Alex Livingston

Author: gala5931

  • My WIP’s Protagonist is on Tumblr

    What a time to be a creator of things. Much of the purpose of creative endeavor is to share something with others, to engage with the audience. More and more this is becoming less of a one-way street than it used to be. So why not share more of the process?

    To this end, at lunch today I started a tumblr account for my current work-in-progess piece’s protagonist. She’d be about 45 now, and would definitely be running around the nets posting stuff that interests her.

    My goals for this little experiment are bifold.

    • Have place to log the various drips and drabs of research I’m doing.
    • Play with the character’s voice. Let me get into her headspace more often, and see how she would feel about various things.

    Sure, budding writers are always told that you need to get all social media-y to get your name out. This is not one of those deals. It’s not advertising. I mean, the book isn’t even half-way done yet.

    I want to play around with my own creative process a bit, to see if getting away from the keyboard, outside of the plot, and into Robin’s personality will help me figure out who she is. Like if I were to start an in-character diary for her. A writing prompt process.

    Now, if I were a published and awesome writer, there would be concerns of spoilers or maybe even copyright, I’m sure. Certainly not a problem here. If, once this book is finished, published, and flying off the shelves from the widepsread popular and critical acclaim it is just sure to receive, people want see what was on my mind when I wrote it, they’re more than welcome to tumble down that particular rabbit hole. If you’re reading this post and are curious, you can go to amberscreenjunkie.tumblr.com and start the descent now.

  • Will the Affordable Care Act Spark the New Enlightenment?

    No, seriously. What would you do with your life if you knew your healthcare was covered? Would finally put the desk job behind you and live off ramen until your creative and intellectual endeavors started paying enough to live, safe in the knowledge that if you got a cavity you wouldn’t have to go into ludicrous amounts of debt?

    All around the US, people unshackled from the workaday world will dedicate themselves to the furtherment of humanity! The starving artist will have enough time and security to become the successful one! Works of staggering beauty and intellect which would never have been realized will be added to the sum total of Mankind’s Work! It will be as it was in Atlantis!

    Sounds very romantic, and I don’t mean that in a snide way. I have zero information on whether the arts have burgeoned in Massachusetts. But we can hope, right?

  • One Quarter Point

    I’ve reached the half-half-way point in the first draft of my latest novel project. The hook has hooked, the world has been built, the stakes have been made clear, and the protagonist has been made interesting. The first major plot-point just went down, changing the protag’s world forever and presenting a new set of risks and stakes (“I’ll come with you to Alderaan. There’s nothing more for me here.”)

    OK, none of that has happened. That’s what’s supposed to happen, though, and the framework is there. Feel the power of Revision!

    It’s just such a massive task. Write out several tens of thousands of words, knowing that they’re crap and hoping you’ll tear them all apart later to make them good. Especially with my habit of catching an hour of writing when I can, this is going to take forever. Spirit flags.

    I’m finding that if I think about this project as fan fiction, it’s easier for me keep my spirits up. I have limitless energy for piecing together the bits of other people’s work — would the child of a firebender and a sandbender be a glassbender? — and applying that same level of nerd intensity to my own little built world makes climbing that mountain seem a little easier.

  • Final Fantasy III

    What have I been doing for the last few weeks, you ask? Why, re-playing the DS remake of FF3.

    Now, I don’t know how much of it comes from the fact that this is a remake, but it seems that by the time 3 came around, the developers were hitting their stride. A nice, big world full of fun stuff to kill do, actual named characters, and a wildly replayable job system.

    Once again, we have the old-school several hour final dungeon where if you die on the last boss, you lose several hours of gameplay. Lame.

    From a plot standpoint, we’re looking at the same old “save the four crystals” thing, but it’s early yet. Considering how most games if this era had plots which consisted of simply getting higher numbers, we can’t complain.

    Oh, and there’s a Scholar job. Know stuff, and KILL BADDIES WITH BOOKS. I am, perhaps unsurprisingly, a fan.

     

  • Final Fantasy II

    Is this really a Final Fantasy game?

    Sure, we’re introduced to such FF staples as Cid, chocobos, and dragoons, but where’s the confusing plot? Where’s the XP system? A very different feel from the first.

    And then there’s the trick ending. Last night I spent altogether too much time running the the final double-dungeon only to find that defeating the undead emperor is impossible. I’m doing 200 damage a turn and he’s healing in the thousands with a move that both heals him and one-shots one of my guys.

    Over to gamefaqs for some guidance, only to find that a sword which is otherwise completely useless is pretty much the only thing that can kill him. No indication given in-game that you’re supposed to hold on to this thing. Jeepers.

    I whomped every baddie on my way to the boss, so grinding wasn’t the problem. So, what were the devs going for here? Keep every weapon, then try them one at a time as you die over and over again without being able to save. Or switch weapons midfight. Is that really the experience they wanted the player to have?

    So, yeah, I watched the end on youtube. Screw that nonsense.

    This game is grinder’s delight. Any character can learn anything you want — just keep ’em using axes, for example, and they’ll get good at axes. Since I was going for a plot play-through, this forced me to focus my guys on specific skills early on so they could keep doing damage at higher levels. But, if you like a lot of flexibility to customize your guys, you could make some fun combos.

    On to III!

  • Doing It Right: His Majesty’s Dragon Chapter One

    Ya gotta grab ’em. That’s what everybody says. Hook that reader right away. Make her care what happens. But how?

    Hello. My name is Naomi Novik, and I just kicked Alex Livingston in the brain.

    If you want a good example, go check out the opening of His Majesty’s Dragon. Novik was generous enough to include much of the first chapter as an excerpt on her site — I’m going to go ahead and give her credit for knowing it’s because she frickin’ nailed the hook.

     

    Firstly, dragons in the Napoleonic Wars? Did the author write this for me? Enter my dreamspace and say “you know what Alex wants? This.” So maybe I’m a little partial already.

    Secondly, by the time I reached “The end came abruptly”, I was fully invested. I wanted things for the characters and was nervous for what would happen at the end of that paragraph. All that by word number 4,500. Awesome. If I can get that reaction by word number 45,000, I’ll be happy.

    Now, part of the success here comes from using a world that we already know about. The reader is familiar in general at least with concepts of duty and honor in the western military tradition, and certainly with the archetype of the noble British seacaptain. And we know what dragons are. So, we’re not thrown into watching a Atreides child face the Bene Gesserit gom jabbar (for example). We’ve got some footing already.

    But still. How the hell did she make me care about this plot in under 5,000 words?

    She presented good, capable people, and then added something which would change someone’s life irreparably. Instant stakes. These are fine folks who act admirably, the sort of people one respects if not outright aspires towards being like. And someone’s going to have all their life’s plans thrown out the window.

    Or maybe a dragon’s gonna eat somebody. Something like that.

     

  • On The 7th Guest

    A lot of folks read books during vacation. I played The 7th Guest.

    I missed this game when it came out in ’93. This was the midst of the dark time of my gaming experience from late high school through college. Fortunately, the cash-printing iOS machines are bringing all kinds of old games out of the drawer.

    So how does it hold up?

    This game is essentially a series of puzzles strung together by a loose plotline. I don’t think anyone would claim that The 7th Guest revolutionized puzzle gaming, but the chess moves and mazes aren’t really the point. This game is creepy.

    The reward for solving the puzzles is movement through the world of the house. Not trophies or harder enemies. Weird, disturbing sights and sounds conveying the story of a group of people trapped by a madman and set to a dark task. From this standpoint, assuming that the intent of the game was to present an interactive experience which put the player in the central role of a horror plotline and scare the hell out of him or her, The 7th Guest holds up better than I would have expected.

  • Quick review

    Here’s a review of Syrian Folktales by Muna Imady, a pleasant little book I received as part of the Library Thing Early Reviewers program.

     

    Imady has successfully accomplished what we all say we should do: get a hold of the story-tellers and write this stuff down. Riddles, songs, and recipes from the various governorates of Syria flesh out the folklore collection, making this volume more of an introduction to a culture than simply a book of stories. The tales themselves are presented in a sparse form, perfect for the scholar.

  • New Tumblr

    I’m very jealous of people who can draw well. So much awesomeness.

    As I play through the Final Fantasy series, I am doing up sketches of my adventures here.  http://ff25sketches.tumblr.com/

  • Final Fantasy I

    In celebration of the 25th anniversary of Final Fantasy, I am playing all of the main titles in order.

    Yarrrr!

    Final Fantasy I. It’s been a while. I picked up the PSX re-release as a PSOne Classic on PSN and ran through it on easy, fully prepared with FAQs and maps.

    By all that is holy, did we really figure all of this out as kids? I mean, we must have had a Nintendo Power or something, right?

    How do you play this beast?
    Ask the locals. Clues as to what precisely you are supposed to be doing next are hard to  come by. You need to talk to every last citizen of these poor monster-sieged towns to glean rumors and half-memories about abandoned caves, desert caravans, and civilizations long dead.

    Look around you. On foot? Walk the perimeter. Got a new boat? Sail the perimeter. And so on. This is a game about exploration — forget this new-styled business where you can just hop from point to point along the plot and only need to wander if you want the cool stuff. Oh no. You will see ALL the things.

    Fight fight fight. Just like 4e D&D, if you don’t like encounters you better play something else. This game is all about surviving long enough to find what you’re looking for.

    Compared to the platformer-heavy early NES library, FFI plays like Grand Theft Auto III. I can go where I want? Just run around exploring and fighting? Radical! This was early open-world gaming, and banked on the concept that we would love the freedom too much to care about the difficulty. They were right, if I remember correctly.