; I hate when stories do that overly-convenient coincidence crap. Well, this is going on and on. I guess I felt the need to prove that I really don't edit or proofread these blogs? My initial point was that I spent the last 6 hours yesterday writing, slept, and got up and spent the first 8 hours today writing. It was enjoyable and very productive, but afterwards my head was sort of emptied. Like I wanted to do other things, start on the next chapter, work on the outline, etc, but I didn't feel like procrastinating, I just felt vacant. I felt like it was bedtime, but I wasn't tired. I'd done so much work that my day should have been over, and it was hardly past lunch time. So here it is hours and hours later, and I've got probably 2 or 3 hours left in me, and I've not done anything else of any worth. This blog doesn't count, since thus far it's just a mess. I'm happy with the story thus far, about 10 emails about it and all are rapturous with their praise. I enjoy that, but I'd actually like constructive criticism a bit more, and for someone besides Gaile to tell me how much everything I write sucks. One guy pointed out that the gold bands around the Godking's coffin vanished between their initial description and Vena's later coffin observation, and I gave him a bonus point for that. I was aware of that, and had an explanation for it, but never got around to working it in yet. There was more discussion between Vena and Quinoss in the crypt than I'd originally planned, and I didn't want another couple of paragraphs of explanations. They'll talk about it in the cave at the start of chapter 2. One thing I need to go back and fix up a bit is the dialogue. The summoner, who I've never named yet (but he's Quinoss, at least that's his AKA initially) doesn't talk as he should. I don't mean content, I mean word choice. He's hundreds of years old, archaic, over-educated. He should have more dignified and somewhat stilted or verbose elocution. I did remove any contractions from his speech, and verbose'd it a bit, but it needs more so. It should be instantly obvious from the words who is talking, he or Vena, even apart from the context. I should probably stupid her up some too. She's not stupid, but is not educated and lives a very rough and tumble thieving life; she should use more slang and profanity. This isn't LotR, they don't all talk in the same high-falutin', Oxford professor fashion. Story feedback. While this may appear self-congratulatory, and in fact it probably is, I have a deeper purpose, which I'll get to eventually, providing I don't entirely forget it and just wander off into endless tangents. The following emails are all ones I've received in the last week, in regards to my Halloween short story/first chapter of my fantasy novel. It's still just on the D2 site, though I'll add it here once I get some more work on Chapter Two done. Not that the version here will be much/any different than the one there, but anyway. (I actually considered doing a much different version, with more sex/violence, or at least more vivid descriptions of the sex, and posting that here, but I'm not going to bother with that. For one thing, I can't just change a few words or add a paragraph to my own work when I go over it; I'd be making major changes and rewriting stuff, and end up with lots of inconsistencies, and parts I liked better in two different versions of the same thing.) Here are a few mails. I have 24 in now, and these are randomly-picked from the shorter ones. All of them are pretty much identical. All very positive.
This last one is about the harshest criticism of any aspect of the story. Really. He's got a point too. Part two is around 15,000 words, and part one is probably 9000 or so. 24,000 words doth not a short story make. A lot of novels are much less than 100k words, so basically 4 chapters like the first would be novel length. My current outline has at least a dozen chapters, and I don't think chapter one is especially long, compared to some of the very involved scenes I've got in mind for later segments. I didn't realize it was that long, until I just pasted it into Word so I could do a word count. I have a very technical, literal, precise writing style in most things, which seems to involve a lot of words and very clear descriptions of action and events. I don't do much description of what things look like, but I do cover what is happening. When I do a big edit over chapter one, I'll put in more tactile details. More about what people look like, buildings look like, smells, etc. I tend to sort of glaze over that stuff when I'm reading a novel, which is no doubt why I don't spend much time on it in my own writing. I don't really care what a character in a novel looks like. I want to know their personality and how they'll act and react to events; I'm not trying to draw a wanted poster of them. It's sort of a clichι that poor writers (lots of whom dominate the fiction best seller list) use physical descriptions as a character introduction. One that jumps to mind is Brian Lumley. All I've read of him is his Vampire series, and they're discussed briefly on the horror novelist review page, but that's one thing I remember instantly about the few books of his I've read. Every time there's a new character you get a big paragraph about their clothing, facial hair, size of their nose, how attractive they are, etc. Very omniscient authorial intrusion, to my taste, but as he's written and published about 50 novels and I've written 1.7 and published none, you may wish to discount my objective expertise. Anyway, I don't consciously eschew physical descriptions, but they don't generally seem necessary. I did not initially differentiate between the two paladins in chapter one, but on the big rewrite I realized I needed to. And that worked with the story, since the younger one was more "attack attack", while the older was more of a cleric and tactician. They needed to have enough of a physical description to tell them apart, since they did different things. None of the city guards do different things, so there is no reason to clutter the reader's mind with descriptions of which has the biggest nose and the ugliest tattoo and the heaviest helmet. At least that's my excuse for leaving it out. I'll also note that in real life I have zero memory for people or appearances. Most people look alike to me, and I pay no attention to names of people I know I won't meet again. Even people I've known for a long time I have trouble recognizing, or think people who look slightly like them might be them. I'd be a terrible witness in a robbery. Or an excellent one, from the robber's PoV. This tendency seems to be reflected in my stories, since I don't visualize the faces of my characters very often, and describe them to the reader with about the same frequency.
Okay, that went miles off course. I was talking about feedback to the story, and it's all been positive, often glowingly. The exact same thing happened with the other 4 Halloween short stories I've posted on the D2 site. All of them are updated and archived here now, and all of them have a feedback portion to the notes page, where I've pasted in mails I got about them. I probably got more and longer feedback on the last story I posted there, for Halloween 2001, and also the 1999 one, if only because there was a lot more d2 site traffic then, so more people read them. I don't have any of the emails now, HD changes and crashes and new email client took care of them, sadly enough. Most of the mails for this one are short, like the ones quoted above. I got more discussion and elaboration and point by point comments on the other ones. And that's the sort of stuff I like to get. Praise is nice, but it's not of any use, so to speak, to the writer. Perhaps if you have a low opinion of your work it'll pump you up, but that's one weight I'm not burdened with. I think/know my writing is very good, and I'm quite critical of myself, much more so than any of my readers, as far as I can tell anyway. I think I'm pretty good and picking out the weaknesses and conceits in the writing of others, and when I read one of my stories once it's cold in my mind, I tend to be pretty merciless and cut and slash in the editing. Also... oh screw this, what am I, trying to convince you of it? Anyway, a friend on ICQ read the story and had a lot of concrete comments, which were helpful. I didn't agree with his opinion or suggestions in some places, but that's to be expected; I know a lot more about the characters and story than any reader does, and I have ideas for how I want it to proceed. Where this is all going? Here.
An odd little conversation, eh? The key remark appears to be:
I don't know what that means. I don't reply to many of the emails I get at the D2 site, but that's because there are still dozens a day (down from hundreds a year ago) and most of them are the same questions over and over again. In any event, what would me replying or not to an email about something else have to do with me wanting or not wanting feedback on my own fiction? I don't reply to many of those emails either, but few require it, unless I just wrote to say, "Thanks for the kind words." Which I probably should do, come to think of it. Anyway, I don't know which lines he's reading between, or why he'd get the impression I don't want feedback from someone who isn't powerful. Pity he didn't email, some actual comments on good/bad things would be interesting. Though he sounds pretty prejudiced going in, so I doubt the comments would be all that objective or useful. If you've read the story and are interested in commenting, especially on anything you didn't like or thought could be done better, feel free. Just as long as you're at least a state senator, or a B-list celebrity. You have to be powerful, after all. One thing I forgot to include with the comments about story feedback yesterday is a mention of the subset of mails from people who seem to assume this story is going to be a published novel. Now that was an ugly sentence. What I mean, is that perhaps half a dozen emails about the story have been just like this one, that I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique:
In which the person commenting is being very encouraging, or else is actually under the impression that this potential novel being published is a done deal, and that I posted the first chapter on a D2 fan site for um... publicity? To test the waters? Just because I could? In the past I've gotten emails saying that my writing was better than what they've read in fantasy novels, or that I should get my stuff published since it was good enough, but I don't recall people talking about the publication as if it were preordained. It would be nice, since that is exactly what I want to do with my life and how I'd like to earn a living, but I've taken no steps towards that much-desired conclusion. In any event, I couldn't publish this novel independently, since it's full of copyright infringement on the Blizzard Diablo games and universe, which are all trademarked. If Blizzard wanted, they could try to shut down all fan fiction on the Internet. Many authors have their publishers doing just that, or trying to anyway. Anne McCaffrey's official site has strong wording in the FAQ that not only discourages any fan fiction, but threatens immediate legal action. You wouldn't think a gaming company like Blizzard would do that, since after all, fan fiction encourages interest and attention in their games, and is free publicity for them. However as you may or may not be aware, Blizzard has recently begun producing novels set in their gaming worlds, written on commission by established authors. Fan fiction is definitely in competition with those, at least in the way most corporations look at it. I'd think the opposite; that people who read fan fic are much more likely to be interested in a novel about the game, and are probably their main market for such things. But you know how lawyers are. I've heard nothing about Blizzard cracking down on fan fiction on the internet, but they could choose to try if they wanted to. Which would do nothing to the smaller stories on various guild sites here and there, but would be inconvenient to the better quality stuff on major sites. I'm sure if someone were trying to make money off their Blizzard fan fic, there would be C&Ds coming on the hour from Vivendi legal. The obvious extension to my novel and Blizzard publishing novels is that perhaps Blizzard themselves would be interested in turning it into a book. That's problematic on at least a couple of levels. For one thing if it's all been on the Internet for free already, why would they want to try and publish it in paperback form, when much of the audience has already read it? As a larger issue, they announced plans for three novels in the Diablo world, and just released the third, so they might be done with that world, at least for now. Also, they are doing their novels with established authors. They were willing to let an unknown aspiring writer do their first Diablo fiction, but that was just in ebook form. It'll sound like sour grapes, but I've read the first of the Diablo Novels, Legacy of Blood, and to be honest, it was pretty lame. The story has almost nothing to do with the Diablo world, and in my opinion it didn't capture any of the magic of it either. It was a pretty mediocre fantasy story about a guy and an evilly-enchanted suit of armor, with the requisite battles and small scale city sieges. But there weren't any memorable characters or much in the way of dialogue or interaction. Some interesting action scenes, but in a "one thing after another" style, where it felt like the author was just throwing in everything he could think of, with no real concern for logical progression, and especially no concern for fitting it into the Diablo world. The thing I best remember was an attack of a huge sea serpent on a ship he was riding on, which is about as far from D2 as you can get. It would also fall victim to most of the common problems that I criticize in fantasy writing; poor character description, weak dialogue, action that's not clearly detailed, etc. Do I think I could do better? Well actually... The only potential commercial value in the novel I'm apparently writing now would be to gain attention and interest in my work. I.E. an agent or publisher sees it and likes it and figures if I can write that then I can write other, more marketable books. Of course that means the whole D2 novel is just a sort of 700 page query letter. And even if successful it's worth nothing to me, and I must write another novel that would hopefully be of interest to a publisher, and would then actually sell some copies in the real world. Would it make a lot more sense for me to spend my writing time (not to mention blogging time) toiling away on a novel with a totally original world setting, and trying to get that published? Of course. Has that been true since about 1993, and am I still putting it off to do various Internet amusements that earn me zero money? *coughs*
I did find some time to work on the supposed D2 novel I am supposedly writing, though it seems such a fool's game. Why am I writing it? It's unpublishable, it's not going to impress Blizzard to make them give me a job (at Bliz North in SF ideally), and I'm taking so much time and effort on making the wording perfect when it's at best going to have an audience most of the illiterate babbling AOLers who infest B.net and only want more action scenes and gory stuff. A fan fiction Magnum Opus is rather a misguided dream. Yet write it I will, since there are some amazingly good scenes to come in later chapters, I have the whole story in my head, and neither of the two novels I have written to this point (well, 1 2/3 novels) really "worked" as a coherent whole. This one will. So it's something to practice my craft on, a way to get some readers interested in my work, and maybe some sort of resume-builder, proving I can write long form fiction? Anyway, I'm just noodling around rewriting chapter one now, but I can see it before me more clearly than at any time since I began it back in late October. Chapter One was posted on the D2 site at that time, but I'm not going to link to it since it was nearly a rough draft and I've rewritten/improved it greatly since then, as well as making a few minor plot and event changes. I'll post the updated version here soon enough, along with chapter two, I hope. I will also be posting it on The Dark Library, the fan fiction section of the D2 site that has been redone and just launched with a fancy new scripty design thing. I'm eager to see how it goes, since I had a hand in picking the mods for it. Also, I just want to see the Fan Fiction more frequently-updated, and see more readership for it. I just added my three humorous Holiday stories, though I can't link to them yet since they must be approved and added by the mods first. I'll add my 4 other Halloween D2 stories tomorrow perhaps. You can just read those here now, they're all in the fiction section. Given that all of my stories on the D2 site get posted on the main site, and are linked to from the news, it's not like I'm hurting for exposure there. But it'll be interesting and fun to see how things go in the TDL database. I am of course curious to see the ratings and comments on the stories, mine and those by other authors and like the whore I am, I expect to get the highest ratings. Not that that will do me any good whatsoever, but I like stats and numbers, especially when they involve my work. Of course something like say, the NYTimes best seller list would be more fun than the ratings and scores on a fan fiction site hosted by a Diablo II site, but let's just work on an economy of scale, shall we?
Progress was made on the supposedly D2 novel today, at least in terms of quality rewriting going on. Chapter One is reworked and improved, I think. Malaya read it and liked it a lot, and did her usual (helpful and well-meaning) "This is too good to be on the Internet for free, Flux." routine. Not that it's a routine; she is sincere and I think a good and objective judge of writing quality. (Though I would say that.) But she says it often when she reads something of mine that is 1) free, and 2) on the Internet. My problem has never been the writing, (well maybe a little, in terms of procrastination), my problem is always the marketing and self-promotion and business aspects. Which is why I write this stuff every day for my own amusement and the amusement of some hundreds of readers, rather than pushing to get a column in a newspaper somewhere, or at least on an internet literary journal type site. Not that this specific writing would be suitable for publication elsewhere, but I could (I think) do an article or two a week that would be, on whatever topic was required. And I've been told that there's even money to be paid for that sort of work! My concept of "fiction fiction fiction" is holding me back, when so many of my readers (that's you) say they like the fiction, but actually prefer the non-fiction stuff. Ideally non-fiction that's better than the five paragraphs so far here today, anyway. I worked on my fiction for years, got a lot done, made no effort to publish it, and just when I was getting to the put up or shut up stage, I got into doing web work, and spent most of the next 3 years writing features for the D2 site, where due to the policies of the site ownership (which is not me) almost everything I did there was very dry and um... journalistic, I guess you could say. Not lively or joking or with the sort of voice I think I do pretty well when given the opportunity. And therefore nothing I wrote stood out or seemed especially interesting, though a lot of it was quality work and very informative about the game. Then about a year ago I finally got around to making up my own site (you are here) where I could write whatever I wanted, however I wanted. And people started to read it and say that they liked it a lot. Furthermore, the last 4 months I've been doing a regular column on the D2 site which has tens of thousands of people reading it, and it's been very popular, though too much of a niche market to have any broader publication hopes. And readers keep saying I should get some stuff published, do a newspaper column, etc, both here and on the D2 site... Which might explain why I'm now trying to get more back into writing fiction regularly, and working on a totally unpublishable Diablo-inspired novel. I seem to flee from a field just as success is looming. Which explains a lot about my sex life as well, come to think of it.
On another topic, I did get some good work done on Chapter Two of my supposed D2-novel. I liked this bit, which is near the last thing I wrote today, but near the beginning of the chapter. Relatively speaking. I don't think Chapter Two will be anywhere near the 37,000 words that the semi-final version of Chapter One is, but it'll probably go a third of that. Anyway, here's a quote. It's been worked over for wording a couple of times, and will probably be much like this in the final story. Which I'd like to begin posting on the D2 site (and here) as soon as I have enough done that I'm sure I'm not going to go back to the beginning and change everything around once I get to about Chapter Six.
Yeah, it's sort of useless to you without the context, and Malaya thought it was too elaborate and out of place for Vena's thoughts, based on how she is in Chapter One. At least she (Malaya) thought that until she read the 8 or 9 pages that is Chapter Two to this point, at which time she felt this fit very well and was a sort of bright/fertile spot in the slow and drab (but not boring) opening to the chapter. I didn't expect either her initial or her secondary reactions, to be honest. I'll hopefully have enough done to start posting it soon, since the only online version of this story to date is the very rough version I posted last Halloween on the D2 site, and which has been completely rewritten and improved, though the plot remains 95% the same.
Also in Bryan's email (he puts the rest of you slackers to shame, doesn't he?) was this comment that got me to thinking. This is also from the update on the 16th, when in the essay portion I yappled on with much repetition about my on again/off again D2 novel, and why it's probably off for now, mainly since it's unpublishable.
He might be right. My concept is that since it's based on/inspired by the D2 world, I can't publish it, since it's derivative of copyrighted work of Blizzard Entertainment. Just changing the names (of the spells, not the characters) would matter since it's using much of the game dynamics in it, and spells that sound like the game spells, etc. There are two points to be made. One is that yes, I could change the spell descriptions and names somewhat and invent my own forms of magic, and make it different enough that there wouldn't be any real Diablo II tie in. It's hardly recognizable as a Diablo II story at this point, unless you know the game well and recognize the descriptions of spells and character classes (which could easily be changed). Nothing in the story in terms of plot or characters has any connection to the plot or story of Diablo or Diablo II, so basically it's original fantasy fiction set in a world somewhat inspired by the Diablo world. The other side of that is... why? I could change it that much, it would still be basically a Diablo II type story, but would lose all of the built in audience, and I'd have to work harder to explain everything, rather than just allowing for the reader's knowledge of the aspects of the game to help them make sense of things. I suppose a third option is to do it just as planned and try to sell Blizzard on officially endorsing it. I feel quite safe in saying it's better than any of the three Diablo novels they did publish, none of which were any good (though I only read the first two, I can't see some enormous leap up in quality for #3 proving me a liar here). But I would say that, as I'm the author. The problem there is that they almost certainly wouldn't be interested, since I'm not a known author and they've already run their three novels from the Diablo world, to moderate success. My only regret in letting go of the tale is that I have so much of it thought out already, and so many good scenes in my head for it. However as I think about it, exactly none of those great scenes are in any way tied to the Diablo-y aspects of the story. They are events that could take place in any fantasy tale, and a few of them could even be turned into a modern day novel with modern day characters, which is what I'm trying to think of to write now. I can preserve 95% of the D2 novel and think up my own fantasy world to set it in, and write it from scratch with no connection to D2 whatsoever. And that would be publishable. In theory anyway. The problem with fantasy is that one time novels tend to do very little. It's all about trilogies or quintets or endless 10+ book series, where you get a built in audience and then string them out with successively-less interesting novels essentially forever. I mean continue to write tales in your rich and interesting fantasy world. I'm not interested in that. I want to write novels that are individual and unique and unrelated and have a chance to be judged on their own merits, not just as part of some series of pulpy fantasy yarns. And yes, I'm damn choosy for someone with no money and a shit job and nothing published to date.
Also today, I return once again to the topic that will not die. What topic? The commercial viability (or lack thereof) for my mythical D2 Novel. This was discussed yesterday, and the day before, so click back if you want the fully discussion to this point. I had no intention of mentioning it again today, but Caaroid mailed with some comments on it. Comments which I shall quote here:
As for his first bullet point, I can't dispute it. As he says, they might do more D2 novels, or want to do ones to tie into D3, etc. #2 is debatable. I didn't mean to the target audience, but to Blizzard and to the book buying public at large. I don't think many people are buying the books based on who the authors are, but I think that Blizzard wants to entrust their novel franchise to people who are proven authors, with past published books to their credit. They're not likely to go on hope in a newcomer, other than maybe for a quickie eBook type thing, as they did with Garwulf and the relatively-mediocre Demonsbane. And then turned down his offers for writing more stuff for them, probably since they wanted "known authors" for the actual novels, which require an advance to be laid out, require confidence the author will get the work done in time for the publishing deadline, etc. Also, while I'm known in the D2 online community, which is probably a large part of the target market for the book, I think Bliz is mostly selling it on it being a Blizzard book, in their gaming world. I can't imagine them publicizing a book as by "Eric Bruce... "Flux" of Diabloii.net! The guy who writes relatively scathing editorials about our lack of response to hacks on the realms." As for #3, Caaroid has another good point, but that assumes that Blizzard really cares about the quality of the stories they are publishing, and if they capture the magic of the game. Going by Demonsbane and the first two Diablo novels that I read, they do not, since none of those had any more than a faint connection to the game, and were set hundreds of years before the events of Diablo 1. Blizzard wanted passable novels set in their gaming worlds, with some relation to the actual games, but nothing that might tie directly into them or compromise what they wanted to do plot-wise in any future games/sequels. And that's what they got. If I'm going to be honest about my feelings, I don't think there is any way Blizzard would publish the novel I want to write. Immodest self-evaluation time: Content is a problem. The
Blizzard Novels are all basically hack and slash stories. Sort of a
comic book level of writing, I mean hero vs. villain, violence,
conclusion. Nothing too complicated or adult or thought-provoking. Little to none of that stuff is evident in the one chapter I've posted, but it's what makes the whole thing tick later on, and what makes it such an interesting novel in my mind. Now possibly they'd like the basic event structure enough to want to publish it with major changes, but that would be removing the best stuff in it, IMHO, and turning it from what I think would be a very original and interesting book into just another sword/sorcery romp of no memorable importance. And I don't really want that published with my name on it. And yeah, that's a sacrifice I should be willing to make, to possibly
get my career going, etc. Anyway, if anyone has further comments on this, feel free. It's the topic that never dies, after all.
The email goes on to add this, about the never-ending D2 novel topic.
I think my plan now with that story is to adapt it to an original world, since most of the good stuff I had in mind is not in any way Diablo related. The first chapter is probably the most Diablo-like of anything in the novel, and it's not all that much like it. I just have to change the names of the classes somewhat, (not that any of the classes or character types are original to Diablo or Diablo II) and make up new skills/spells for them to use, though I was largely doing that already. Almost nothing in D2 is original fantasy anyway, it's just all inspired by other earlier works, and I'm not sure that "original" fantasy is even possible at this point, since there are so many series and books that anything you think up that's oh-so-clever about spells or magic or society or dragons or whatever will have been done in virtually identical form in some other series that you've never even heard of. As the saying goes, "there are no more original ideas". All new stories are just reinventing the wheel from somewhere or other, usually a reinventing that the author him/herself has no idea they are doing at the time.
And here's another mail on the never-dying topic, in what will hopefully be the last word on it. At least for a while.
Well, he's got me there.
This saga continues on the Fantasy Novel Page. |
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lanned
for years, "the big d2 novel" was finally begun in earnest just before
Halloween, 2002. This page collects news updates about it,