Newfound respect for authors

I have to admit that I have always had a huge amount of respect for authors of fiction. The ability to dream up new worlds or to come up with crazy situations or characters while at the same time making everything seem realistic and possible. Amazing.

That level of creativity is something which I've always struggled with. For some reason, despite not really understanding the rules of grammar, I don't have a huge issue in writing (generally) technically correct English (I can already tell this sentence is going to bite me in the ass at some point down the line!). The problem for me has always been coming up with something interesting to write about and then to make that "thing" engaging to the reader. If anything, this feeling has intensified recently with my attempts to do a bit of fiction on my game blog.

The whole affair started with a series of journals (the so called Aladuchar Journals) tracking one of my characters in a role playing game. I thought that if I didn't have enough creativity to come up with new situations or characters, then I could just "borrow" them from an existing game. In effect, I was doing a fanfic.

However, I soon found that even doing a fanfic is not easy. The problem I found myself facing was that the journals soon became a pretty boring log of what I was doing in the game. And quite frankly, even I found myself bored to tears upon reading them. I can't imagine what anyone else would have been thinking.

As a result of this, I scrapped the journals and decided to do something on a smaller scale. Instead of cataloguing the adventures of a character over the course of a 100+ hour game, I would just catalog one quest. Hopefully, the smaller scale would be easier to manage and keep interesting.

The result was a write-up of the Blood Ties quest in Fallout 3 (part one here and part two here). Overall, although there are a couple of area's which could be improved, I have to say that I'm relatively happy with the results of that writeup. It's also worth mentioning that your enjoyment of the story probably depends completely on knowing about the background of the Fallout universe.

Of the things I learned while writing that story, the most important one is probably the need to plan out the story. When I first started writing, all I was doing was cataloguing what I had actually done in the game while adding in the occasional commentary on events as they unfolded. If I had a proper plan to the story, I would have been able to incorporate some foreshadowing into part one.

In addition, with a proper plan, I would have been able to make the change in tone a bit more consistent. In writing part two, I felt that I had to keep the start of it lighthearted as well so that it had a consistent tone with part one. Having said that, I'm still in two minds about this. Part of me likes the way that the tone suddenly changes at the end of part two as it serves to make you reevaluate all the stuff that came before.

Liverpool 2 Sunderland 2

Dear oh dear oh dear.

I have to admit that recent performances from Liverpool have been unbelievably poor. And when I say poor, I don't even mean the fact that we have shipped 3 goals to both Man Utd and Man City. The fact is that in the Prem so far, the only team that Liverpool have beaten are WBA - and even that was only by 1 goal. And to be honest, if it hadn't been for that freaky first goal, we might not even have had a point from this game.

I don't want to hop onto the bandwagon that is already calling for Hodgson's head as I still think that he should be given more time. Hopefully, things will eventually "click" and the results will come. However, if things don't click soon, we may well find ourselves in the relegation zone as October brings some tough fixtures.

Okay, granted, the first match in October is against Blackpool at Anfield which Liverpool should really be winning. However, after that, we go up against Everton, Blackburn and then Bolton. All three of these sides have shown in prior years that they are not easy sides to beat (although you have to wonder what happened to Everton this year) and if Liverpool continue to play as badly as they have been, a defeat against all three sides is not as far fetched as I would once think.

So far, the only positive this season has been the fact that we have been able to score goals (Stevie G FTW!!!). Still, my pitiful performance in FM2010 doesn't seem so bad now...

Twitter

By now, the more observant of my readers (so no, not you) will have noticed the twitter feed on the right hand side of my blog. For the extremely unobservant, I should add that the twitter feed is mine and that I have indeed created a twitter account.

The catalyst for this was basically last Thursday's post. I had some random thoughts which I wanted to share. The problem was that there wasn't enough meat on those random thoughts to really justify a blog post in its own right but other than ignoring it completely, what could I do?

Well, it turns out that I could have created a twitter account and micro-blogged about it. Who knew, right? Too late now I suppose but hopefully, such short and random thoughts can be kept to twitter in future.

Also, somehow I have managed to pick up three followers. I have no idea how I managed this or why they would be interested in my tweets considering that my tweets so far have consisted of random crap. But there you go.

Some random links and thoughts

This rant perfectly echoes my thoughts on people who are consistently late. There really isn't much that I can add to that which hasn't already been said. So why am I writing this post if I don't have anything to say?

The truth is that I really wanted to send that link to the missus. However, at the last moment, I chickened out so I'm posting it here instead. If you never hear from me again, then I want you to know one thing - the missus did it.

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Also - Oh, how I wish this didn't resonate with me so much.

Gerry and Gordon go to the mall

The weather in Hong Kong has been extremely unpredictable lately. At any moment in time, you are either going to be pelted with thunderstorm levels of rain or baked by heatwave levels of sun. The net result of all this is that we have been spending a lot of time in shopping malls recently.

Still, Gordon doesn't seem to mind. Having said that, I think he is just happy with any chance to get out of the house.


A rare picture with Gordon looking at the camera while Gerry is looking elsewhere.


Closeup of Gordon - he is starting to look really cute now. :)


Huzzah - its me again!


For the life of me, I can't remember what they saw that is so fascinating.

Gerry at Pizza Express

Gerry actually learned to love pizza at a very young age. At some point in time, the missus and I couldn't be bothered going out to eat and ended up ordering Pizza Hut for delivery. In those days, Gerry only ate a little bit of the pizza dough but it wasn't long before he started eating whole slices!

Being the fan of pizza that he is, we naturally jumped at the chance when we got an invitation from a parent of one of his school friends to join a pizza making party at Pizza Express.


Here you can see that he is kitted out in his chef's hat and already has his pizza base ready for the topping.


Halfway through the process and you can already see that this is going to be a yummy pizza!


Huzzah - the (almost) finished product. In case you are wondering, this is a ham, mushroom, pepperoni and olive pizza. If I recall correctly, Gerry looks so upset because he wanted to immediately run off and cook the pizza (instead of standing there while daddy took a picture).


And here is the final finished product. Unfortunately, I don't have any good pictures of Gerry eating the pizza as he wasn't willing to stand still while holding a slice (I have lots of blurry pictures though!).

Even little Gordon managed to get some. Considering our nickname for Gordon is "little pig", would it surprise you to learn that he really enjoyed the pizza?

Werewolves

Short post today as I'm linking to entries on someone elses blog which are really worth reading.

In my travels through the interwebz, I sometimes come across some really interesting stuff that I wish I had the time to partake in. The online forum game of werewolves is one such circumstance as it sounds like a perfect mix of paranoia, psychology and dumb luck.

If you want to know what Werewolves is, then you should check out this post which gives a good introduction to the rules while also giving you a pretty good gameplay example. And if you have the time, I seriously suggest you read the gameplay example (which lasts for a couple of posts).

The level of paranoia, downright sneakiness and all round back-stabbing which goes on during a game of Werewolves sounds deliciously delightful. It also convinces me that I would be an awful Werewolves player as I would probably be way too trusting. Probably a good thing that I don't have the time to get involved in a game.